My best practices

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Over at my Chinese medicine blog, Deepest Health, I wrote a post about my having reached the end of my seeking.  It’s a pretty long conversation that you should probably just get a sense of by reading the post there - click that blue link above if you would like to do so.  I’ve been working a long time to find a set of practices and principles that work for me - and while I found most of them a long time ago, I find myself pretty stubborn when it comes to adopting something for real.  I generally hem and haw and then go looking for something else.  I guess that recently I realized that nothing is going to be perfect, and that I can’t really judge what’s working or what’s not until I’ve really used it to its fullest potential.

So, instead of constantly oscillating between one thing and another - I’m going to abide in the things I’ve found to work for a while.  I’ll list them simply.

1.  Episcopalianism : I have an exceedingly hard time focusing on any one spiritual tradition (thus the title of this blog) and I have no intention of jettisoning the many gifts I receive from the other spiritual traditions I engage in.  However, I find that the Episcopal version of Christianity is able to easily accomodate everything else.  The fact that I am an Associate of an Episcopal Franciscan order also helps me make this decision.  My hope is to delve deeply into this system of knowing, and I expect that I will see how all the rest of my spiritual inclinations fit into this one simply.  So, you’ll still see me talking about dharma this and lao tsu that, but personally my focus is going to be on this particular spiritual tradition.

The daily practice : A daily reading and bi-monthly service attendance.

2.  Qigong : I must do the forms daily.  An ernest desire is to teach Qigong to my patients and the general public.  I cannot hope to be worthy of that until my daily practice is solid.  It’s hard to stay committed to this, as most of the forms take some time and they’re challenging.  But, the multitude of benefits are hard to ignore and I believe that this could be the foundation of my success as a physician.

The daily practice : About an hour of a form.

3.  Getting Things Done : As I’ve talked about already, I have been searching far and wide for a system of personal organization that works.  I have a lot of commitments, a lot of balls in the air, and it’s hard to keep track of them.  I’ve tried every system I can find - Steve Covey, Tony Robbins, hybrids of the two, my own systems created out of the practices I’ve learned over the years, so on…  Getting things done is the only one that’s stuck, although it does take some time and energy to fully implement.  My greatest problem has been keeping my lists and inboxes current daily and checking in on my lists when I have open work time.  I find that I’ll spend two hours in a weekly review, get everything perfect, and then perfectly ignore it all week.

The daily practice : Doing a regular weekly review and morning and evening reviews of lists and inboxes.

4.  Physical cultivation : I’m in the process of shaping my body into something that can withstand the tests of time.  :)  When I hit 30, I realized that my body won’t just automatically bounce back from every little thing like it had been.  So, along with my Qigong - which builds my strength and flexibility from the inside - I will be entering into a program of weight training and adding daily walks of at least half an hour. Given that we are also transitioning to bicycles as our primary form of transportation, I should be well on my way.  I won’t be doing any dietary restriction of note, because my diet is already pretty good and I want to focus on movement for now.  In the future, some dietary alterations may be in the mix.  If you’re a member at Gyminee, you can add me and watch my progress.  Otherwise…

I will be updating weekly about my progress on these fronts, along with lessons learned.  If you’d like to join me in any or all of these practices - we can share our progress here.  Leave your name and email in the comments and I’ll add your progress to my updates. 

Thanks for reading,

Eric