KAP Tips: If you don’t like “practicing”…

Is it possible that as a child you were compelled to “practice” something that was not enjoyable, that was not immediately gratifying, was boring, or even downright soul-crushing?

Did a parent, coach, teacher, “authority figure” make you “practice” something you had no interest in?

Or were you perhaps interested in the result – performing, displaying, flourishing, expressing on the court, on the stage, in class – but found the preparation and drills dreary?

If the word “practice” still makes you freeze, try two things:

Choose a different term that means something you do frequently in order to increase your capacity and dexterity with a skill, or to change your perception, experience, and expression of the world, rather than something you do while waiting for life to bring you more excitement.

Or simply and firmly re-define, re-contextualize, re-frame “practice”, and re-wire your response to the word so powerfully that it conjures experiences of everyday ecstatic expression.

There are plenty of other words and phrases you can substitute. “Doing”. “Expression”. “Exploration”. “Cultivation”. “Positive Habituation”. “Performance”. “Improvisation”. “Learning through Play”. “Playing Around With”… “Getting Deep With”… “Going Deeper With”…

Surely you get the picture(s), and the mind pictures are indeed yours – so assume control of your nomenclature and select your own pet name or phrase that brings up better images and better feelings.

Alternately, choose the second option, and redefine.

Practice isn’t the dreary stuff before the event. In KAP and other forms of embodied cultivation, the magic is in both practice and result.

Or rather, the practice *is* the result, and the result is practice.

We don’t practice KAP so that we can achieve some far off goal; we do KAP cultivation because it actually opens an interconnected flow of awareness and energy in the body *every day*, until there is an integrated and habituated flow. Peak experiences, and their integration, all are expressions of the daily cultivation.

The practice itself is the happening. The practice is the transformation. That’s how embodied consciousness learns – through neuroplastic habituation and adaptation. We adapt to the skills we “do” frequently, and we adapt faster and more dextrously to the skills we do frequently, with powerful feeling.

The daily sensory-motor-proprioceptive-emotive re-habituation of awareness, sensation, emotion, breath, circulation, and physicality, creates both gradual and quantized changes in perception, experience, and expression of consciousness, in ways that occur both during and following each practice.

Changes in subtle/breath energy and proprioception tend to develop gradually.

Contrastingly, the initial release of electrical kundalini in the body often occurs as a quantized, sudden phenomenon:

When a certain threshold of simultaneous sensory/emotional arousal, vagal / spinal centralization of awareness, increased breath energy, and simultaneous relaxation response is reached, the energy effervesces or surges, but from that activation the continued expansion of the signal is often a series of both progressive amplifications and quantum jumps.

Similarly, the deeper continuity of integration of each subsequent body region’s consciousness in all of its facets – is a mostly progressive experience, but also has its jumps and leaps.

So we don’t practice in hopes that some sudden magic will unfold. We practice to experience and embody the “gradual magic”… and bigger expansions also happen.
The doing is the being, the being is the doing.

Getting back to the common aversion to the word “practice” — to give some cultural context, the term Kung-Fu (Gongfu) does not literally translate as “Martial Art” but rather literally means “any study, learning, or practice that requires patience, energy, and time to complete.”

So Gongfu is both the daily practice of the thing, and the accumulated skill that results from that practice.

Most commonly, outside of China, we use kung-fu/gongfu to mean both the practice of and resulting skill in Chinese martial art – wushu in all its forms… but Gongfu can just as easily be applied to qigong, music, calligraphy, mathematics, inner alchemy, KAP, etc.

So you could just as easily say, “I am embodying my KAP today,” as, “I am doing my KAP practice today,” because every playful, persistent exploration of these states, feelings, movements, expressions, awarenesses is a living embodiment of the end state – one that gets more powerful, refined, and harmonious, through intentional daily _________ .

So if you have an aversion to the word “practice”, just enter your new preferred term for the daily “doing” of your “being” in the __________ and watch your reticence vanish and a newly playful exploratory attitude surface.

May your cultivation be fruitful, and the fruit generate deeper cultivation!
Have a great weekend,

Tao Semko

P.S.
You are receiving these KAP Tips because you’ve taken or are taking one of my classes on Dr. Glenn J. Morris’s Improved Kundalini Awakening Process. If you have questions from your class materials or your practice experiences, I offer Open Video Q&A almost every week of the year on Zoom Cloud Meetings, along with scheduling short personal Zoom Q&As at your request: https://taosemko.com/student-group-q-and-a/

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Thank you as always for your patronage and for your practice!