The Importance of Daily Practice

Much of my recent work on LinkedIn has focused on the importance of total engagement with religion. We shouldn’t just cherry-pick the elements of our faith that appeal to us and ignore the rest.

One aspect of Buddhist practice that has become popular in recent times is mindfulness meditation. However, many secular practitioners of mindfulness fail to realize the depths you need to travel in order to realize its full potential.?

A State of Flow

Imagine yourself in your most productive state. You’re engaged in your work or your favorite hobby, and everything you’re trying to achieve is unfolding perfectly, effortlessly. Save for an immediate crisis, nothing could distract you. You’re having something that feels somewhat like an out-of-body experience; you’re still occupying your conscious mind, but none of the thoughts and feelings that usually get in your way are no longer present.?

This is what has popularly become known as the “flow state.” Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, the psychologist who coined the term “flow,” has suggested that there are two potential paths to this state of mind.?

Firstly, there’s arousal; if you’re full of adrenaline because you’re playing an important football game or completing a final exam, the task at hand will fully absorb you. Of course, this isn’t something you can emulate on a daily basis. Even if you could persuade your body to experience this level of urgency during everyday tasks, the resulting anxiety and tension would start to take their toll, and the drawbacks would quickly outweigh the gains.?

Csikszentmihalyi’s other route to the flow state is more relevant to this article. This path brings you from a place of apathy, to relaxation, to control, using meditation. Attention training can teach you how to walk this path by yourself, unaided by anxiety-inducing stimuli from the outside world.?

In this way, you can learn to enter flow states more readily and consistently, and to realize the associated benefits of this in your work and other pursuits (without sacrificing your health, or your humanity).?

Realizing flow using this route requires challenges (like the first route), but also practiced ability. You need to learn how to get to that place without heaping external pressures upon yourself.??

Why Mindfulness Isn’t Enough: Seeking Full Secondary Control

“Mindfulness meditation” has become a popular approach to self-improvement in recent years. Studies have shown it to improve a number of common modern ailments, including anxiety, stress, and deficient attention.?

However, there’s more to the story. Mindfulness is an effective path to relaxation for most people, but attention training can bring you a lot further if you’re willing to pursue it properly. Focusing your attention (filtering out irrelevant stimuli to devote yourself fully to the task at hand) is a skill that must be honed over time, and one that can improve exponentially in the right environment.?

When you make progress with attention training, you’ll discover an increased ability to concentrate, stay organized, eat and drink intentionally, be more patient with those around you, and improve your executive function (without ignoring your broader environment).?

However, these benefits only become available through rigorous intentional practice. Basic mindfulness tactics (like those currently popular in the world of secular spirituality) will never take you as far.?

Fully Embracing Your Surroundings

In Episode #699 of the Tim Ferriss podcast, Apollo Robbins (an attention expert touted as “The World’s Most Famous Pickpocket”) shared his extensive experience of manipulating human attention to perform tricks. His main aim was to entertain, but his work also highlighted the yawning gaps in our ability to notice what goes on around us.?

He first came to prominence after stealing items from the Secret Service detail of former President Jimmy Carter. As well as becoming a “theatrical pickpocket,” he’s also provided security consulting services to several high-profile organizations.?

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Robbins’ stories clearly illustrate the glaring shortcomings in our ability to perceive, and how these limitations can negatively affect us if we allow them to be manipulated.?

The average human has never been so easily distracted. Experts highlight that our focus is naturally vulnerable to environmental distractions; a feature that would historically have kept us safe from predators and other threats. Like a lot of our evolutionary wiring, though, this has been hijacked in the age of information.?

With our attention under siege, it’s never been so important to shield ourselves from potentially harmful distractions.?

So, What Does “Practice” Mean?

As someone who has meditated in the Theravada Buddhist tradition for most of my life, the term “daily practice” has a very clear meaning for me, personally. However, I’m not writing this article for myself. I appreciate that many people on the path to enlightenment have a much spottier relationship with their faith than I do, and that this may make it difficult for them to know where to start when it comes to prayer or meditation.?

If you’re in this position, try imagining you’re on a plane traveling through severe turbulence. You’re afraid for your life, but keenly aware there’s nothing practical you can do to help the situation. What prayer do you offer to plead for your safety, and to whom do you say it?

The answer you come up with will be the form of practice you find most natural, and the best starting point for you as a newcomer.

I always advocate pursuing prayer or meditation through your own tradition, rather than starting anew with an approach that’s fashionable, or that strikes you as attractive at a given moment. Intentional practice, as the wording of the term suggests, requires practice; years and decades of it. You need to be prepared to persist with it long after it loses any flavor of novelty.?

It should be noted that the use of psychedelics does not, by itself, count as a form of intentional practice. As I discuss in detail in this post , while psychoactive drugs have an important role to play in some rituals, they can often do more harm than good when it comes to the pursuit of meaning through prayer or meditation. They invite a lack of control into the mind; the aim of attention training is to exert as much control as possible over your reactions to external stimuli.?

Consider this in terms of the featured image on this blog post. The flowing rapids represent consciousness; thoughts and emotions will always propel themselves through your mind, whether you want them to or not. Secondary control (control over your reactions, rather than to circumstances themselves) is about finding a safe, steady path downriver, rather than being swept away and bounced from one rock to the next.??

Building a Better Life With Prayer or Meditation?

Intentional practice is the cornerstone of the “No Haste” pillar I’ve discussed in my previous LinkedIn posts. Regardless of your specific religious tradition, you’ll make much quicker progress down the path to enlightenment with daily, focused prayer or meditation.?

As well as this, you’ll realize all the touted benefits of intentional practice promoted by secular advocates, including enhanced powers of perception, improved emotional control, and sharper concentration.