Spiritual Practice
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I grew up in a music school—that is to say, our home was filled most afternoons and evenings with music teachers and students playing scales and études. A couple of times a year our living room was transformed into a recital hall for those students to show off what they had learned, and to practice performing.
Over those 16 years I studied music at the Hegvik School of Music, I would occasionally ask my mom if I could quit. We argued the various merits of learning to play an instrument, but ultimately she believed there were benefits to studying music beyond the music itself. One of those was being able to stand up in front of people confidently, and the other was learning how to practice.
As a child growing up in a house full of music students, I heard examples every day of the most common misunderstandings beginners have about practicing (one I often made myself). Folks think “If I want to learn to play this piece fast, I should practice it fast.” What we don’t realize at first is that what we are actually doing by practicing this way is training our fingers to stumble and trip. However, if you slow it down until every note is just the way you want it, your body and mind are creating neural pathways to play it just the way you want it. Another mistake beginners make is that they want to play the piece the whole way through over and over, mistakes and all. Again, by doing that we are training those mistakes into the brain and the muscles. At some point you just have to stop and do the thing in little bits and pieces until body and mind really understand. Then, and only then, do you put it back together in bigger and bigger pieces until is second nature.
Gradually it dawned on me that if you practice a piece without beauty, without tone, without feeling, that is how you perform it. If we practice joylessly, the music we make will be joyless. If you hate practicing, it’s time to make a change. It’s so much easier to sit down and practice a piece you love than one that doesn’t speak to you. Sometimes it’s more fun to collaborate with friends when our solo practice has lost its vitality. Sometimes you just have to practice goofing around, improvising spontaneously, making silly sounds. If we want joy and creativity in our music, we must practice bringing joy and creativity into our music. This is the opposite of what so many young musicians learn—they somehow learn that playing music should be difficult, joyless work, and it’s no wonder they quit.
Perhaps the most important lesson is not to get attached to your mistakes. I would so often hear moans and groans from the lesson rooms, and have myself many times slammed my fingers down on the keys of the piano in frustration. Practice is specifically time to make mistakes. We must learn compassion for ourselves, and patience while we practice; we need a safe space to make ugly sounds, to play things imperfectly as we begin to smooth and polish and shape.
Knowing how to practice is useful in unexpected parts of our lives. I remember when we got a brand new video game called “Spyro,” and all my friends took a turn playing it. Most of my friends, when it was their turn at the controller, raced forward toward their goal until they plunged accidentally off a cliff and had to start over with a new life. When my friend Akire, who had studied classical cello for many years, took the controller, she pulled over to a meaningless clearing and started running in circles and making little jumps into the air. “What are you doing!” we all cried impatiently “there’s nothing over there!” “I’m practicing” she replied. Her strategy was to learn to jump and glide in a safe area where death would not be the consequence of messing up.
In fact, the skills you learn practicing apply to just about every part of your life. This is never clearer than watching a toddler practice walking, or obsessively opening and closing doors, or putting things into a box and then dumping them out and starting it over. It takes hours of repetition to develop skills that now seem second nature to us—walking, talking, closing and opening doors, putting keys in your pocket and taking them out again later when you need them. This is why we do fire drills—so that in the moment of an actual emergency the procedure is second nature. I went to a master class many years ago with the great singer Leontine Price. When a student asked if she thought about technique while she performed, she told the packed house that the time for thinking about technique is in the practice room. When you perform you just think about the music you are making and the character you’re playing.
Spiritual practice is no different in this respect than any other kind of practice. Some days it will not seem like much is happening, but things we repeat day after day have a way of sinking down deep into our muscles and spirits. There are many stories among healers and ministers of visiting an elder who has lost much or all of her memory. She doesn’t recognize family or friends, but when the old hymns of her childhood are sung, or the rosary beads placed in her hands, something old and deep wakes up. Her fingers start to move on the rosary, she nods or even sings along with the hymns. What we practice most we know in a deep way; our bodies remember even when our minds are distracted or diminished.
There was a funny headline in the satirical paper The Onion the other day: “Man Who Downloaded $2.99 Meditation App Prepares to Enter Lotus Plane of Eternal Serenity.” This could have described me at my first meditation class. I, like many other new meditators, was constantly frustrated by my early attempts. I wanted to power through to enlightenment the same way I had, as a beginning flute student, wanted to power through to the end of the piece, without taking time in the difficult spots so they could become smooth and clear. I chose forms of meditation that were very challenging for me right off, rather than choosing forms that were enjoyable, so I dreaded my spiritual practice rather than looking forward to it. I was so miserable in my meditation practice at one point that I took a class called “Removing Obstacles to Meditation,” which was full of other people who were also having trouble meditating. The best advice the teacher gave in that class was “encourage yourself” —it turns out beating yourself up for your perceived failings in your spiritual practice is not actually helpful. It’s important to be compassionate with yourself as you practice.
Then I discovered yoga, which I looked forward to and dreamed about. No matter how much I practiced I wanted more. I took a break from meditation that lasted almost a decade. I realized that meditation was just one of many spiritual practices. Sure, the Buddha realized enlightenment sitting under the Bodhi Tree, but meditation is not temperamentally or developmentally appropriate for everyone.
Perhaps it was because of all those years practicing music that I took so readily to practicing yoga. I was reminded of the power of repetition. As I entered Down Dog pose the other day, I considered that if I have been practicing yoga for about 12 years, at least three times a week, and took Down Dog about ten times each class, I had been in the pose about 20,000 times. When you do something 20,000 times, not only do you learn it more deeply, it changes you. Not everyone is going to be able to twist themselves into all of those yoga pretzels you see in photos, but everyone will change and grow with practice.
One yoga teacher called this “slow surgery,” because the capacity it has to change muscles and joints and connective tissue is so powerful. This is why form and alignment are so important in yoga. Yes, if you practice carefully you can become more flexible and strong. But if you don’t practice mindfully you can easily blow out a shoulder or acquire an array of injuries.
Think of all the things you have done 20,000 times so far in this life. That probably includes brushing your teeth, which is why the humans alive today have better teeth than any humans who have ever lived before. It also probably includes sitting at a computer, which is why we have problems like carpal tunnel syndrome that millennia of humans have never had in this magnitude before.
Even if you don’t practice ukulele, or meditation, or yoga, you are practicing something. You already have a spiritual practice right now, whether you think of it that way or not. The question is—what are you practicing? Some people might not realize they have a spiritual practice, that they have shown kindness, or shared a warm smile 20,000 times. It now comes so easily to them they don’t even have to consciously choose to be kind; it arises naturally out of habit. Some folks notice the natural world around them on their daily run or their walk to work, or watch the slow growth of a tree through the kitchen window while they sip their coffee. They know just by looking at the fresh, green shoots whether spring is early, or what tree is fighting off parasites. One spring when birds and butterflies come back in reduced numbers, they notice the change and wonder what is wrong—they have become that in tune with their eco-system through years of practice.
Practice is the patient expression of our intentions. In the same way that devout practitioners in Hinduism, Buddhism
or Catholicism use a rosary to help them stay connected as they repeat prayers to the divine, so can our repetitions of scales, Downward Dogs or compassionate acts help us stay connected to ourselves and to our intentions to grow and bloom. Depending on our intention, the action itself becomes a prayer. In fact, many UUs understand their work helping others, or working for social justice, as their spiritual practice, as their prayer.
Every life is filled with repetition. All those thousands of repetitions of simple things when taken all together have power. Like drops of water that wear away a stone, we are shaping ourselves every moment with the simple repetition of our daily lives, whether we are conscious of it or not. Let us choose carefully what we practice, because that is what we are becoming.
In the summer of 2007 Darcey and her partner, Eric and son, Nick moved to Ithaca, New York to lead a more family-centered life. In 2008 she was called to serve as Parish Minister of the UU Church of Athens and Sheshequin and has served as their settled minister ever since. Rev. Laine also provides ministry for the UU Fellowship of Big Flats, and the Unitarian Universalist Church of Cortland. These congregations taught her the blessings of small-church ministry.
In 2014 Darcey completed her training in Spiritual Direction, a one-to-one practice for spiritual searching and growth, and enjoys providing Spiritual Direction to members of our congregations and to the community at large.
- Spiritual Practice - July 1, 2020
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