Bagua

Bagua

Tuesday, July 5, 2016

Dealing With Reluctance to Practice


We ALL have moments where we hunker down and become reluctant to engage in our daily practice of Qi Gong and meditation. The question, and the difference, is what we do after that.  There's two (not incompatible) ways of handling this. The first is to try to reconnect to the joy of doing the practice.  The practice can't feel great ALL the time, but we should in general be able to find things that feel good about practicing.

So one step is to focus on the parts or the ways the practice feels good.  When we're very ill, for example, it's good to do as much as we can of the practice while ill, but not too much more than it could either harm us or sour us to the practice.

When we are for non-physical reasons in a state of malaise, it can be good to figure out and remember those things we like most about practicing, and give ourselves permission to just do those for a few days, to focus on improving those parts. To ignore or de-emphasize the parts we think we don't care for and spend more time focusing on the parts we do.

You could say that's the Yin way.





The second way is to focus on Discipline, and push ourselves forward to practice. To defy our own Inferior Person and take our practice as an act of our own Will to defy what we might happen to be feeling at the given moment. Doing that first, we can start to turn around and find value in our practicing, and then reconnect to the joy of practicing.

You could say that's the Yang way.





The ideal is to be clear on which way to deal with the barriers to our practice at this given time.






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