Verified by 
Personality
Your Daily Practice Needs to Stop
By ceremonially ending your practice each day, you give it added power.
Posted September 22, 2020
This post is Part 22 of a series of posts 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.
Just as you want your daily practice to have a clear beginning, you also want it to have a clear ending. You have spent your time with it and now you get on with the rest of life, with all those other tasks, responsibilities and life purposes. You do not have to mourn that you are stopping because you know that you get to return to it, maybe as soon as later in the day but at the very worst tomorrow. Let it end; maybe end it on a ceremonial note; and come back to it later today or tomorrow.
That’s the essence of the matter. However, the concept of “completion” is rather more complicated than that. You’re working on your novel; it’s time to get ready for your day job; you end your writing session; but must you stop thinking about your novel? No, of course not. Your novel is still alive and your brain is still working. In one sense your daily practice has ended. But in another sense, it never ends, not if its content is important to you. Each of our life purposes threads through our days and threads through our life.
It makes no particular sense to contain a life purpose to exactly 30 minutes or an hour a day. If one of your life purposes is to strengthen your relationship with your children, should that be held to one chunk of time a day? Certainly not. Likewise, if our practice is centered around a personality upgrade, our recovery from an addiction, or our attempt to better manage our anxiety, then it makes complete sense that we would still be manifesting that personality upgrade, working our recovery program, or employing our anxiety management skills throughout the day.
So, it is fair to say that there is a clear line, a blurry line, and no line at all between our daily practice and the rest of the day. All three are true. But, although there is only a blurry line and even no line at all, there should also be a clear line. You mindfully and ceremonially stop writing. You mindfully and ceremonially clean your brushes and finish painting. You mindfully and ceremonially get up from your meditation practice. You mindfully and ceremonially roll up your yoga mat. Yes, you will continue practicing “yoga off the mat.” But your hour of formal yoga practice has ended.
One challenge to a robust daily practice is stopping too soon. You do not want to mindfully and ceremonially end your practice if it isn’t really time to end it yet. Some characteristic challenge may be provoking you to leave your practice early—a challenge like anxiety and distractibility, a felt sense of a lack of progress, boredom with repetition, the hardness of the task, etc.—and that can prove a powerful provocation. You want to be aware that the desire to leave too early may well up in you, you want to plan for that oh-so-common problem, and you want to stay put even though you are itching to leave.
Another, opposite challenge is being unwilling and almost unable to stop. For most people, getting started is the greatest challenge. For a lot of people, stopping too soon is the greatest challenge. For some people, stopping at all is the greatest challenge. They do not want to leave their novel and return to a dull day of routine. Their brain is still working and their thoughts are still whirring. They are “obsessed” with their novel, energetically “manic,” and can hardly tolerate the thought of stopping or the reality of stopping. For this person, focusing on “completion” and brilliantly managing stopping are vital.
I conceive of personality as made up of original personality, formed personality, and available personality. A person who is so obsessed with her project and so manic as to be almost vibrating with energy must make use of her available personality to announce to herself that she is stopping. She must mediate her manic energy so that she is in charge of her racing locomotive self rather than it being in charge of her. This is much easier said than done but it is such an important matter that, for a person facing this challenge, mastering stopping may be worth its own daily practice.
Part of the power of our daily practice comes from the sense of completion that we get from doing something with a clear beginning and end. You start to clean your room and you end up with a clean room. That feels good. You work on lesson three of the online course you’re creating for the whole two hours you’d intended to devote to it. That feels good. You practice those chord sequences without much ardor but you do practice them, you stay put for the allotted time, and then you proudly and ceremonially put your guitar away. That feels good. Make sure to finish up as seriously as you practice, so as to provide yourself with a welcome sense of completion.
***
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.
