If you missed “We Talking About Practice” Act 1, The Path, follow the link and give it a read.
In that post, we explored Allen Iverson’s legendary “We Talking About Practice” rant, which revealed his perspective on practice—as a chore, a burden, an obligation. Act 2 delves deeper into what transforms mere practice into something more profound: A Practice.
Yoga and the Yogi
Practicing yoga can be quite a challenge, but a yoga practice is as easy as can be.
Some people attend yoga classes because they enjoy a good sweat and added flexibility. They want to lengthen and strengthen their muscles. Others attend because they enjoy the community, they enjoy the hippy-dippy dialogue with their classmates, or they want to exchange granola recipes. But true practitioners of yoga aren’t filled with these muscle toning, friendship building ambitions.
Yoga, at its core, is a breathing practice. Each movement is synchronized with the breath, as though one and the same.
Yoga is a dedicated, unending, practice. A time-honored prescription for the liberation of your mind. It’s not preparation for a competition. You wouldn’t compete in breathing, would you? Well, would you?
In Autobiography of a Yogi, Paramahansa Yogananda writes, “Anyone who practices a scientific technique for divine realization is a yogi…A yogi engages in a step-by-step procedure by which the body and mind are disciplined and the soul gradually liberated…A yogi practices a thoroughly tested series of exercises that were first mapped out by the ancient rishis. In every age of India, yoga has produced men who became truly free.”
That’s heavy stuff. And with that deeper understanding, you can see why a Yogi in Calcutta might look at our strip mall yoga studios, full of suburban moms flouting Namaste apparel, and wonder where it all went wrong.
I’ve spent some time on the mat, and I wonder too. Can you be a true practitioner inside the synchronized movements of a group class? The instructor says, “go at your own pace,” but ego is hard to shake, and falling behind feels like the first semester of calculus. You are trying to keep up, but your pace slips, your eyes drift to the student next to you.
How do they do it? Maybe I don’t belong.
And soon enough, you’re lost.
A yoga practitioner—moving in accordance with their breath—follows their own rhythm. Their pace is theirs alone, like a thumbprint. No better. No worse.
Maybe that’s where A Practice begins: with ego. Slaying it. Letting go of comparison, of competition, of rushing to “keep up.”
A Practice isn’t preparation for something else. It’s not a tune-up for a competition or a means to an end. A Practice is the end. The thing you do daily to be the person you want to be. Daily.
It’s what you do and who you are, not just something you attend.
Observe anyone you admire, from athlete to artist. Each one has a practice. And if you ask them their secret, they’ll say, “I do it every day, and nothing gets in the way.”
You and I can have a yoga practice. We can have a meditation practice. We can have a writing practice.
It doesn’t matter what you choose, as long as you choose something. Because the thing you do every day becomes who you are.
So, what’s your practice?
Controlling What You Can Control
What Allen Iverson didn’t understand was that a basketball player and a champion have different criteria.
Basketball players attend practice. Champions have A Practice. And if you have A Practice, the championship is like collecting your diploma on graduation day. It doesn’t change anything, because you were already changed.
A Practice is infinite. There is no end, no finish line. It’s like walking towards the horizon.
If you live in the woods, you wake up every morning and start in on your practice: chop wood, carry water. The same goes with batting practice, writing, yoga, or walking—if you do it consistently, with no goals, no finish line, just doing your best, you’ve found A Practice.
But if you only show up so you don’t get fined, or lose your starting spot, that’s just practice. Not A Practice.
The difference will define you.
How do you know if you’ve moved from practice to A Practice? You show up without being asked. You focus on the process rather than fixate on outcome. You stop checking the clock. And the big one – missing a day feels downright dirty, not because you’re falling behind, but because the practice itself has become part of who you are.
Most people dismiss the idea of having A Practice, choosing instead to simply go to practice. But when you do that, you give up the only thing you truly control: the process.
Larry Brown wanted to win a title in Philadelphia as much as anyone. But the reason he was upset with Iverson wasn’t the losses—it was the lack of understanding. The lack of vision. And the ego.
Iverson couldn’t see the world the same way Brown did. He didn’t see how his inputs—his Practice—were driving their outcomes.
Outcomes
“We can begin with this,” Seth Godin writes in his book, The Practice, “If we failed, would it be worth the journey?”
For years, I had a neighbor that would pull out his fly-fishing rod and cast in his front yard. The rod was short—perhaps sanctioned for suburban use—and every afternoon, there he was, casting. Over and over and over again.
Not once did he reel in a trout. No neighborhood derby was won.
Was it all a waste of time?
Was it worth the effort?
Depends on who you ask. Because A Practice, from the outside, can look like fly fishing in the lawn. No obvious rewards, no trophies, just endless repetitions.
And often times, outcomes can get in the way of A Practice. They distract.
Remember when Forrest Gump “just felt like running?” He gave everything up to do just that, and to onlookers, it appeared to be a waste of time.
As a matter of fact, most real practices look this way. That might be the test: if your friends and family keep asking, “Why?”, it’s probably a sign you are on to something.
Zen and the Art of…
If you search “Zen and the Art” on Amazon, you’ll find thousands of titles. Two of my favorites are Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance and Zen in the Art of Archery. The theme that runs through these classics isn’t the mastery of motorcycle maintenance or archery, but mastery of oneself.
In classic Zen training, masters suggested four simple Practices: archery, calligraphy, pouring tea, and arranging flowers—physical tools for embodiment of the larger spiritual Practice. This type of spiritual Practice sheds the ego—no gold stars, no report card.
In 1948, Eugen Herrigel published Zen in the Art of Archery, describing his time in Japan studying Kyūdō (Japanese bow) under Master Awa Kenzô.
Even though Herrigel used a bow and arrow, Master Awa insisted he focus entirely on his breathing. It took Herrigel a long time to grasp the concept, but eventually he “Was not breathing but—strange as this may sound —being breathed.” Over time he was learning to draw the bow “spiritually.”
For years, they practiced at close range. “Losing” the arrow into the “arrow catcher,” that was a simple bale of hay at a distance of “two arrows laid end to end.” The emphasis was on fishing, not catching, so to speak. The Practice, not the outcome.
Like casting that fly rod in the lawn.
Finally, they moved to target shooting. Master Awa set the target at 60 feet, and predictably, Herrigel’s arrows fell short. They didn’t carry, Master Awa said, “because they do not reach far enough spiritually. You must act as if the goal were infinitely far off.”
I’ve told my son something similar, not knowing I was essentially a Zen Master wrapped in a suburban Little League Dad.
“Don’t throw the ball to me, throw the ball through me.”
And of course, Herrigel should have been shooting this way all along. But it’s difficult, when shooting just a few feet into a hay bale, to shoot as though it was a target 60 feet in the distance.
Difficult, until you’ve mastered the self. And lost the Ego.
But the distance is one thing—what about taking aim?
Awa said, “If you hit the target with nearly every shot you are nothing more than a trick archer who likes to show off. For the professional who counts his hits, the target is only a miserable piece of paper which he shoots to bits.”
The Zen way doesn’t concern itself with a fixed target. A “target” for the egoless archer cannot be aimed at through mere technical practice. Master Awa admitted he does face the target, gazing in its general direction, but is adamant that “seeing is not enough, decides nothing, explains nothing.”
Herrigel pushed back, “Then you ought to be able to hit it blind folded.”
That evening, Herrigel walked into the bright lights of the practice hall. Master Awa asked him to place a slender candle in the sand in front of a target, 60 feet down an unlit shooting corridor.
Herrigel walked the candle into the darkness and said, “It was so dark that I could not even see its outlines…I might perhaps have guessed the position of the target, though I could not have made it out with any precision.”
“The Master ‘danced’ the ceremony. His first arrow shot out of dazzling brightness into deep night. I knew from the sound that it had hit the target. The second arrow was a hit, too. When I switched on the light in the target-stand, I discovered to my amazement that the first arrow was lodged full in the middle of the black, while the second arrow had splintered the butt of the first and ploughed through the shaft before embedding itself beside it. I did not dare to pull the arrows out separately, but carried them back together with the target. The Master surveyed them critically. ‘The first shot’, he then said, ‘was no great feat, you will think, because after all these years I am so familiar with my target-stand that I must know even in pitch darkness where the target is. That may be, and I won’t try to pretend otherwise. But the second arrow which hit the first—what do you make of that?”
“The Master had evidently hit me, too, with both arrows: as though transformed over night, I no longer succumbed to the temptation of worrying about my arrows and what happened to them.”
Mastery of the self, not the sport. No doubt Awa could pour tea with the same artistry.
Aiming, in the traditional western sense, could have produced this outcome. Practice, repetition, maybe some luck.
And aiming might seem like the right focus—but for Master Awa, just like my neighbor in the lawn, it was the Practice, A Practice, that mattered. The point of the story—and I do believe it to be true—is the Practice not the precision. The Master tapped into his Practice, and even if the first arrow had fallen outside of the bull’s eye, I get the feeling that its splitting was inevitable.
31 Easy™ Has Never Been Easier…
Having trouble turning your practice into A Practice? 31 Easy™ can help.
The program will help you build better habits and turn those into a daily practice that suits you, not your internet guru. Success is about building A Practices. It’s about continuous growth without goals.
It’s free to start, free to finish, but failure will cost you. The Daily Journal has been updated, and for those that need a little kick in the pants, we have a Somewhat Motivational Journal available for purchase.
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