some instructions for deep practice
I have been thinking and writing a lot about the notion of "deep practice" lately. It has become a touchstone for me between so many different jobs, different projects, different modes and methods of focus.
I've realised I've required an anchor. A foundation from which to engage in the Work. When a last-minute job or submission or voiceover comes up, in many ways I have to drop everything and go where I'm required. Focus snaps off; the ability to stay energetically where I was in my art work is fractured. The team disbands.
To re-gather, I feel like sometimes I have to start all over again. And more often than not, this takes time. An easing into things. A feeling-out of rituals and meditations that enable me to sit back down at the desk and resume.
Thus, Deep Practice. A thread. A vein of gold. Tools to hold onto that allow me to re-find the work faster, more strongly and with greater lucidity. The ability to come back and back again with a degree of certainty that I will meet the work right here each time.
Clearly this isn't just a recent thing. Flipping back through my notebooks I discovered this morning I've been writing about trying to find this for years. Consistency of practice. Rigour.
I then found something I wrote in April of this year that is, incredibly, the exact list of instructions I've been looking for lately. (Instructions to myself, I might add -- and not necessarily useful for everyone, or even *anyone* else -- but just in case a little of it is, I think worth sharing.)
SOME INSTRUCTIONS FOR DEEP PRACTICE
1. Stay strong in your body. Listen to it. Tune in to how it speaks. Do not ignore, deny or suppress.
2. Take time to be silent. In either reading, writing, walking or sitting. Contemplate nature -- this doesn't have to be difficult. Look out the window and sit and breathe.
3. Music helps. Music without lyrics is best.
4. Plan your day. Have goals to achieve, or at least defined tasks to focus on. Do not overburden yourself with goals, though. Have just enough. Allow most of them to be enjoyable.
5. When you work, make sure you are ready to work (well stretched, well breathed, well hydrated), and then throw yourself in completely.
6. Limit exposure to anything that upsets you, makes you anxious or triggers envy or unhelpful rage in you. If possible, limit it to zero.
7. Sometimes rage will be useful, and you will know when that is. Do not confuse these occasions as an excuse to spend time with always-angry people. Do not allow the human temptation for quotidian outrage and aspiration to drive you to the void of social media.
8. Read poetry daily.
9. Look at or watch visual artwork daily (this can be in a book or online, but do not confuse this for tuning-out while consuming entertainment).
10. Avoid sugar and poor-quality fats. Neither are great for your brain. The same goes for alcohol and cigarettes. Don't be uptight about it, but avoid falling into the temptations of living through crappy cycles of self-abuse. If anything, being mindful about what goes into your body will make it easier to wake up to the work.
11. Journal every day. Even if it's all maddeningly crappy drivel, put your hands to work and move a pen across a page.
12. Create something every day. If it's a one-line poem, fine. If it's a sketch for a mise-en-scène, fine. If it's a single photograph, fine. Just make sure you create something.
13. Keep your space clean, neat and tidy.
14. Remember: everything is alchemy. Do not reject nor deny your role as shamanic in intention and in practice. Your job is to transform and conjure and channel. However you interpret that. Your responsibility is to be ready and clear and focussed enough to do this work consistently.
