Offerings To The Spirit of Practice: Knowing How To Work The Brakes
Calibrating the basic function of *on and off*...
The brake and the accelerator: both of these functions are absolutely vital to any serious practitioner, especially someone who engages in consistent daily practice over long periods of time. It's a lot like a car.
It's very difficult to drive without both the break and the accelerator.
And I get exposed to the inner workings of people's minds when it comes to their practices a lot. It's a big part of what I do: talk to people about practices, and teach about practices.
And I've noticed a common theme and that is that a lot of people have issues either getting started, that is that they need the accelerator or people who have issues learning to work the brakes in a way that is a consistent part of the overall practice.
So those people in general push too hard too often or beat themselves up when their system is organically asking for a break.
What I want to talk about today is the brake system. We'll talk about the accelerator in future episodes of Offerings to The Spirit of Practice. The brake system is not something to be ashamed of.
We live in a culture that is:
…constantly telling us that we have to be on
…that we have to be doing
…that we have to be accomplishing
Whether it's going to work for 50 or 60 hours a week, or if it's going to the gym in classical movement culture, or some other aspect of practice; the idea is that we always have to be doing, and a part of what ends up messing people up is not understanding that we have to know how to pump the brakes… because fundamentally, no practice is useful over the long term unless you can adapt to it.
In order to adapt, the system needs time and resources to digest, process and integrate the overall effect of a practice on multiple levels of being. So without the brakes, we are putting a lot of change in the queue, that begins to back up.
And we have all this undigested integrative processing that we have to do. Of course, this is gonna depend on each individual, and it's gonna depend on the practice. Some people have more capacity to adapt than others.
A part of this is getting to know you and where you are at and what you need at any given moment.
The brakes in and of themselves are also something to relate to as fractal across the whole of your practice.
….In terms of how much practice you do on a more broad scale. So we could say a month's time; how much are you practicing and how much are you putting on your plate? In general, how many practices are you trying to do and why?
Learning to put the brakes on in that way, to give yourself the appropriate amount of practice as a whole, and be conscious how often you practice in general, in a months time.
Another element of this is in real-time; that is knowing when to pump the brakes on the speed or the intensity or the volume of the practice.
So you might be engaging with a practice and you have a plan in your head of how much you want to do, and then you get in halfway and you notice that your system starts to erode. And that if you keep going, you know that it’s gonna take more resources than is going to be beneficial for you in the long term.
So in that case, you would also learn to pump the brakes.
And then another level of this is knowing how to pump the brakes internally:
…in the very essence of each repetition, of each practice, of each moment, you can ask the question of how intensely are you pushing into a practice right now?
So you might be engaging with a practice and all of you is trying to go in as hard as possible…well that often creates a lot of tension in the system.
Whereas if you learn to pull back just a little bit, so that you're not at a hundred 100 percent, but that you are at maybe 80 or 70, but still engaging deeply, then you learn how to manage your speed in the context of the micro-scale of the lived experience.
These are some applications of the brake system; understanding the brakes at all these levels is super important, if you wanna make consistent progress.
Cool channel, man. Let me know if you'd like to do a podcast together sometime