Life Practice

Life Practice is about blending and integrating our meditative awareness into all of the activities & contexts of our daily life.

By: Vince Horn

What does it look like to meditate while we’re walking to work, or doing the dishes, or listening to someone close to us share how their day went, or even while we’re responding to a barrage of e-mails? It’s possible to adapt the practice of meditation to all these different activities, and in doing so we can achieve amazing results.

One result of life practice is that we strengthen our skills in more than just our formal periods of practice. Nearly anything that we do can become an opportunity to develop our practice. Suddenly, instead of spending a short time each day doing a focused period of meditation, which by itself is already great, we can extend that training into more and more aspects of our life. As we do so we find our skills develop at an even faster pace, and so do the benefits.

Because intentional Life Practice is about cultivating these various internal skills, of the body, heart, & mind, the fruit of that cultivation comes about as an increased capacity to focus on whatever we’re doing, to notice what’s happening with greater clarity and precision, to open our heart even when our natural tendency is to close off, to question things we’d normally overlook and assume are true, and to simply rest and enjoy the simple experience of being alive. Life Practice helps us integrate meditative awareness into our daily life while at the same time deepening it. When the practice crosses a critical threshold of depth it starts to happen all by itself.