Practice

I shared with a friend recently that Tuesday was yoga day for me. (I get strange looks when I show up at the office in my sweats--or at least I imagine that the looks are strange. I'm always quick with my explanation.) My friend asked what my practice was?

I was perplexed at the question, largely because I'm not sure that I have a yoga practice. I mainly just show up at Yoga on Tuesdays and do whatever Maryam tells me to do. I made up an answer to the question--or really, I simply told them what I had done in the past two or three days, and gave the vague impression that I do that all the time. I knew that I needed a practice, and so with my answer came a silent vow that I would do this all the time, so that it really was my practice. We'll see how silent vows work.

Prayer, mindfulness, meditation---they bear fruit in our lives only if they are truly a part of our lives. Only if we have a practice, a regular routine of participating in the activity. They are supposed to become a part of us, and they can do that only if they become a regular part of our lives. I know that, yet I struggle to follow through on it. Why is that?

I've decided, at least for today, to lay the blame wholly on the word "practice." What am I meaning, or even more, what am I hearing when I call myself to practice? My association with the word has been indelibly shaped by my early forays into athletics. In that context, practice is what you did to get ready for the game, or if you were a musician, what you did to get ready for the performance. In this context, practice isn't the real thing. The game or the performance--they're what you're aiming for, and the practice is only to get you ready for those.

When I think of my spiritual practices and my struggle to practice them--a lot of it stems from this concept that practice is only there to get me ready for something more real. In part, it's because I need practice before I can really feel that I have a spiritual practice. This is most clear to me with my yoga. I can do some of the asanas, but only with a sense of mediocrity at best. Other asanas I can't even begin to approximate. I feel as if I need to practice yoga for a long time before I'm ready to do yoga. This sense of my inadequacy is inhibiting, and it infects most of my spiritual practices. It's hard for me to commit myself to prayer if, with a five year-old and a three year-old, my time of silent prayer often verges into nap.  I need a lot of practice before I'm really praying.

This flies in the face of the spiritual realities that I'm trying to engage, of course. Any instructor of yoga will tell you that your practice is simply your practice. There isn't an "ideal" practice and then our various deformations of them. There is simply our engagement with the discipline. Whatever the shape of that engagement, it's nonetheless authentic if we approach it so.

Likewise with prayer. Julian of Norwich is clear that God is far less interested in our proficiency in prayer, and far more in the intention behind it. If we enter prayer seeking to open ourselves to God, then God honors that, however exhausted we may or may not be.

This thought addresses a second concern I have with "practice." Even if I feel proficient in my spiritual practices, they still stand as "mere practice" in the back of my mind. There's a part of me that still believes that I am disengaging from real life to practice these other things whenever I set aside time for prayer or yoga or mindful attention. Again, in part that's because I'm not clear that I'm doing "real yoga" or "real prayer", but it's also because we live in a world that doesn't recognize the spiritual realities that these practices address.

So how does Julian's thought help? I find it meaningful with my practice of prayer to see that time as a setting aside space in my life to be with God. It's a time to give myself to a relationship. I know and understand relationships. My world knows and understands relationships. So my spiritual practice makes sense, and suddenly becomes very real for me when it becomes less a practice and more a time for relationship. It's a time to devote myself to my beloved. I make time for my children. I make time for my wife--though I want to get better at that. I can also make time for God, and for the world--for simple attention to the world. I can do that--I just need to practice.