Isn’t it amazing how unrealistic we can be about ourselves? We forget that in order to learn something or to be good at something, we have to practice.

So I know a little about the P-word, as I have been having a steady daily yoga and meditation practice for more than five years now. Okay, it’s not as if I’m doing the primary series every day, or that I’m glued to my meditation cushion for hours, but I do a little, and I do it every day.

I’m really not that hard on myself when it comes to my yoga and meditation practice. However, on several other things in my life I have a very weird and unrealistic expectancy of myself. I expect myself to immediately be good at things I take up, like modeling or writing a business plan. Somewhere deep inside, I feel that I either have to be talented at something, or I won’t do it. And since I’m just not a really talented person (it’s sad but true), I can get the feeling that I can’t do anything.

This, of course is totally bogus. This week I had a revelation about one of these areas; writing. I finally got to read ‘Writing down the Bones’ by Natalie Goldberg, THE classic book on writing as a practice (she’s also a longtime Zen student, which made it even more appealing to read it). Within 30 minutes of reading, she convinced me that the only way to learn how to write is to…write! Like so many others, I will wait until I have ‘inspiration’ before I will sit down to write something: and then I expect it to be God’s greatest gift to the world (which of course it isn’t). Like all other things in life, we have to practice, over and over again, before we produce something even slightly salvageable. 

So it took me about 10 minutes more into the book before I decided to take up my third daily practice: writing. Now I sit myself down every day, starting with 10 minutes of writing, and I am not afraid to write the biggest junk in the world, I just write. As Natalie Goldberg puts it:

‘”Finally, one just has to shut up, sit down, and write.”

(Replace ‘write’ here with any other thing in your life.)

Have a lovely weekend,
Geertje