“The Practice is in Coming Back”

Last week I broke a streak of 117 days of consecutive meditation. To add insult to injury, the meditation app I use has these statistics front and center to the user’s experience to gamify the practice and keep people interested. The thing about streaks, though, is sometimes they hit a tipping point where the feeling of breaking the streak can be internalized as a burden too great to overcome to get back to the practice. I hope you can understand the pit in my stomach seeing my streak count say “1” after such a successful run. 

The irony here couldn’t be more palpable. Like my good friend, Carl Paoli, says, “The practice in coming back.” Paoli is a world-renown movement coach, consultant, author, and now coach of emotional fitness and what he’s saying is what the masters of meditation have been saying for thousands of years. 

When it comes to meditation, the great one’s aren’t great because they don’t have distracting thoughts. They are great because after the thought or emotion presents itself during meditation, they are able to come back to the breath, the mantra, or whatever the practice calls for in that moment. 

All practice is an effort in returning to the work. 

Fitness is no different. The meat and potatoes of what makes your training truly work is that when you get off the horse you get back on. Surely, there is no real struggle in being in the momentum and things are going well. So, if you’ve got a practice albeit training, meditation, or something else, keep in mind that the practice begins when you’re presented with the choice to return to the work or not. Returning is most simply the practice itself.