Are You Willing To Take Your Daily Practice Seriously?

This post is Part 8 of a series on the psychological and practical benefits of daily practice. In this series, I’ll explore the elements of daily practice, varieties of daily practice, challenges to daily practice, and strategies for meeting those challenges. Please join me in learning more about this important subject! Complete information can be found in The Power of Daily Practice.

The kirist way is to organize your life around your life purposes because you’ve decided that you and your efforts matter. Kirists do not matter in a grandiose, narcissistic, unrealistic, or childish way. They matter as injustice matters, as wars matter, as love matters, and life and death matter. We can live life frivolously, caring only about our golf handicap and our gold fixtures, or we can put the world on our shoulders and, in our small but not abject way, support the very best principles, like keeping fascists out of office and children safe from harm.

This seriousness of purpose informs our daily practice, even if our daily practice is “just” playing the guitar or exercising. You bring this seriousness to your daily practice because it matters to you; because it is meaningful; because it supports one or more of your life purposes; because it is respectful of the vision you hold for yourself as someone who lives your values; and because it is one of the ways that you manifest your heroism and your humanity. Because you hold it in this high esteem, you treat it seriously.

Remembering this element of practice can make the difference between willing yourself to do brave activist work rather than avoiding it, willing yourself to make ambitious subject matter choices in your art rather than avoiding them, or willing yourself to upgrade your personality or avoiding that effort. In each of these scenarios, we possess multiple powerful reasons to opt for avoidance. It can help us to brave that difficult encounter by saying, “I’m a serious person and my practice is serious business.”

Arriving at this acceptance of seriousness as an element of practice and as an element of life may prove its own circuitous journey. If, as a child, you were tirelessly told not to take yourself seriously, if you were witness to so much chaos and carelessness that the idea of seriousness could only be held as a bad joke, if seriousness was the purview of the select few and you were not in that inner circle, then it will likely prove its own real work to arrive at the place where you embrace the idea of taking yourself seriously. But what journey could be more important?

Remember that this necessary seriousness, if and when you manifest it, can produce its own real challenges. That’s why it must be balanced out by lightness, playfulness, simplicity, and the other elements of practice that help reduce the weight of seriousness. Without that balancing effect, the following can easily happen. You’re working on writing a novel. It is so beautiful in your mind and it matters so much to you. Getting it just right becomes such a heavy, serious matter that you do not work on it all, for fear of ruining it.

Your novel can remain perfect only if it’s not worked on, so you avoid working on it so as to keep it perfect. The other elements of practice must therefore come into play if you are to actually write your novel. First of all, the element of honesty must get its due. You must be honest enough to understand why you are not writing. You must be honest enough to accept that the process demands that you show up and write without any wishful thinking about the perfectibility of art. If honesty is a solid component of your daily practice, that will help you counteract your dread of ruining this prospectively beautiful thing.

Likewise, the element of discipline must get its due. You may not be disciplined in every aspect of your life and you may not even much love the idea of discipline, but your daily practice requires it and without it you may find yourself paralyzed by the weight of the seriousness you’re bringing to your practice. In this scenario, we need our writer to show up to the page at the appointed time “no matter what,” perhaps using “no matter what” as his or her discipline mantra.

Primacy and presence will also help this writer. If you’re committed to your daily practice coming first when its appointed time arrives, and if you’re committed to being present to the content of your practice, that will help keep thoughts about perfectibility and ruination on a back burner. If you are present to what Mary wants to say to John in the chapter directly in front of you, then that will be your focus. You will be taking your novel seriously by virtue of taking the interaction between Mary and John seriously.

You want to take your daily practice seriously, just as you want to take your life seriously. That seriousness connects to the ideas of self-obligation and self-authorship that are central kirist tenets. However, you do not want that seriousness to paralyze you. The other elements of practice, if kept in mind and embedded in your practice, will help prevent that from happening.

Take your practice seriously. That seriousness is a measure of your devotion to living your life purposes.

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In this series, I intend to explain the elements of daily practice, the varieties of daily practice available to you, and what to can deal with the challenges to daily practice that inevitably arise. If you’d like to learn more about the psychological and practical benefits of daily practice and better understand the great power of daily practice, I invite you to get acquainted with The Power of Daily Practice. It is available now.

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Previously published on Psychologytoday.com.

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