Overview of All Practice

All that practice really is is a way to connect with ourselves or the world in a different way than how we normally operate in our lives.

We are essentially using tools and practices to open up to news parts of experience.

Depending on what sort of person we are, what sort of culture we exist in and our life stories, we will naturally be open to some parts of experience and closed to others. Practice should counteract this.

The four parts of the human experience can be described as thinking, feeling, being and doing. They interact with each other very closely and when we are closed to one part of experience it affects another – we end up offsetting the balance by overcompensating.

Imagine that this image is a drawing of a set of scales seen from above. When one part of the diagram is out of whack, it causes all the other parts to go off balance.

The opposite ends of the scales tend to affect each other most strongly. These are the common ways in which most people are out of whack:

1. Overthinking

There are underlying emotions or feelings that can’t be felt

2. Overwhelmed with emotion

There is something that can’t be understood

3. Over entitlement

You can’t do what needs to be done

4. Overachieving

Something isn’t allowed to just be as it is

As well as these four, there is also the space we allow ourselves to operate in, which affects how these things manifest.

Closed/ Out of Comfort Zone

When we are closed and don’t feel safe, overthinking, overwhelm, over entitlement and overachieving seem really bad – we tend to hate ourselves and others for these things because they are too far outside of everyone’s comfort zone.

Open / In Comfort Zone

When we are open, safe and in a space of allowing and gratitude this gives more room for things to flow freely and we see that sometimes embodying these things can actually be a really helpful and enjoyable way to function.

It is important that when we are practicing or doing healing work, like therapy, the goal is not to squash the part of us that is overactive. That part is overactive for a reason, it is a behaviour that we have learned in order to keep ourselves safe and functioning.

Instead, we are encouraging the opening to and connection with the part of ourselves, the world or others that is underactive or underdeveloped.

This is a learning curve and a continuous process of refinement. There are many layers to how we operate and different situations will bring out different strengths and weaknesses in how we perceive, feel and behave, both in ourselves and with the world. If we aren’t willing to recognise our weaknesses we will not be able to grow.

There is no end goal. We are building capacity and resilience in the system to be able to meet each moment and connect more openly and sincerely with what is happening now.

Also, the desired outcome of being in balance and increasing the comfort zone that we can operate in is often the opposite of the process we need to go through to get there. In order to achieve balance and resilience we often have to go massively out of balance and through a whole load of discomfort to get there.

So much spiritual practice teaches the intended outcome as the practice itself and this doesn’t really work. You need to be willing to break a few eggs to make an omelette.

Antidotes

These are some practices that are antidotes for welcoming the parts of us that have been rejected. There is a huge range of therapeutic and spiritual practices that do this to some extent.

Here I have focused on some of the Buddhist traditions that best embody those practices and to me these are the spiritual practices that can take us most deeply into these territories.

1. Opening to Feeling & Intuition

Tradition: Magic, myth & the imaginal (largely forgotten about in Western practice but this has historically been a huge aspect of Buddhism and similar traditions)

What the practice does: Opens up a way of connecting with intuition and how things make us feel, which can give us access to more mystical or fluid ways of being and allows the mind to trust that it doesn’t need to understand or control everything

2. Gaining Perspective & Clarity

Tradition: Theravadan

What the practice does: Gives people the tools to see the bigger picture. The three characteristics are essentially the doorway to getting a perspective that is bigger than ourselves, which gives us clarity on the true nature of reality and allows us to be less attached to our own emotions

3. Empowerment

Tradition: Vajrayana

What the practice does: Visualisation exercises, meditations and energy work allows people to reclaim the parts of themselves that are disempowered and embrace embodiment so that they can become warriors in the world

4. No Expectations

Tradition: Zen

What the practice does: Allows people to open to just being exactly as they are, without feeling the need to do anything to justify their existence

What is worth recognising, and that is often failed to be recognised in spiritual practice, is that we are all part of a wider system. We are each one part of the picture and often the reason that we feel out of balance is not just personal but also collective.

Being out of balance catalyses change and causes growth. We see this through how society changes and grows as a whole and also through the individuals in society who are willing to go out of their comfort zone to stand up for the imbalance they see or experience. In order to bring about more balance and harmony in the world.

It is often the biggest overthinkers, over-feelers and overachievers who change the world. Something to them feels so far out of whack that they have to do something about it – for example, great poets who are so subsumed with intense emotion they have to write about it in order to get some perspective on life. This is then shared with wider society as a whole, which allows people to connect with their own emotions and inner worlds better.

Spiritual practice works better and creates change faster if we see it as a way in which we are here to learn to be more helpful for the world. This can include learning to take care of ourselves better or enjoy ourselves more, but it is a different approach to wanting to achieve perfection as individuals or trying to get something from the system.

When we look at society through the widest lens possible, we can see that we have been on a huge overachieving mission for a little while now. This is because life was too hard for humans to just be – nature was too harsh. So we were inspired to make life better for ourselves.

Through doing this, we’ve created a society in which we are all massive overthinkers. As a whole, in order to heal and awaken collectively, we need to learn to arrive back into our intuitive senses and how we feel.

Again, this is a very simplified version of the story – the reality is obviously hugely complex and different parts of individuals and society are affected in completely different ways and interact with each other in an endlessly complex web. There’s no easy answer to any of this – but first recognising the problems allows us to start considering how we can come up with solutions, for example, by helping people connect with the underdeveloped parts of themselves through spiritual practices or by making people’s work more meaningful.

If we can create a society in which everyone feels safe enough to be open, then this becomes a lot easier. People have more space to operate in and there is room for people to be a bit out of balance without it causing personal or collective catastrophe.

Teaching Spiritual Practice

There are different ways to teach people. You can pick a practice that has worked for you and share the information required for people to be able to replicate this.

If it is simple and easy enough for people to understand, this has the benefits of being able to reach a lot of people really fast.

The disbenefits are that if it was really that easy – just a piece of information that people were missing – we probably would have already solved that. People aren’t dumb and we have a long history.

The reality is that people need to understand and connect with themselves better and this is a delicate topic that requires a huge amount of care, refinement, patience, humility and grace to facilitate.

You want to be able to meet people where they are, sense where there might be an imbalance and creatively offer a way for them to open up to a new way of being. Either by working with individuals, through sharing your own story in a way that might resonate, giving people explicit options or through offering relevant practices to a group.

This will only work if people trust you and feel safe with you – people won’t go out of their comfort zone in an environment that already doesn’t feel safe to them.

Large Goenka style retreats work by creating a very structured environment that is designed to invite a certain aspect of people’s being into it and helps people change the way they relate to that aspect. It works for some people, some people aren’t welcome in the environment and some people it affects very negatively.

One of the issues of focusing in so tightly on one aspect of experience, is that if a different part of someone’s experience starts opening up or coming out, the space suddenly becomes an unsafe and unwelcoming place for that person to be, which can be unproductive or unpleasant at best and catastrophic at worst.

The style of teaching that I most enjoy is the absolute opposite end of the spectrum to this. It is about welcoming the whole of a person or people and feeling in to the specifics of what wants to be brought back in to balance with each individual or in the group dynamic.

The more you want your teaching to be like the latter, the more you have to truly embody what it is you are teaching. It can’t be things you have learned intellectually it must be something that you have integrated into who you are through all the different aspects of your being so that your behaviour, emotional responses and ideas all feel aligned around what it is you are communicating to someone.

When you are in an open state yourself and the practice is being taught from a joyful, friendly, compassionate and inclusive space then people will feel that and be more likely to be able to relax into it, to enjoy the practice and make positive changes really fast.

Appendix

These different parts of experience tie in to all my other writing and practice guides. Here is the structure if that’s helpful:

Feeling – Joy – Soul

Thinking – Friendliness – Mind

Doing – Compassion – Body

Being – Inclusion/ Equanimity – Heart

Open – Gratitude – Environment