The Practice of Your Life

The Exercise and Pursuit of a Consciously Created Life

How do we categorize the people in our lives?

Mar 31
2008

On the popular social networking sites we have one category: friend.  But what are the other categories of “friends” that we use in real life. How do we categorize the people that we have in our lives?  

  1. Family
    1. Parent
    2. Sibling
    3. Cousins
    4. Aunts/Uncles
    5. Step
    6. Half
    7. Adopted
  2. Partner
    1. boyfriend/girlfriend
    2. Companion
    3. ex
  3. Friend
    1. Best friend
    2. Close friend
    3. Friend of a friend
    4. Acquaintance
  4. Business
    1. Contact
    2. Associate
    3. Boss
    4. Colleague
  5. People in my environment
    1. Guy in the lobby of my building, cleaning lady, deli store owner etc., regulars at my Starbucks
  6. Enemies
    1. People that I

How much work is it to live your life as a practice?

Mar 29
2008

Yesterday I wrote about my concern that living your life as a practice will occur for many people as a lot of work. And they would have a point. When I think about what’s involved it covers the following:

  1. Inventing a story or vision of your life. And oh, by the way, your life has several different areas, or categories like, family, career, community, wealth, health, spirituality/religion etc. and you’ll do well to create a story for yourself in each domain that is important to you.
  2. Inventing practices that keep you on track with your story or vision of your life
  3. Inventing practices that transform limiting beliefs. These are beliefs that operate to stop you from having what you say you want in life.
  4. Developing “essential” or “foundational practices” e.g

Overwhelm

Mar 28
2008

So my friend who wants to try out living his life as a practice tells me that he’s willing to give this a go as long as my requests don’t add any more “to-do’s” to his list.

How cute.

He wants to get the benefit of living his life as a practice as long as it doesn’t mean him doing any extra work.

This is a brilliant response in that it’s so typical. It probably is the most common reason for people who are not producing results in their lives. We want the perfect body without going to the gym, or the promotion without the accomplishments to earn it.

No matter how I think of living your life as a practice there is no way of getting around that it involves you doing the… Continue reading

Angry people

Mar 23
2008

So I was at the club of a good friend of mine last night. If you live in New York and like live music its called Rose. Anyway my friend Carlo asked me to help him diffuse a situation with a young man who was apparently causing some concern from Carlo for his place and his patrons.

So there I was in the basement of this club talking to a very young man, more likely a boy, who I can best describe as proud, rebellious, and oh yeah … cool. Being attached to all three, he was not about to be intimidated by the threat of the police. He was there to stay.

Now the interesting thing for me is that I could not understand this… Continue reading

I urge you to listen to Barack Obama’s “A more perfect union” speech

Mar 21
2008

If you haven’t seen or read Barack Obama’s speech on race on March 18th, 2008 I highly recommend that you do (link below). Regardless of your political persuasion, I think you will agree that it was at least different from what we’ve come to expect from politicians.

Now the word different does not begin to do justice to the speech, and I chose the word because there will undoubtedly be those who do not share my view on its significance.

I write about this speech because in it Mr. Obama demonstrates the grasp of certain fundamental concepts that I think are essential to living your life as a practice.

Living your life as a practice is a quest for growth. A never ending journey that requires you to have a healthy relationship with… Continue reading

Can you coach me in living my life as a practice?

Mar 18
2008

This was a question from a very good friend of mine.   My initial reaction was, “Noooo???!” “It’s your life. The whole idea is that you get to invent what your practice looks like.” I didn’t in fact say this, it was what was going on in my head, and in my head I played out the most likely scenario of his response, which would have been something like, “So what the hell good are you then? What value do you provide to people?”

While I would have had a good answer to this hypothetical response, I knew that this thought process was an indication of my resistance to something important. Once people understand the concept of living their life as a practice, the next place for them to go is, “… Continue reading

“Friends” on social networking sites

Mar 17
2008

I was at a panel discussion the other night where the participants discussed the social networking phenomen. Andrew Weinrich, Founder and CEO, MeetMoi a mobile dating service caused quite a stir when he said that he manages his social networking quite carefully and would not accept just anyone that friended him. From Mr. Weinrich’s point-of-view, accepting everyone that “friended him would devalue his network. Eric Alterman, Founder and Chairman, KickApps seemed to be Mr. Weinrich’s counter-point for most of the evening and from his perspective it didn’t devalue his network and all depended on the context. More on the context in another post.

But all this got me thinking about the whole concept of a friend. A major practice of your life