Day 15: Practice makes present

It's been two weeks since I started this challenge -- not only to do Reiki everyday but to capture my thoughts and observations as I do this. And, in posting these thoughts, I am letting go of all I take much too seriously -- my writing and the mind-ful thoughts that fuel it.

Many things seem different now --whereas I missed the distractions of the tv in the first week, I seem to crave the silence even more in the second. While I still fall prey to those enticing moments of anger, I'm finding that I don't stay there as long.

But some things, I've observed, seem more the same than I've ever noticed before. Reiki and writing, for instance, seem to run on parallel paths -- even more than I could have contrived. For instance, doing either one of them on a regular schedule takes nothing short of discipline. There's no ideal time, place, pen or topic that makes for the perfect session. Once the inertia of that first sentence is underway, the carving out of mental time to start the first hand placement, the rest seem to follow just a little easier. You just have to do it.

But there was something I hadn't realize until I read Pamela Miles' 8/29 entry in her blog where she wrote: 'In Reikiville, instead of practice makes perfect, practice makes present.' Reiki should be approached as a practice, she wrote, where the one goal is simply to do it. And, on days when your experience doesn’t match expectations, instead of blaming it on yourself, just recognize it as just that -- expectations. Be content to just observe what it feels to be in that situation.

Be present.

How true is this for my writing, too? I approach the craft too much as a technique, and, one in which I need to perfect. I worry about not doing it correctly or perfectly. And, the times that the writing doesn't meet my expectations (can you say 'all the time'), when my monkey mind goes amuck and tramples on any and all of my delicate creative ideas, when that voice whispers 'if you're good enough to be a writer, you would have been one by now' -- that I'm missing the big picture: that I am doing it. Writing. Putting one word infront of another word infront of another word. That I'm unraveling the sentences I spin in my head and weaving them into paragraphs, then pages, then chapters.

And when the words do not flow as summoned, or gush out in a perfect stream, I need to quieten the monkey mind, and just observe the moment. Yield to the present.

And simply be.