A good practice schedule should change your life! Reflecting on my progress and practice schedule helps me heaps. It’s interesting how sometimes I can get more perspective and insight looking back than I can in the moment.
Recently I wrote about creating a new practice schedule. I decided it was time to see how I was going, what was helping and what I needed to improve.
Practice versus life
If I don’t get all my practices done I feel like I’m not doing a spiritual work properly. This seems at odds to reality. Belzebuub talks about this in his getting through suffering to reach peace video.
It’s easy to get compulsive and unconsciously rush through daily tasks so I can get to the other stuff that I wanted to do more. This stops me from learning a lot and highlights that I’m not very comfortable just being with whatever I’m doing in the moment.
Where am I on the path?
- I don’t feel like I tried to find out where I am on the spiritual path enough – my focus subtly shifted to other things. Got to fix this!
- A difficulty I have is getting some indication of how I’m doing spiritually, trying to work on it and then not knowing how to progress to the next step.
Remember and write-down dreams including seeing egos to work on
- Setting a strong focus of trying to remember and write down my dreams and work on the strongest egos in them has made the biggest change in my life – it made the learning in my days and nights dynamic and my life a whole lot more interesting and helped me remember more dreams, more clearly.
- I’m still trying to work out the best way to remember my dreams so I don’t forget details if I’m not going to the get up and write them down straight away. There’s a mantra to remember dreams called RAOM GAOM that is awesome and helps a lot to bring the details back. Writing down key points from the dream also helps.
- Trying to find the best way to organise my morning – how long in bed trying to remember dreams, whether I get up straight away and try to write them down or I allow myself to drift in and out of sleep a little bit to try and get more dreams. How not to get distracted.
- Another difficulty is interpreting dreams when their meaning is obscure
Asanas
- I have been a lot more consistent with the asanas generally
- Often I would end up doing them as a visualisation on the train rather than the physical practice, so need to plan my morning better
- The practice was mechanical sometimes – felt like I was doing it just because it was on my schedule. I saw a post recently about asking for help to pray properly so I’m going to try this going forwards.
Working on the ego from my dreams
- This helped me to set my focus for the day.
- After I wrote down my dreams I would underline what I thought I was being shown to work on to help me remember
- Often I wouldn’t catch the ego until after it had already come through or was getting fed. Occasionally I would be able to see it and stop it. I feel like I need to be stronger and more consistent asking for the disintegration. Need to develop self awareness to see the egos sooner.
Awareness walk
- I spend a lot of time on the computer so these have helped a lot. Awareness walks get out of my head, help me see reality more and to feel peaceful.
- When I have thoughts or desires in my mind I’m not at all at peace but I often can’t tell how bad it is until I go for a walk and see how hard it is to get out of my mind and be at peace in the moment
- I need to focus more on awareness and self observation throughout the day to learn more about how it works and how to sustain it.
Retrospection/meditation on an ego
- There are parts of the day which I can’t remember or can only get very superficial information about which also shows a need to work on awareness.
- Retrospection helps a lot so I need to get more regular with them. Sometimes I lack willpower, don’t plan my time properly or tiredness / laziness comes in and I will fall asleep rather than doing a retrospection.
- I’m building up to meditation on an ego by doing a short practice of serene reflection after retrospection.
- Serene reflection before sleep helps my dreams to be a lot clearer
- I wanted to read over my dreams from the night before prior to doing the retrospection to make sure I was working on the right things – I need more regularity with this.
Astral practice
- A short astral practice daily has been showing that I need to work on concentration in practices and during the day if I want to have regular out of body experiences.
Inquisitiveness
- I find this is a really useful approach but when I get caught up in egos I forget to do it. I wonder how I can fix this?
Exercise
- Still getting absorbed in exercise, maybe because I’m not setting a focus properly before I start or doing it too compulsively
- Have to watch out for egos that want to do research but never actually put things into practice. My egos love to research but don’t like to act.
Conclusion
So did my practice schedule change my life? Maybe a little bit but not as much as I would have liked. I’m looking forward to making some changes to my approach and seeing how I go!
If you’re interested in seeing similar threads, check out some more people’s approaches to spiritual practice.
If anyone has tried anything related to the above points that they found helpful I’d love to know!
Thanks for this, it’s been interesting to reflect on these points you’ve brought up, I can certainly relate to a number of them.
Getting stuck without that inquisitiveness is something I’m struggling with every now and then. What usually helps is taking up a different practice, preferably one I haven’t done a long time ago, which often brings a breath of fresh air, so to speak. Afterwards, it is easier to go back to other practices with more interest, as the consciousness is invigorated. One other thing that has helped is to try the practice in a different way. For example, interrupting an awareness walk to sit down, close your eyes and just listen, trying to feel where is the “limit” of hearing, if that makes sense, just trying to absorb all sounds.
Inspiring goals can help a lot in my experience. Sometimes a goal is too complex, so picking a simple one for a change of pace can be terrific. I once had a great astral practice where my sole goal was to pass through my bedroom door. If I did that, I decided I would do something spiritual in the experience. Having such a simple goal really reduced the excitement and tension that can crop up when you’re focused on doing something grand. It tricks the unruly mind in a way, so you don’t get easily excited, demotivated or tense before you do your simple goal and move on to the larger one.
Thanks again,
M.
Hey Matija,
Thanks a lot for your comment! That tip about trying a practice that hasn’t been done for ages or trying it in a different way is a really good one, I’ll have to give that a shot!
I remember awhile back playing with the volume of mantras like that and it making a big difference to being able to concentrate on the practice.
Thanks for the tip on goals too.
All the best with everything!
David