## Resilient Koan 13 Practice and Practicing ### _Koan_: When is practice practice, and when is it just practising? ### Discussion: Having the discipline to practise is wonderful. There is no substitute for doing something consistently, with commitment. But that can be totally different from having the intent to actually learn, to actually develop skill, to actually be transformed through your practice. I even recall the precondition of the practice being very intentional being cited in Gladwell's book 'Outliers' regarding the '10,000 hour rule' to becoming an expert \[sorry, I didn't read the cited studies at source, yet!\] Consider the example of swimming lap after lap, just because you are training for some race and you thought you should swim a lot. Compare that to swimming with the intent that you would get faster every session, more perfect with every stroke, and that swimming was another means to explore the limits of your body and develop a increased sensitivity to the placement of your hands, curve in your elbow and rhythm in your kick. There is likely to be a huge difference in the learning curve and potential for insights between those two approaches. Having considered that example, there really is something to be said for practicing even when your intent (on a given day) is not right. For example, sometimes I go to Tai Chi, or start weights, or go skating, or cycling, not because I have the right intention in that moment, but rather because I am just following through on some commitment I made to myself to do it. It is sometimes only in the last quarter of the time spent that I actually snap into actually being interested in the practice. Another interesting dimension is the frequent mention in definitions of 'practice' of the word 'habit'. Yet, my experience of spiritual practice is that the act of meditating is not so much habitual, rather deeply intentional most of the time. The habit would, most of the time, be to not do it, sleep in, not engage with any intention. Yet the joy from meditation (or buzz from exercise) can be equally a habit and addictive. ### Insight: Intention defines relationship. Becoming more skillful in relationship to self, action and world is the purpose of practice. If the intention is to truly become more objectively skillful, then the practice will be intense, the relationship appropriate and the objectively observable quality and impact of the practice will be greater. If the intention is just to practice, as a means of growing into or reinforcing a particular identity, then intensity, relationship and quality doesn't matter. All that matters in that case is that you practice 'with' your relationship in Intention to Becoming. ### Inquiry: What are the important distinctions to draw? Reading Varela (2000) today he makes the distinction between praxis, practice and practicing. Perhaps simply these are the apithological distinctions of theory of action (knowing), the presence of action (being) and the undertaking of action (doing). If we are (Being) and do (Doing) without the Knowing of why, we are engaging in something, but I wonder what it is ultimately for. To have a theory of action and to act without intention or presence also presents a disconnect. In apithology this in the conjunction of mind.speech.body. It is not necessary to combine all three consciously, unless you want generativity. The alternative is of course just to practice endlessly - which is an option. Hope (or self-delusion) is then necessary. ### Practice: My grandmother (who was a very accomplished pianist) would say 'practice makes permanent' - as a play on 'practice makes perfect'. Only perfect practice makes perfection. The trick is to practice perfectly, but as that is impossible until we attain perfection, which we cannot do as there is no attainment, the aim is to 'practice mindfully' with an eye on (and toward) continual refinement. Our practice is to engage in practicing mindfully. The accomplishment is not in the result, but the time spent in aware engagement. Better one foot placed well with permanent awareness resulting of the difference in that step than do 108 moves completed with a concreting of a self-limiting habit in ignorance - no matter how good it looks. --- This is one in a series of 25 'Resilient Koans' documenting "an apithologue into the koans of practice discovered while creating resilient sustainable communities", in 2010.