Yet Untitled 038 - Three Practices
An anatomy of three cycles of value creating repetition in my life
Welcome back!
I hope you’ve had a good week. I’ve been busy, carrying on but mindfully, thanks to a refresher course in Bullet Journaling I opted into last week. It’s been really fantastic. I don’t know how many of you are familiar with Bullet Journaling (or - BuJo). It’s been defined as a mindfulness practice pretending to be an organization system and vice versa. I can vouch that I get tons of both - mindfulness and organization - from it.
In essence, BuJo helps create dynamic lists through “rapid logging” that helps capture tasks, events and thoughts quickly and powerfully. It teaches simple methods to effectively organize these so that you always know where to find them and also prescribes rituals through which things that aren’t vital, important or consequential to your life are allowed to fall away, creating space for attention that you can utilise where it matters.
Refreshing myself with the tenets of BuJo was great. I realised that over time, I had started practicing my own, significantly less-effective way of using it. I knew this because I was still carrying my to-dos in my head rather than offloading them into the effective system that I knew BuJo to be; so I came back to the fundamentals.
I’d say that coming back to fundamentals is an essential part of any practice. Coming back to BuJo basics got me into a lovely, reflective zone that wasn’t indulgent and (relief!) effective. Through it, even in this short time, I managed to drop one big time-consuming habit I’d kept going for years by finally understanding that it served next to no purpose. That’s a big one.
Seeing this practice work, I started thinking about practices in general and looking at other practices in my life. I have a few.
The three practices I’ve chosen different spheres of my life - one in the sphere of the body, one in the sphere of the mind and the last in the sphere of the spirit.
Yoga
I have practiced yoga for 18 years.
It feels like it’s written into my bones now and that the writing’s going even deeper.
I also talk about it a lot. My friend Selin quoted a yogic hyperbole of mine in the last issue of her lovely newsletter that you can read here. But I talk about it for good reason. Yoga healed my recurring back-pain, permanently. I owe some wonderful early morning experiences to it, one of which I captured in this poem in 2001:
Revisiting this poem was a TRIP. Reading it aloud was a trip to the MOON (I’m no poet, but I think I secretly harbour a deep wish to be one). I wrote it so long ago, but this poem shows me so clearly that even 20 years ago, I was already looking in the direction of the practices I write about in this instalment.
You can read the poem text here.
Bujo
I have practiced Bullet Journaling for 4 years.
This is the shortest time-span of engagement among the practices I mention here. However - I have practiced shadows of BuJo via other practices over the years:
I kept up a practice of Julia Cameron’s prescribed Morning Pages off and on for many years. It involved filling a blank sheet of paper first thing in the morning without caring for continuity, syntax or grammar. The reflective aspects of BuJo definitely relate to my experience of this practice.
I’ve experimented with various other forms of journaling over time. I’ve kept traditional journals, especially during holidays. But I always felt that these were scattered enterprises until I came to understand that these could be indexed and organised without taking too much trouble, and become not just time capsules but tools to relieve the mind of it traffic jams. BuJo showed me that this was possible.
I practiced an organization technique called GTD (getting things done) for some years. This was the first time I saw the potential deeper thinking behind organizing out life - that you needed both narrow and broad fields of perspective in order to really understand what needs to be done today. I found pure GTD cumbersome, and some of its complexity was offset by a great app called Omnifocus which helped streamline GTD principals digitally and across devices. I eventually chose BuJo because I found myself getting lost in a digital environment. Call me old-fashioned, but I never wanted to discard the haptics of pen and paper, something that allows me another powerful form of expression - drawing.
BuJo brought all this together for me. It’s a wonderful and evolving relationship.
Buddhism
I have practiced Nichiren Buddhism for 6 years.
I started because I wanted to be braver and had seen other practitioners of Buddhism display tremendous courage. My search for a spirit-oriented practice wasn’t new. Some of my friends may remember me taking them on a day trip visiting a well-known Hindu, Islamic, Buddhist and Christian places of worship in the city of Mumbai, all on the same day. I have been a seeker for a long time, during which my life steadily awoke to what it was seeking in the spiritual realm.
I can say today after coming face to face with many complex, existential questions that spiritual seeking revealed along the way - had some divine entity handed me an all encompassing answer saying “here take it”, it would likely have been of the same value as finding nothing at all. The Truth, to me, always felt like something you need to grow into. For this reason, I feel that my life was definitely seeking a practice. The idea of seeking answers bit by bit via consistent effort appealed to me - especially the aspect of routing this understanding through the lens of reason and daily life that I found Nichiren Buddhism to take.
Fundamentally Common
I started each of these practices when I needed something fundamental to change in my life.
YOGA happened when my mind wasn’t feeling so healthy. I was done with education, confused about how to proceed with life. I was living alone in Delhi and a lot of my friends weren’t around. A romance wasn’t working out. I think I was skirting a depression those days. Yoga happened because I wanted this to change. And it did!
BUJO happened because I felt like I was quickly losing all feeling of substantially as I drowned in the etherium of digital nothingness. Times had changed too fast and I felt like I was leaving an important part of myself behind - the guy who doodled in the margins and kept his notes. I kept some of my class notes because they told me who I was back when I wrote them. No chains of bits and bytes was going to cut this for me. BuJo happened when I wanted to reconnect with what was valuable in the past and in danger of falling away. I did and it didn’t fall away!
“IMAGINARY VEGETABLES” - A page from a journal, c. 2021 BUDDHISM happened when my father in law was diagnosed with cancer. Vani and I had been married for just over five years and now I was responsible for her. It felt like I was facing death as an adult for the first time and I was frightened and without an anchor. Buddhism happened because this needed to change. And it did. Not immediately. But eventually.
Repetition
I repeat all three of these practices every day. Even though I don’t practice yoga every day, I constantly apply it to how I stand, how I sit, how I pull my shoulder blades together so my chest opens and I can draw deeper breaths, and so on.
My oft-quoted friend Craig Mod says of repetition while talking of his practice of qalking:
This is how trust and belief in the power of these processes is built: repetition.
All three of my practices potentially yield good results for my life. If anything, they lead to insight and self-awareness. Every instance - every moment of actual proof of them working deepens my faith in my practices and I am then able to deploy them even in unfamiliar circumstances.
That’s the thing. Good practices dispel fear.
You can march bravely into the unknown armed with good practices.
Practices make you Present
The sharp rebuke of my yoga teacher always reminds me that the point of a practice is to snap you out of autopilot into being present. She does not let me drift. She asks me to enjoy an asana fully.
What I hear from BuJo, Yoga and Buddhism is that they all acknowledge the fact that we are in constant flux. Yoga works with your breath, which is always on the move. BuJo makes us step off the superhighway of out mind so that we can watch the traffic from the pavement for a bit. Buddhist practice aims to inflect our many thoughts with the positivity already latent within them, actively sending every new action in the direction of value and creativity.
In my understudying, the bad stuff basically happens when we aren’t present. And Craig Mod observes that fantastic stuff happens when we are. Mod says further of walking:
You feel changed by the walk and changed by the people you walk beside. The world yawns in new ways. Every river becomes a thing to dunk yourself in. Every piece of fruit to be tasted. Each farmer to be greeted and acknowledged and seen.
My three practices confluence into something wonderful, working hand in glove, informing one another to achieve just this. Vasant is more present in his life because of them.
I love all three of my practices a lot. There’s a part of me that also wants to sometimes get lost in them, and it’s possible. But things start falling apart pretty soon when that happens.
I always try and remind myself: a practice should be a means to an end, not an end in itself.
I could go on, but…
…let me start winding up. I’m happy to (and would love to) continue any part of this discussion via the comment box.
I’ll leave you with one more thought:
Practicing incorrectly is part of practice:
A practice isn’t a prescription. It a ritualised method of slowly finding the right answers on your own by slowly imbibing the tested principles designed to lead you to them.
What this means, in my experience, is that you will invariably hit dead ends - I messed up my back pretty badly while practicing yoga incorrectly in my novice days, but when I did correct my course, it set my spine up for life. Good practices lead to growth. Growth entails getting past existing limitations.
There will be friction. There will be sparks. But in my experience, they light your way!
I will end here, dear Yet Untitler…
…but before I go I will ask you to tell me about one of your practices which surprised you by changing your life in come way.
Please tell me. I’d love to know.
PS - The Marie Kondo Method is another practice I’d like to imbibe more. Just look what it did for my closet! Defo Spark ⚡️ Joy!
PPS - Funnily, enough - Writing “Yet Untitled” but is a practice that I’ve kept up now for over 40 weeks straight. But it never once occurred to me to write about it in this edition!
Till next week!
Marie Kondo would be very proud of you. What a beautiful drawer!
Like you I practice Nichiren Buddhism and am approaching my 35th anniversary of practising. I chant every day, usually for between 40 and 60 minutes. It is the backbone of my life and everything else comes from it. When I have difficulties (this last year has been HUGELY challenging) it helps me have the courage and wisdom to face the world each day and determine that there will be victory eventually. After such a difficult time I am now starting to savour that victory.
And I love journalling on paper. I've done Morning Pages in the past. At the moment my practice is a weekly journal, done in a coffee shop over a cappuccino. It helps me take stock of where I'm at and chew through decisions that I need to make. Somehow, on the page, I can tap into my inner wisdom and trust what comes out.
"Vasant is more present in his life because of them." How lovely. I share 2 out of 3 of your practices and they have kept me human. (And I am sure the third one is a blank cheque I can cash when I need it) Grateful for the patient and meticulous way you share.