I always tend to divide practice into two areas. There is the practice that we take to grow and develop in something. For example, I’m learning to play golf right now and I’m practising various shots to help me play better golf. I’m in a deliberate practice and when I play golf on the golf course, I don’t put pressure on myself because I say I’m learning, and this is always a practice.
However, I differentiate that kind of deliberate practice from the everyday practice of getting out of bed, brushing our teeth. I call this habitual practice or automatic practice that we do around our day.
When we start realising that our habits are a practice, in that we are practising in everything that we do, how we get out of bed in the morning, whether we look at our phones, and how we start our day, when we do exercise, and even how we relate to stresses in our lives, these are all habitual practice .When we start to make this kind of distinction we can then start to move into what transforms our way of being by being on to the habitual practice that serves us and those that don’t!.
This makes me think of the work that Daniel Kahneman has done in his work on Thinking Fast, Thinking Slow. System 1, he articulates, is an automatic feed, almost like our habitual practices and system 2 is where we are using a lot more energy in being conscious of what we are learning and how we are being. He likened this to learning to drive and then driving. In learning to drive we are in system 2 where we are having to get consciously aware of everything (and at times it can become too much) but after a while driving becomes naturally automatic and moves into the domain of system 1. This is the shift from deliberate practice to habitual practice.
When we start to remember ourselves, and our commitments, systems 2 keeps us on track to be in deliberate practice. I notice when I’m in my deliberate practice of intentionally meditating, doing my Jo Kata session along with exercise in the morning, my day is set up better that way and I can feel very resourceful for the whole day. I also notice when these deliberate practices don’t happen for some reason, my day doesn’t feel as well resourced.
I think one of the things that I notice is practices organised around my commitments, stating my commitments in the morning, helps me orientate to the day. Knowing our commitments, living and embodying them is an important part of our practice. For me, there’s a vast amount of difference when we’re working somatically with clients as we’re working on the latter, how to embody, and take skilful action towards our commitments, which takes practice, but with practice transformation can occur.
