What’s the Most Stable Practice Routine?
Whether you’re practicing a sport, learning a language, building a business, refining an art, or doing The Work, routine can be a wonderful friend.
What all these things have in common is that they are long-term processes. And when dealing with long-term processes, a steady approach is helpful.
With any of these processes, if you go too slow, momentum never gets gained. And if you go too fast, you can end up burning out, or quitting early.
Somewhere in the Middle Is a Sweet Spot
Most people who start doing The Work are on the “too slow” side. They are still just figuring out how to do The Work, they may have doubts about it, and they usually don’t have a routine established.
So for most people, they hear a little about The Work, maybe read one of Katie’s books, maybe watch a few videos, or read this newsletter, but no habit of The Work gets built. And soon their interest peters out, or they put it on a shelf for later.
But the other extreme is people who go all out, hitting sprint speed with The Work, but can’t maintain the pace long term. The funny thing is they end up in the same place as those who never get started.
So What Is a Balanced Approach?
It is different for each person. Because the balance is a balance between internal interest and external situations. And that’s different for everyone.
If you have a great internal interest, you can naturally maintain more practice of The Work. But even if you have great interest, if you don’t structure some routine for doing The Work, it can easily fall by the wayside.
So the first part of finding that balance is to gauge your interest. This includes educating yourself on how to do The Work, how to find turnarounds, how to answer the questions as meditation. And it includes getting honest about what your priorities really are.
Once you’re clear on that, it’s a matter of finding what’s practical in your life. Can you find a time on a regular basis to do The Work? Maybe it’s 15-30 minutes in writing every morning before work. Or maybe it’s a phone session once a week. It’s up to you to find a routine that matches your interest level.
But Even if You Find a Good Routine, The Balancing Act is Not Over
In Inquiry Circle, we do The Work every day, five days a week. It’s a routine that works for most of us. And I recently had a good idea for supporting us all to show up every day. I proposed creating a “day streak” report for each person every day.
You see this kind of thing in foreign language apps: it tells you how many days in a row you’ve shown up. The basic idea is that the feedback will give you motivation to show up more regularly.
But as we discussed the idea in the forum, I saw some drawbacks. It became clear to me that this was outside motivation, not genuine internal motivation. In fact, it could cause extra stress for each of us as we try to do it perfectly.
This Made Me Think
Showing up perfectly, every day without fail, is not necessarily the best practice. If I’m attached to doing it perfectly and some day I can’t make it, then I may never start again. Imagine I do two months without missing a day, and then I miss one! That could make me give up. Why put all that pressure on myself?
But if I am doing my work from a genuine internal motivation, I’m not paying attention to “doing it perfectly.” So when I miss a day here and there, it’s no big deal. My day streak was not ruined, because I’m not paying attention to that at all.
What I am paying attention to is my internal experience of doing The Work, which is its own motivation. When I discover through my work that what I thought was a stressful situation is not stressful for me, I feel freedom. And it’s that feeling of freedom that brings me back to do more of The Work.
It so nice to forget about perfection, and just follow my heart into inquiry.
If you want to start building a practice of The Work, or just want to experience it more deeply, join us for The Work 101 online course starting soon.
Have a great week,
Todd
“There is a perfection beyond what the unquestioned mind can know. You can count on it to take you wherever you need to be, whenever you need to be there, and always exactly on time.” Byron Katie, A Thousand Names for Joy
If you like this article, feel free to forward the link to friends, family or colleagues. Or share the link on Facebook or other social media. If you have thoughts you’d like to share about it, please leave your comments below.
Get two new articles about The Work of Byron Katie every week. Subscribe to the newsletter here.
