The Necessity of Practice: Excerpt from Strength to Awaken

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Practice is preparation. Without practice the human being is unprepared to meet the demands of life. While some species are born “hard-wired” to operate maturely as soon as they enter life, human beings require practice. Nature provides a crocodile with all the necessary capacities to survive as soon as they are born. For all practical purposes a newborn crocodile is an adult crocodile, just smaller. In contrast, human beings require complex exchanges between nature and nurture over decades of experience to cultivate mature capacities. Of the full territory of being human, the majority of life is intrinsically tied to skills that are learned and refined through repeated practice over a diverse range of faculties.

Practice is, at its center, engagement. When you practice you engage the various faculties that the chosen activity requires. The more you engage, the more prepared you become. When you took your first steps in life and began walking you most likely balanced tentatively, teetered and fell. Often. But with practice, as you engaged the activity of walking over and over, you became increasingly more competent, more proficient and ultimately more elegant to move about in the world and meet the demands of your life.

So what happens if you do not practice? Without practice you often find yourself lacking the competence needed to meet the multifaceted challenges of life. Fail to engage your sexuality and most likely your partner will soon ask for more than you are prepared to offer. Fail to engage in disciplining your mental focus and you are likely to find yourself putting out distracting fires at work instead of focusing on real strategic priorities. Fail to practice attuning to your child and you are likely to find yourself unprepared in being able to connect with them as they grow.

Without the repeated engagement of practice you are largely unprepared to meet the demands of your life. It is simple, practice is a necessity. But what happens when you engage life and acquire a certain level of competency that is satisfactory for you? To answer this question we must look more closely into what it means to engage.

Engagement is the conscious inhabitation of your body and mind. Practice is happening when your open awareness is moving with, in and through your embodied activity. Intrinsic to practice is your conscious participation with your life. Engagement is the conduction of your free and open awareness through your activities, whatever they may be.

When you acquire a certain level of competence that is presumed to be satisfactory, practice typically stops. As soon as ‘good enough’ is achieved something subtle yet extremely powerful happens: habituation steps in. One of your habituation’s central attachments is comfort. Wherever you are comfortable, wherever ‘good enough’ is subjectively perceived, your habituation will invest vast amounts of resources to maintain this comfortable status quo. One way your ego achieves this is to stop practicing.

Suddenly, the practice that birthed the greater competence in your life stops and your conditioning steps in. As engagement ceases the conscious participation and inhabitation of your body, mind and life is replaced by your ego’s habituation. And as soon as you cease consciously metabolizing your experience within the direct immediacy of the present moment you are no longer preparing yourself, your ego is just repeating itself.

Life’s vivid textures, the alive energy and unbounded beauty, fade. The result is that hours pass, then weeks and entire months float by, years and sometime entire decades pass, with the same patterns repeating. One song is on repeat seemingly playing without end. You are not becoming more prepared through greater refinement but rather more prepared to execute the same habituated pattern regardless of what demands are present.

So while practice is a necessity for survival, it is often only a matter of time before your ego steps in and habituation hijacks your engagement with life. Fortunately, given the trap of your ego’s investment in comfort, there is a second dimension to answering this question.

The second reason why we practice is because of a desire, a seeking to improve, a yearning to refine and develop yourself and the world we live in. Survival is not enough for human beings. There is some facet of humanity that is intrinsically invested in creativity. The human drive for progress is interested in fashioning some dimension of oneself and life anew, taking what is not here and merely a possibility and make it an actuality.

If you look closely, cutting through your ego’s habituated attempts to struggle with this dimension of yourself and that dimension of life, I think you will find a simple impulse, drive or inner imposition that lives within your heart. This force is an energy that continually draws you forward, inspires you out of the limitations and constraints present and into a greater more liberated fullness of life. This impulse is congruent with the present moment, it is not in conflict as the ego’s position maintains. Instead of struggle, this force moves through uninhibited participation with the truth of your direct experience. This inspired force moves with that which is good, true and beautiful. This dimension of you is perhaps the central reason why you practice even when you have developed adequate skills to function with grace and efficiency in society.

This inspired desire to refine yourself, the inner imposition to develop and evolve your gifts, skills and unique capacities is nothing other than your Excellence calling you forth into your greatest articulations. Your desire to go beyond habituation, to reach into novelty and to liberate the constraints of your life is the beating heart of your true strength. When you free yourself from the ego’s grip upon comfort, I think you will find yourself realizing a necessity once again. If you are to actually face and embody the purpose of your life you need your strength. Without practice strength and Excellence rarely manifest. Ultimately, practice is part necessity and part inspiration. To understand and embody practice requires both.

Strength to Awaken Your body truly is a temple, and you want your temple to be as strong and solid as possible. But a more contemplative approach to strength training (such as the one developed by Rob McNamara) not only helps you rebuild your temple from the ground up, but can also have as much of an impact upon the interiors of your temple as it does upon the exteriors....

Integral Practice

While practice cultivates greater preparation and engagement resulting in the refinement and development of yourself, the skills you possess and the capacities you can enact in your life, there is a catch. You only refine the dimensions of yourself that you are engaging in practice. So while you may be incredibly focused upon one area of your life, another equally important dimension may be stuck in habituation. While this may result in a high degree of competence in one area, if central dimensions of you are not refined through practice inevitably you will find yourself lacking essential competencies for addressing the true demands of the full scope of your life.

Integral Practice is a technology that addresses these inherent limitations of practice by engaging all of the major dimensions of yourself. By engaging all of these facets you will be able to unfold, develop, refine, and actualize your larger potential with greater efficiency.

One of the ways Integral Practice has been utilized is through the lens of cross training in athletics. Serious athletes are dogged about performance and as such they are grounded in objective measurements. What athletes discovered was that every approach to training has both strengths and weaknesses. To train in just one approach left dimensions of their athletic capacity untrained. When their sport demanded responses from them that their training methodology did not address adequately they found themselves unprepared.

For example, a marathon runner who only trains long runs and does not develop their ability to sprint explosively for shorter durations has at least one glaring weakness. If the race comes down to sprinting speed during the last 200 meters to the finish line the athlete who failed to cultivate their capacity to sprint will find themselves unprepared and outperformed. This is especially the case if their competition had been training both capacities.

Cross training has become an embedded dimension to athletics because of its positive impact upon recovery from training, its application with injury prevention as well as its ability to optimize performance. Athletes at most levels now employ some form of cross training giving them a more integrated approach to meeting the full demands of their sport. As a result athletes enjoy competing at entirely new levels. By training what may at first appear to be seemingly unrelated dimensions of themselves, they enjoy novel performance capacities when it is time to compete.

For example, some National Football League players cross train with dance and ballet to improve athleticism on the field. One effective form of cross training for soccer involves martial arts. There are National Hockey League teams who cross train their professional athletes with yoga in addition to their on-ice training. Strength training is one dimension of cross training that many sports employ today to improve performance.

While cross training typically focuses exclusively upon training physical capacities, Integral Practice looks to engage all of the major human faculties, not just the physical. Integral Practice spans across the physical, emotional, relational, mental and spiritual dimensions of selfhood. There are two ways to look at and enact Integral Practice, and both are absolutely essential to this discipline. The first, and perhaps the most widely understood, is that Integral Practice is the sequential engagement of all of your major faculties. This means that each of the major dimensions of yourself are regularly practiced separately.

You may begin by practicing with your physical capacities, pouring your open consciousness into your kinesthetic skills and movement capacities. Developing your strength, endurance, balance or flexibility are all different dimensions of kinesthetic skills you may cultivate. Later on you choose to engage your emotional faculties with the intention to grow your emotional intelligence. This may involve increasing your ability for emotional self-control, improving your ability to generate initiative and positive motivation in your life or refining your capacity to be adaptive in the face of stress. Next your relational or interpersonal faculties could be developed by expanding your capacity for empathy, clear precise communication or improving your ability to manage conflict in relationship. Mental faculties may later on be engaged and refined through rigorous intellectual study and investigation. Through this process you step outside of your own perspective thus expanding your ability for perspective-taking. You may decide to refine your ability for strategic thinking as you develop plans to execute in your career or enhance your ability to perceive and understand complexity as you investigate the work of experts in your field. Finally, you may close your day in contemplation or meditation as you develop your spiritual faculties. You may rigorously focus your mind into a singular intention as you refine your faculties of perception to penetrate into the essence of life or you may center your attention and presence into the inner room to dwell in God’s presence as you practice centering prayer.

In this way your central faculties are regularly strengthened. This daily practice breathes more life into your body and mind, balances and integrates your development, and accelerates the rate at which you can shift your life to the next level. Ultimately Integral Practice is a powerful vehicle for bringing your fullest, most free expression of your unique gifts, talents and skills into the world. Fail to pursue an Integral Practice and you will likely leave important dimensions of yourself undeveloped or underdeveloped. If you look into the most painful parts of your life, the areas where you struggle the most, you will often find some central faculty or set of faculties that are not developed enough to adequately respond. Simply put, a lack of practice almost always leads to pain in some area of your life.

The second way to look at and enact Integral Practice is the more important perspective to understand if you are to answer the true call for Excellence with graceful efficiency and effectiveness. Integral Practice understood and lived from the sequential perspective is important, yet the heart of Integral Practice is something else. The essential aliveness of Integral Practice resides in the engagement of all of your major faculties in the immediacy of the moment and your present activity.

Through this understanding, you can inhabit the true elegance of Integral Practice. Regardless of what you are doing you have the capacity to practice with the full territory of your Being. Whether you are running, at work in front of your computer, making love, in a board meeting or playing with your children your embodiment is accessible for your full participation. Your relational faculties can be engaged through connecting with the direct truth of your immediate experience. Similarly your mental and emotional faculties are always available for your conscious engagement and full participation. Finally your spiritual essence, the seat of your most open and liberated consciousness is an essential fabric of what it means to genuinely practice in an integrative way.

Integral Practice from this perspective has no end, only a beginning...followed by another beginning. This path requires a constant unwavering commitment to engage. While this may appear tiresome, I can assure you, this is the only path from which you will truly and fully understand rest, and the complete release of Surrender, the letting go of the ego’s compulsive struggle. Sadly, the alternative is the continued unconscious investment in your ego’s unwavering habituated struggle with the truth of what is and the deception that this process of grappling can eventually result in genuine happiness.

This book is about the tool of strength training birthed as an Integral Practice, and how this path can foster your emergent Excellence. In the process we will liberate strength training from the habituated conventions that currently trap this discipline and millions of its practitioners. Whether you are an elite athlete, someone struggling to find your motivation to “get in shape,” a busy executive who has discovered you live your life “disembodied,” or a seasoned strength trainer burnt out on an old paradigm, this book has something important for you and your ever-emergent Excellence. Even if you have never even considered strength training as a viable option for your life (if you prefer yoga or meditation, as examples), this book has something priceless to offer.

If you are to know the full unbounded truth of your Excellence the path outlined in the pages to follow illustrate how you can step into your own unique embodiment of strength training as an Integral Practice. As a result you will learn how to bring your integrated engagement to the full territory of your life. You will discover how to Surrender your habituation and your conventional ways of functioning through ego for the larger field of life and Being that is calling out to you.