What is your SACRED practice?
What do you practice?
By practice, I don’t mean religion. What I mean by practice is an intentional act of paying attention while performing a chosen action! Do you have any?
If your answer is a no, this note is for you — in the hope that by the time you finish reading, you have found a reason and purpose to embark on a wholehearted pursuit of _________ practice. The _______ is your choice of action! It could be a lifelong practice of “Writing”, “Meditating” or “Gardening” etc… I hope you get the drift. And it doesn’t matter what you choose — every act of practice can be raised to the level that it becomes sacred.
And, if your answer was a Yes, even then the note is for you too. It is to transform any and every practice [that you currently pursue] and raise it to a level of sacredness that you aspire to.
So, what do we mean by sacred? As I already told you — it has nothing to do with religion. So can we pursue “sacred-ness” without being religious? I think the answer is Yes!
So — what do we mean by transforming our practice into something sacred?
The adjective that I relate deeply to when I think of Sacred is “Pure”. In nature and its diverse creation, purity is by default — it is only when business sense dominates decision-making that it insists that we add impurity to anything we make.
Hence, truth is in reality — “Everything and every moment is sacred”; However we find ways to add impurity and ruin the moment and the act.
What impurity am I talking about here?
The impurity of DISTRACTION. Today, more than ever before we are a distracted species. We have been losing the ability to pay attention and every moment there is a temptation to multi-task.
It could be as simple as listening to music while cooking, or talking on the phone while driving. The intensity varies, but the act involves to some degree the impurity of distraction.
Why? Because it is more efficient!
We have been trying to be efficient since the time the industrial age started. More efficiency means more profit and more profit means a pathway to more material wealth.
However, it is the Business and its Leadership over decades, who were instrumental in drilling and driving the perks and benefits of optimization at work. However, there is no end to efficiency — last year’s 23% is no longer good enough; this year we need 43%, and so on…
And so, we are perennially looking to optimize how we sit, eat, drink, sleep, and work so that we can squeeze that little extra out of our days! This in no way to live and die. This is no way to raise kids and no way to grow old. We are all running a treadmill and optimizing how to run better all the while burning out and never enjoying the weather outside. If this is not absurd — what is?
And, this is how we got our entry pass to the world of hasty, shoddy, unfocused work. We forgot the beauty and purity of focused work. The joy of losing hours and feeling only seconds passed by. This feeling is today on the verge of extinction.
Human beings along the way have picked up more pace than they can handle. From Hunter-Gatherers to today’s Gen AI experts — the only change has been that of the perceived pace of development.
We wanted to just reach the target [by hook or crook] earn the profits promised and get ready to run the next optimized batch. It just gets a little too tiring to say the least after a while. It is beyond my understanding how so few of us even notice this suffering even fewer who initiate conversations and the rarest of rare few who dare to step out and do something meaningful for the soul.
We are still waging wars, killing children, suffocating voices of protest, struggling to eradicate poverty, and dealing with robbery, violence, and all forms of crimes. So, where is the progress? Is sleeping on a better mattress or wearing a device over your head that can show both the reality and the unreal together mean progress?
We are pushed towards an epidemic of shallowness. We have shallow hearts, minds, focus, will, courage, and hope! Please don’t treat this blog as productivity advice. This is my protest against the productivity brigade. I want humans to dump the chase and numbers and grow as the plants and animals grow without any targets on their backs.
Who would you be if you weren’t chasing that mirage of a goal? How would you eat your cereal or drink your coffee? How would you speak to your child if the call was not diverting your attention? How would you drive and cook and write and read and sleep and walk and work?
and, hence I ask of you. What is your sacred practice?
I can’t ask you to ditch your distractions and become a saint or a monk. But, I can ask you to choose a practice and lose yourself in it. Let there be no targets, no goals to achieve, no likes or subscriptions to crack. Just the purity and joy of focus at the moment and losing yourself in the practice for as long as you feel the flow.
Flow. Get into the flow and forget the targets. Flow is divine. Flow is surrender. Flow is the renunciation of results. Flow is the appreciation of the beauty of the process that replaces the anxiety of results. Flow is waking up to forces greater than the ego and tapping on to universe’s juices guiding you to shape that which never existed.
This is Sacred Practice. May you find one and May I retain and build a few as I grow older.
