The Axis of Praxis: a brief inquiry into the different types of practice

What is your practice?  What is mine?  For that matter, what does practice really mean?

Practice is one of those words so loaded in nuance it runs the risk of being misused if not rendered a bit meaningless at times.  These days it seems everyone has a practice.  For doctors and lawyers their practice can prove to be quite lucrative, ice hockey players practice on ice, while baseball players prefer natural grass; Jesuit priests and Zen monks take their practices to spiritual heights whereas painters and poets think in far more creative terms.  Even philosophers get in on the practice racket, although they more often refer to it as praxis, and use it as a term so general in meaning it has the potential to subsume all these other usages.

In thinking about the range of practices we encounter these days, it’s helpful to distinguish at least four distinct qualities that may characterize a given practice at any given time:  (i) the extent to which it may be advanced through the establishment of a routine, (ii) the extent to which it serves a utilitarian purpose, (ii) the extent to which it serves a higher spiritual aim and (iv) the extent to which it is driven by and helps unleash one’s creative energies and thereby has a transformative effect on the practitioner.  Let me expand briefly on each of these.

Establishing a routine:  This is the aspect of practice that most of us remember (and often associate with varying degrees of dread) from childhood.  We endured endless hours of drudgery doing our finger exercises on the piano after school.  We initially understood practice in this negative sense, as something that must be undertaken not as a good in itself but because, if we practiced enough, then it might eventually prove to be the route to Carnegie Hall. 

Serving a utilitarian purpose: This is the aspect of practice that has been commoditized and often may prove highly lucrative, as when a legal or medical practice may provide a nice living and then be transferred by deed of sale from one professional to another.   A practice in this sense may be synonymous with a particular expertise, such as when a lawyer is said to have a tax practice, or alternatively it may associated with a particular measure of success, when a proctologist boasts about having a million dollar practice.

Serving a spiritual aim:  Monks and nuns and yogis of various faiths around the world were among the first to think and speak of themselves as engaging in a distinctive form of spiritual practice.  This sort of practice also typically entails establishing and maintaining a strict routine, as a defining feature of everyday life.  A spiritual practice routine, as such, may involve a mixture of meditation, menial work and prayer, which is quite similar in one sense to finger exercises on the piano or extra batting practice after the game, as a form of self-discipline that must be cultivated day after day, except spiritual practice is perhaps better understood as an end in itself rather than merely as a means to achieve some ulterior purpose.

Unleashing Creative Energy:  In recent years it has become increasingly fashionable for artists of all sorts to think of and describe their work as a matter of engaging in a creative practice.  Painters practice with stipple and brush and poets do so with their typewriters or pens. This notion of creative practice certainly overlaps with and entails some aspect of practice is derived from or rests upon the establishment of a personal routine, through which an artist achieves mastery over an instrument, craft or particular technique.  But creative practice is typically understood in broader terms – entailing more than a matter of mastering technique.  It also serves as the pathway to creativity and artistic discovery.  In that sense a creative practice may refer to the totality of how an artist approaches his or her work, what makes it not only productive but personally liberating and rewarding.

I hope it’s clear from the foregoing discussion that these various forms or aspects of practice have much in common, notwithstanding the ways in which they may also been seen as emphasizing different facets of the same ideal.   In that way, whether you are a bass player or a base stealer, a monk or a mixologist, a novelist or a car thief, the practice of your art or craft or spiritual belief will often entail more than a single one of these four elements of practice – the routine, the utilitarian, the transcendent and the transformative.  Whatever your practice happens to be, you stand to derive the most reward from it by incorporated and enhancing all four of these elements into what you’re doing.  At the risk of getting ahead of our story, this is one way to begin thinking about what a practice platform is and what purpose it serves – it is the means by which you integrate these four strands into a vibrant and self-sustaining practice.  If you can find a way to achieve this integration, your practice will, in effect, become its own platform.   I will explain more clearly how this happens in the ensuing chapters.