Seasons of Practice

I guess it should never be surprising when this happens, but my practice lately has me suspecting that honest aspirants augmenting whatever their native resources are with new spiritual skills tend to overcomplicate something.

Many a spiritual or religious system will provide temporal or seasonal cycles to guide augmentations to practice, but these can be held too rigidly, as structures, rather than as guidance for aligning environmental factors with the ultimate guide of practice: the body.

My native tradition of rabbinic Judaism has done a fairly incredible job transmitting its indigenous wisdom forms of this kind, with specific embodied ritual formulae for every time of year that are more or less universally practiced.

But the teachings defer to the forms themselves, insisting that their performance will lead the body to the intended state, rather than beginning from the assumption that the practitioner is prepared to honestly and rigorously self-diagnose and adjust.

Which is fair enough. Most people probably aren’t.

But my concern is that such calendar-driven forms rely too much on the transmission of non-doctrinal, even non-conceptual cultural wisdom, not about subtle spiritual states but about grounded experiences like “health” and “illness” and “energy level.”

You think you know what I mean by those things at first, but sit with them for five seconds and realize how completely vague they are.

I suspect that wasn’t always the case in many lineages.

How do you know when YOUR body has processed the reduction of chametz over the week of Pesach?

How do you know when YOUR body has transitioned from the spring form of your qigong discipline to the summer form?

These things don’t happen at the stroke of midnight. They don’t even happen all at once. That’s what my own experience tells me, anyway.

How can these senses be developed and strengthened, so we can adjust our own practices wisely and correct our own errors?

Where I’m getting to on that is a sort of scientific approach that feels like it mediates well between the material culture of these times and the civilization in which I was raised and the more ancient forms I have received from my lineages.

I observe and self-report on increasingly rigorous, overlapping methods of internal and external observation of seasonality, metabolism, growth and decay, the passage of time.

I develop a sense of a “situation,” and I act now to address THIS situation.