Tag Archives: practice

Practicing Sex

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I believe that practicing sex is less about technique and equipment than it is about learning to be vulnerable, intimate, and tender with the one you love.

It’s paying attention to the little things, like taking the opportunity to give a nice long hug, or gently rubbing your loved one’s back, or giving a quiet touch as you walk by.  These touches make us feel valued and loved.

It’s about taking the time and effort to be romantic: giving a gift unlooked for, making a special dinner, or planning an adventure to some place or event you’ve never been before.

It’s about savoring your lovemaking with long lingering kisses, passionate embraces, and lots of gentle touching or massage.

Maybe the hardest thing about practicing sex is talking about what you want, or what you’re afraid of, or what you don’t like.  Something as simple as initiating sex, or refusing it, can make us feel extremely vulnerable.

You know it’s time to talk if you feel some resentment about your sex life.  Where does the resentment come from?  What is it you want that you’re not getting, or don’t want that you are?  How can you express that to the one you love in a way that is respectful and not resentful? 

These conversations are usually pretty difficult.  I need to find a way to get some distance from my emotions.  I may begin by writing a letter, and getting down on paper what I’m feeling.  Obviously I’m already feeling some resentment, so I want that letter to sit for at least a day before I edit it.  Then I’ll read it again and try to reword it in a way that is less resentful, more respectful, and uses language that I think my wife can hear. 

What you don’t want to do is provoke the same resentment in your loved one that you’re already feeling yourself.  That’s a recipe for an emotional conflagration, and maybe long term damage to your relationship.

Once I’m happy with the letter, I’ll give it to her and ask her if we can talk about it after she’s read it.  When we begin to talk, I try to breathe through the conversation, be aware of our emotional pressure, and back off if it gets too high.  But I keep trying to find a way to talk about it until we can come to a mutually satisfactory conclusion.

Practicing Persistence

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Why do you persist in your practice? What do you do when you get discouraged? How do you make yourself do it again when everything in you says “No mas!”?

I am trying to learn the answers to these questions. So please share your experience with me.

It is easier to quit when I lose sight of what I’m trying to accomplish, or lose faith that I can accomplish it, or lose the expectation that my practice will bear fruit.

So to persist, I need to continually revisit and sharpen the vision or description of the expected results of my practice in all its blossoming glory.

I need to carve my practice into a series of small achievable steps of gradually increasing levels of difficulty, with well defined milestones along the way. These milestones are the “small wins” that will build my confidence and my expectation of future success.

I need to document these wins, so I can go back and look at them, and remind myself when I’m discouraged that I have succeeded in the past.

I need to surround myself with like minded individuals, who share in these experiences, who share their encouragement, with a mutual expectation of success.

I need a mentor who is a model of practice, persistence, and who has already accomplished what I want to achieve.

Flow (P.S.) by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

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The book is about the “flow state” of consciousness: what it is, how it comes about, and the consequences of its presence or absence in a person’s life.

In particular it describes the current existential malaise of western society, describes the flow state, and presents it as a kind of tonic both for the individual and for society as a whole.  It discusses flow in the context of physical, mental, vocational, and social activity, dealing with the accidents of life, and meaning making; and how it can heighten the enjoyment of each.

He defines the flow state as: “…a sense that one’s skills are adequate to cope with the challenges at hand, in a goal-directed, rule-bound action system that provides clear clues as to how well one is performing.  Concentration is so intense that there is no attention left over to think about anything irrelevant, or to worry about problems.  Self-consciousness disappears, and the sense of time becomes distorted.  An activity that produces such experiences is so gratifying that people are willing to do it for its own sake, with little concern for what they will get out of it, even when it is difficult, or dangerous.”

Flow activities, “…have rules that require the learning of skills, set up goals, provide feedback, make control possible, facilitate concentration and involvement…”

The book is often cited as one of the seminal works of positive psychology.  At times, particularly in the beginning of the book, it feels like a harangue.  But the insights found in the later chapters are worth waiting for.  The content is useful and applicable to one’s own life.  While I may not read it again from cover to cover, I am certainly likely to refer to it from time to time.

Practicing Contentment

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He who knows enough is enough will always have enough – Lao Tzu.

How do you know when enough is enough?

Jesus said something that bothered me for years:

25 Whoever has will be given more; whoever does not have, even what they have will be taken from them.” (Mark 4:25, NIV)

I’ve chewed that verse like a cow chews cud.  It just didn’t seem fair to me.

I grew up a glass half empty person.  It was as if I had negative vision: I could only see what wasn’t there.  And not just possessions; accomplishments, skills, physical attributes… the list was unending.  I saw what was lacking in my life, and everywhere I looked I came up short.

Whoever doesn’t have, even what they have will be taken from them.  It’s unpleasant to be around a person with negative vision.  They aren’t thankful for anything, and complain about everything.  They are jealous.  They are insecure.  They are easily offended, because the whole world is an insult to them.

I should know, for that man was me.

Here’s what that verse has come to mean to me: we all have something to be grateful for.  The issue isn’t possession, but recognition.  We’ve all been blessed with life.  And if we’re alive, then we have air to breathe, water to drink, and food to eat.  Give thanks.

We’ve all been blessed with some interest, some activity we like to do.  Enjoy it.  Practice it.  And give thanks.

We all know people who are better than us in those things we’re interested in or like to do.  Admire them.  Get to know them.  Learn from them.  And give thanks.

Whoever has will be given more: this is the path to true wealth.  Before long you not only discover how blessed you are, but that you are a blessing too.

How Many Hours of Practice?

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How many hours of practice does it take to be good at something?

Since Malcolm Gladwell’s book, Outliers, came out in 2008 the 10,000 hour rule has been quoted more times than Poor Richard’s Almanac.  But that rule refers to the six sigma experts that are on the right hand edge of the bell curve.

What if you don’t want to be an expert at something, just competent?

For example, say you want to learn a new language well enough to be conversant, but not so well that you could write a piece of literature in that language.  How long would that take?

I’ve seen rules of thumb kicked around on blogs and in books, but never any research to back them up, apart from Ericsson’s 10,000 hour rule.

For instance one fairly common rule of thumb seems to be the thousand hour rule: that is, it takes one thousand hours of “practice” to achieve competence at some skill.  I found an article online that seems to confirm this for learning a second language.  The article refers to research done by the Foreign Service Institute, but without an actual citation.

Family Fortunes by the Bonner brothers asserts that it takes 1,000 hours to become competent, and 5,000 to become really good at some skill or other.  But again, they don’t cite any research to support these claims.

There is a graph in KA Ericsson’s article, The Influence of Experience and Deliberate Practice on the Development of Superior Expert Performance, that plots expert performance as a function of experience (see figure 38.1).  It looks logarithmic to me, but the article doesn’t make that assertion.

But suppose expert performance is in fact a logarithmic function of experience.  The log base 10 of 10,000 is 4, while the log base 10 of 1000 is 3.  In other words if this relationship is logarithmic, a person with 1000 hours of deliberate practice would have 75% of the skill of a person with 10,000 hours of practice.

If “really good” is halfway between the competent level at 1,000 hours, and the expert level at 10,000 hours, How many hours of practice does that translate to?  Well 103.5 = 3162, so about 3200 hours to achieve 87.5% of the skill of an expert.

Harness Infinity in your Practice

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We tend to think of infinity as a REALLY big number.  But pick any number you want, even say a googolplex, and that number is finite.  It is limited.  A googolplex plus one is still greater than a googolplex.

Infinity is unlimited or unbounded.

Infinity is less of a thing than it is a process.

The natural numbers are just the counting numbers: 1, 2, 3, 4,…  We know that there are infinitely many of them, because if you assume there are only finitely many, then there must be a largest number, say N.  But N+1 is greater than N, and if N is a natural number then so is N+1.  This contradicts our assumption that there are only finitely many.  Hence there are infinitely many natural numbers.

It is by this process of adding one that we come to infinity.  As soon as we stop adding one, we know that no matter how big the number is, it is still finite.

So how do we harness this concept of infinity into our practice?  By doing our practice every day.  This is what takes us from N to N+1, from the finite to the infinite.

The brain is a very plastic organ.  When we do something again and again, particularly at the same time and place every day, that activity will eventually cease to be something we consciously choose, and will eventually become nearly autonomous, like the beating of our hearts.

Our practice becomes truly powerful when we no longer waste any emotional energy on choosing whether or not to do it. At this point our practice transcends habit; it becomes part of our very nature.

N+1 follows N as night follows day.

Cleaning House, part 2

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The essence of practice is repetition. 

I suspect what separates the well ordered house from the clean house, and the clean house from the messy house is the regularity and quality of repetition.  What do I mean by that?

In one of those disgusting houses I mentioned yesterday, there is no repetition: the countertops don’t get scrubbed, the clutter doesn’t get picked up, and the floors don’t get vacuumed.  Hence the foodstuffs laminated to the countertop, the buried floors, and the accumulation of filth and odors.

On the other hand, we can’t do everything that needs to be done every day; there isn’t enough time, and we have other things to do.

Certain things I feel need to be done every day: the kitchen needs to be cleaned, the clutter needs to be picked up, the mail processed, and laundry needs to be kept moving.  I feel like I’m reasonably competent at these things, though I tend to get behind on the mail.

Other practices don’t need to be done every day, but probably at least once a week: vacuuming floors, cleaning bathrooms, etc.

What I really struggle with are those activities that need to be done only occasionally: organizing the basement, washing the windows, cleaning the garage, etc.

The problem for me seems to be, how do I make these activities regular without making them frequent?  How do I bring them into my awareness?

What I’ve noticed about myself is that I have a kind of tunnel vision.  I see the daily or weekly things that need to be done, but the other things may as well not even exist.  There have been file boxes at the bottom of the basement stairs that have been patiently waiting for over a year for someone to deal with them.

So my experiment to deal with this blindness is to spend the first part of my day devoted to housework on these kinds of chores.  In addition I will keep at list of these chores in a list together with the date the chore was last done.

How do you make the occasional regular?

Cleaning House

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Housework is something you do that nobody notices until you don’t do it. –quotegarden.com

This topic may seem out of place on a site like this.  When we think of practice it’s generally in the context of learning some vocational or avocational skill like accounting or playing the piano; or some transformational practice like meditation.

Housework has almost acquired a taint:  No liberated woman would choose to be a housewife, and no man would choose to do woman’s work.

So how does it get done?  Does it matter?

I have been in living spaces where the foodstuff on the countertop is so thick and hard you couldn’t take it off with a chisel; where old cat poop lay about on the floor; where the floor couldn’t be seen for all the clothing, papers, and trash strewn about; where there are bug infestations; where the smell stops you at the door.

Clearly it matters.

I know our house isn’t clean enough when it starts getting in the way of life: when it’s too cluttered to find things, it smells bad, it looks bad, etc.

On the other hand, there is more to life than a clean house.  That is, our house is too clean again, when it starts getting in the way of life: there’s no time for fun, all we do is work and clean the house; or it’s never clean enough to have company over.

Aristotle described virtue as a mean between two extremes.  So if the two extremes are those above, then we know clean enough lies somewhere in the middle.

When is your house clean enough?

Fallen from Practice

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I’m a big believer in practicing every day, at the same time and the same place.

I just don’t do it.  That’s probably why I’m a dilettante and not an expert.

I do try.  But invariably I have a late night out with friends, or take a trip out of town, or just don’t want to practice; so I don’t.

This is where the planning ritual becomes important:

  1. Reviewing my vision reminds me of what kind of person I want to be, of what kind of life I want to live.
  2. Reviewing my goals reminds me of what I want to accomplish.
  3. Reviewing my projects reminds me of what it will take to accomplish those goals.
  4. And reviewing my tasks reminds me of the habits required to complete my projects.

By the end of that process I am generally motivated enough to climb back on my horse and start riding in the direction of my vision again.

I once found it difficult to look myself in the mirror of my plans once I’d fallen out of practice.  It made me feel like a failure.

I’d go for months without looking.  By then I’d be out of shape, out of tune, and feeling a great deal of stress.  The stress would drive me to look for a solution, which in turn would bring me back to my plans and to practice.

I’ve decided I’d rather feel like a failure occasionally than to actually be a failure perpetually.  So I plan – daily.

Finding Meditation

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I chant.

It’s not something I would ever have chosen to do on my own. But my EPT therapist prescribed it for me, I practice it, and it works for me.

By “works for me,” I mean I finally found the off switch to the nonspecific sense of anxiety that haunted me most of my life.

My point is not that you should chant, but that if you keep an open mind with respect to the various forms of mediation, then you might find one that works for you.

I tried transcendental meditation back in college some thirty years ago.  It gave me headaches.

I tried pranayama (without a teacher; they were hard to find back then) and had a problem with swallowing air.

I tried just lying down and counting my breaths – that helped.  But nothing has worked as well as the chanting.

I’ve been diagnosed as ADHD.  When I was a kid I couldn’t focus on anything but the television.  I think my favorite kriya, Ganpati Kriya, has several aspects to it that make it easier for me to stay focused and harder to be distracted.

First, there are eight syllables that I chant out loud over and over for eleven minutes.

Second, the kriya has a mudra where the thumb touches the successive fingers on each hand with the pronunciation of each syllable.kirtan kriya

Third, I associate one of the chakras with each syllable and visualize the “activation” of that chakra with the pronunciation of each syllable.

So my mind and body are fully engaged as I practice this kriya, making it easier for me to stay focused for the entire eleven minutes.

I practice Ganpati Kriya in the morning, Sat Kriya at noon, and Kirtan Kriya in the evening.

How about you?  Have you tried meditation?  What works for you?