Post six of seven, in section About Practice
If you want to wake up and see tangible changes to your life as a result, continual practice throughout the day supported by a regular meditation practice is by far the fastest and most effective way to do this.
Lots of people talk about continuous mindfulness practice, which can be super beneficial, but it’s also only one aspect of experience. Humans are body-heart-mind-soul ecosystems, and this guide talks about a more holistic approach to continuous practice.
Holistic Practice
For a holistic practice, you want to develop embodiment, wholeheartedness, mindfulness, and soulfulness in some sort of even balance.
Awakening comes from opening up to all these different aspects of yourself – it’s about developing sensitivity to all of experience so that you can be more present with what is really going on in each moment.
Mindfulness, which is the most common form of meditation, focuses on how you perceive things. It’s incredibly powerful, but on its own it can be a little incomplete, and overdosing on it without engaging with other forms of practice can cause issues.
This more holistic approach is about the entirety of how you experience things – how you see things, how you feel about things, what it’s like to be in your body, and the things that are most meaningful to you.
Benefits of Continual Practice
Seeing practice as something you do throughout the day allows it to become a part of your life rather than something that you keep separate.
If you separate off your meditation practice and see it as something other than your daily life, you are limiting the benefits you are going to get from it.
One of the key insights in awakening is the realisation that experience is immediately in front of you and you never arrive anywhere final in life. Blurring the boundaries between daily life and practice allows you to be open to the immediacy of experience and embody it more fully.
Continuous practice also provides the opportunity to sink into a broader and deeper awakening. By being willing to meet all of life with an open mind and an open heart, you are connecting with different aspects of experience that you wouldn’t encounter sitting on a cushion.
Rather than awakening and spiritual experiences being something you can only access when in very controlled and specific situations, you become comfortable with integrating these ways of being into your daily life and experience of reality.
This approach can make the whole process more difficult, but the rewards are huge. It can lead to your entire life being permeated with a sense of magic and a deep understanding of how things are in this moment, in every moment.
Importance of Attitude
When you are practicing continually, adopting a meta-level attitude of wholeheartedness will allow for the practice to lead you to deeper presence in life rather than become something that takes you away from immediate experience.
Practice is more effective when it comes from a place of kindness and compassion for self and others. People generally already have enough sticks to beat themselves with in life, and a deep sense of care is a far more powerful tool for change than punishment.
Kindness and compassion do not necessarily mean you have to be nicey-nicey all the time – toxic positivity can be just as destructive and punishing as inner critics. Having a wholehearted attitude is about understanding that practice, awakening, and life are hard and putting in place the things that will support you to be able to do it.
It also helps if you can find a sense of joy and enthusiasm for the practice. This doesn’t mean that you expect it to be easy all the time, but feeling naturally motivated and excited about the practices you choose to partake in will be a lot more effective than forcing yourself through endless drudgery.
This can be counterintuitive, but you will see far higher rewards if you choose a practice that is naturally engaging for you rather than one that is difficult in a boring way.
Here are the heart states that can help you stay open to experience:
Compassion: Remember that life is hard, and it’s ok to feel all the feels.
Joy: Connecting with a deep sense of joy and purposefulness will help you feel that practice is meaningful and worth doing even if it is hard. This feeling will also help you connect with a broader and deeper range of your experience.
Friendliness: Can you relate to experience in an open-minded and curious way? Friendliness allows you to be interested in experience rather than judgemental about it.
Inclusion: Can you purposefully orient towards the things that are excluded from your experience, even if that feels challenging?
Practicing being in these heart states and adopting a wholehearted attitude will help you to cultivate the capacity to meet experience with openness. In micro-moments throughout the day, you are showing up with a willingness to connect to what is present.
Part of adopting this attitude is also understanding that you are a complex being. Life is hard, and people have a lot of layers to them. It takes time and patience to build the capacity to open to your experience with love. This meta-level of wholeheartedness allows you to be in this process without needing to be perfect.
It can also be helpful to find spaces where other people can hold you in these states. You can spend hours sitting on a cushion, not able to see a way forward, beating yourself up about something that can be dissolved in an instant when it is met and witnessed with love and understanding by another human.
Why You Practice
Getting clear on why you practice is a fast track to keeping your practice heart-centred.
It is helpful to be able to feel these things very clearly in your experience:
- The intentions behind your practice and what you would most like to cultivate, manifest and connect with (you can use this intention-setting exercise)
- Believing that embodying the true nature of your being will be for the benefit of yourself and all beings
How To Do It
The continuous practices themselves are very simple. They are essentially committing to showing up for what is here in this moment.
By having the intention to do continual practice, you are reminding yourself to orient to reality in these ways. Over time, this will develop a stronger capacity for you to be with the truth of experience. Your perception of what the truth of experience is is very likely to change with the more practice you do.
The practices can sound straightforward, but there are lots of knots that you have to slowly and patiently untie in yourself and in experience. This process goes almost infinitely deep and is what the journey of insight into true nature is about.
I have distilled the essence of the practices below, you can dive into more details in my practice guides.
Embodiment: developing presence by arriving in your body in this moment and feeling all the feels
Orienting question/mantra: Drop into the body
Wholeheartedness: being committed to seeing and feeling things as they are, being honest with yourself and setting the intention to be open to experiencing all life
Orienting question/mantra: Show me things as they are
Mindfulness: continuously bringing non-judgemental awareness back to this present moment
Orienting question/mantra: What is happening right now?
Soulfulness: developing sensitivity to the depths of experience
Orienting question/mantra: What is here under the surface?
You can read more about each area, including ways in which they show up in daily life and ideas for practices, in my practice guides.
Developing Over Time
Having a continuous practice of some kind is one of the most powerful and effective things you can do on the journey to awakening.
Remember that it can sometimes feel like you are moving backwards in practice when you are meeting difficult aspects of experience. Be kind to yourself and allow things to unfold over a longer period of time to evaluate the benefits you are getting from your practice. Cultivating a bigger capacity to be more present with more challenging stuff is one of the best things you can be doing.
As you practice, you may also notice how interdependent the different areas of experience are and how having an opening or awakening in one part of experience will naturally allow other parts to open by creating more space in your ecosystem of being.