Establishing a Daily Practice

Establishing a daily practice isn’t just a matter of picking the one with which you accord intellectually. In fact, I don’t think that’s even possible until the experience is there to confirm it.

This IS a version of the standard “you have to practice” argument, but there’s more.

For me, thought-stopping hara breathing is emergency anxiety-fire suppression. I have to do it the second I wake up and keep it up all day. It’s not that relaxation or anxiety management IS the practice, but that practice isn’t possible in a dysregulated, freaked out state.

I didn’t KNOW that’s what Zen practice was going to do for me when I started. I learned about it as a set of propositions first. I’d say they appealed to me aesthetically more than intellectually, because Zen in particular is resistant to intellect, but mind stuff. Same idea.

But after just a few weeks (not days) I could tell it was WORKING. That was what I needed as a basis to establish a daily practice. “Working,” though, was not related to the propositions of Zen. It was a completely idiosyncratic, personal SENSATION that my system needed this.

It’s not like Zen is the only thing I tried, even after I found it. For one thing, when I was about 25, I took one more big run at getting back into Judaism as a daily practice, thinking it was my “indigenous” tradition, so it must be tailored for my system. Good thought! But nope.

As it turned out (big shocker coming), my indigenous cultural conditions (read: Ancestral Trauma™, anyone?) turned out to have more to do with why I was so dysregulated in the first place, and those practices just spun me up more! Fortunately, the medicine was out there.

I got lucky in terms of the teachers and communities I encountered in the right places at the right times to get me into this medicine. Of course, karma, no coincidences, etc. But not everybody can find what they need that way.

What I’m begging you to do is use the resources at your disposal not just to search, but to TRY, and to examine for yourself whether it’s what you NEED. Let the ideas and the meaning follow from the signals you perceive. Study medicine to specialize as your own doctor.