I am currently finishing up three months of residing in Brooklyn, NY, ostensibly to PRACTICE. I'm here taking lessons and writing music as well as practicing, and of course going to see inspiring shows, supported by a grant from the Canada Council for the Arts - please support them politically whenever you get the chance - they are an amazing benefactor to Canadian musicians and artists. It's cooler to say Brooklyn than New York City now in the music community, as this is the centre - or I suppose centER - of an exploding music and arts scene.

Practice! Something that all tai chi and meditation practitioners (and musicians) seem to have to grapple with and a very challenging word for me personally. I like to joke that I wish I took up a "hobby" which would have had concrete projects or clear end goals, instead of tai chi and meditation, a second life's work (building model cars?). So I'm here, grappling with practice guilt, discipline, and personal time management skills, just as much as I'm grappling with the bass (should I be practicing right now instead of writing this blog?).

What is practice? At the Tai Chi and Meditation Centre (TCMC) we use the noun "The Practice" sometimes, as well as practice in its verb form - "remember to go home and practice your new moves".
I checked a couple of dictionary entries about practice, and they point to a couple of ideas -
From www.dictionary.com:
Noun: habitual or customary performance; operation: office practice.
Verb: to follow or observe habitually or customarily: to practice one's religion.
Verb: to perform or do habitually or usually: to practice a strict regimen.

- but there is something about my Mac's built in dictionary's definitions I like:

noun: the actual application or use of an idea, belief or method, as opposed to theories about such application or use.
verb: perform (an activity) or exercise (a skill) repeatedly or regularly in order to improve or maintain one's proficiency.

To me the notions of application and improvement go well with the internal martial arts, qigong and vipassana we study at the TCMC. Why engage in a habitual or customary performance (the tai chi form, meditation)? To me the goal is inquiry, the act of testing "the actual application or use" of what you are "practicing". This means taking the things you are learning home and examining them to see if you can find a personal connection or truth in them. "Examine" is the sometimes horrifying word that my bass teacher here uses to cut right to the core of something I have taken for granted for years, and have allowed to develop unconsciously. Examine means that the action in question must be systematically practiced in order to be able to gain full conscious control over it - performed "repeatedly or [and!] regularly in order to improve". To me, this applies exactly the same for the left hand playing arpeggios on bass as it does to the left hand doing ward-off in the tai chi form.

Practice, in terms of "actual application... as opposed to theories," means it isn't enough to go to class and be told how things are. It means going home and examining the things you have been taught, and finding out if they are true- whether or not they work for you, if you can make them your own (and if you can't, it gives you questions to bring back to the next class, so practice actually makes class better).

To me, "regularly" is an important word here. Since practice can be daunting, especially as you learn more things and wonder what you should be working on, I think it is important to build up a practice (the noun), that is something you do habitually/regularly so that you are constantly going back and examining these skills. In the context of tai chi and meditation, this means constantly examining yourself, as you are looking to bring the object of practice into consciousness. Practice as inquiry is a form of meditation (I wonder if vipassana meditation, as basically pure inquiry, might be seen as pure practice?). It's always the same moves in the form everyday (or same posture on the cushion), so what changes? What changes is YOU - your attitude, your perceptions of progress or lack thereof, the things that are preoccupying your mind and preventing you from focusing. The things we practice are a touchstone to our internal states, and in the case of tai chi and meditation, practicing is an opportunity to learn from our habits and reoccurring patterns of behaviour and thought, giving us the possibility of freedom or space from ourselves. I've found that going at regular practicing with a spirit of inquiry (I always find starting again after a long break seems arduous), makes practicing fun and exciting, and leads to revelations about both the objects of practice (tai chi, music) and the subject of practice - yourself! Of course, as we head further down the non-dual "Zen and the Art of Archery" route, the practicer and the practiced merge, the place we are all "practicing" to get to!

The spring is one of my favourite tai chi times of year, a chance to re-birth a practice that may have become a bit dormant in the winter (or constrained by the size of my living room). I'm looking forward to bumping into you all in a Toronto park this spring - Happy Practicing!