What Kind Of Practice Makes Perfect?

You want to improve your health? Permanently transform your eating or exercise patterns for the better? Do you want to embody a different approach to success in your career, business or relationships?

Consistent practice is essential, but only if you are practicing the right things!

When you are transitioning from an old reality to a new more vibrant reality, everything that went into creating your old reality must surface. It must be felt and acknowledged, without identifying with it, in order to be integrated, so it no longer controls you (remember what we resist persists). This means all your judgements, beliefs, repressed feelings, insecurities that produced the old reality are going to surface to make room for a new way of being. If we practice a new behaviour over and over and over again without also practicing feeling at a bodily sensation level what is emerging, our bodies can never fully adapt to the change and make space for the new reality to emerge.

Everything that went into creating the old reality is still within you, within your embodied neurology. By simply behaviourally changing, you might be able to create a muscle memory change that retains 10-20% of your efforts. But this isn’t effort to produce radical change, especially if you are working with shifting addictions such as emotional eating, over-extending, relationship addiction and chronic over doing.

Thus include into your practice process, not only the behavioural change but also:

1. Notice what is happening in the body at a sensation level (make sure to bypass the emotional state <- I will explain why in a future article). Breathe into the sensations. Witness them. But do not identify with them and believe that your experience is true. You have feelings, they move through your body, but you are not your feelings. Let the greater aliveness of who you are emerge within you.

2. Stay in the question, keep an open mind and a beginner’s mind. Staying in the question facilitates relaxation and opening at a mind and body level, allowing insights and awarenesses to emerge from the embodied brain to support your growth. Being in conclusion, expectation or the answer shuts awareness and insights down, and it is a form of control that gives the false illusion of safety.

These two factors, on top of practicing your behavioral change facilitates evolving of your consciousness. Because consciousness can not evolve through the mind and behaviour alone. It must also include the body. To include the body means to learn how to experience sensations, especially sensations of discomfort. Sensations are the language of the somatic.

Many of us however are not taught how to use the body to support our endeavours. So the skill of body awareness is weak in most of us in north america. But this can change and is starts by asking yourself :

“What am I noticing in my body? Is it light, tense, open, constricted, heavy, expanded, etc.” … ”Where in my body do I notice these sensations?”

Then simply learn to hang out with the sensations. Build tolerance and resilience. And when you kick into thought, breathe deeply and return to the sensations.