“My Practice”

I would say the beginning of spiritual practice — with which I am not done yet — is a process of distilling a few ways of supporting and improving function out of a great many ways of feeling virtuous while avoiding fixing things.

If we’re going to bother to define it in a way that is generally applicable, spirituality is basically a few different kinds of light exercise with your own cultural particulars layered on top.

I’m interested in your point of view on light exercise, and I’m interested in your cultural particulars, and I’m interested in how your cultural particulars interact with your light exercise, but that’s about it, spirituality-wise.

And like, mental health is a different thing.

I talk to people sometimes who seem to feel that all this embodiment stuff is new to them. That their native experience is cognitive at root, and they’re having to learn something new.

I hope it helps them to talk to me, but that’s not where I’m coming from.

I am exorcising something that feels like it was installed on top of a system that was working perfectly before. The practices I have undertaken to get along in life assist me in reconnecting with sense-awareness-conditions that I already know and remember from before words.

I wouldn’t bother to describe them except to communicate with others.

What does it mean for something to be “my practice”?

I know something is “my practice” if doing it creates a new harmony in my field with the day’s particular tones such that I can call it right back into the foreground all day long.

Self-regulation is a manual process, but there are tools for it that have no limiting dependencies.

‪The only dependency is that you do it, because it’s your job, and no one can do it for you.‬