A big call in this life for me is daily practice, which I began exploring when I was 17 as a way to be more with myself and in the world. In December of 2015 I practiced making 30 faces in 30 days, and that launched me into my current exploration of painting every day. For 2740 days I made a painting every day — and now I’m following the call to simply paint everyday and to practice working on longer arc visitations with my inner life.

My daily practice by all appearances is about painting — but it’s really MORE than that. It’s about staying present to myself through visiting the blank page. After 15 years of “messing around” with a variety of things ranging from yoga, meditation and journaling to writing a pantoum poem, I landed in it with paint and have since come more alive.

For many years my practice was about trusting the process — and now there’s an additional quality of savoring the process. To trust the process, I needed to make decisions and witness myself work it out when things didn’t go as planned. I needed to witness myself follow through with a vision even if it didn’t perfectly match what was in my mind or turn out in a way I liked. Making a painting every day for nearly 8 years supported me in developing trust and confidence in myself and the process.

The shift towards savoring the process this year is bringing me to unexpected depths because I trust the process. Savoring the process has brought a dropping of urgency, which is reaching into all areas of my life. There is no static right size of my practice each day, it’s living.

Practice has revolutionized my inner and creative life.

Here’s some of the gold I’ve found in daily practice:

• Tending my callings and desires each day with devotion.

• Reclaiming some time each day to go in my own direction. Much of my work and natural way leads me to tend others, and my practice gives me time and soul food to tend myself.

• Transformation through small acts that cultivated trust and confidence from within.

• Encountering more of myself than previously imagined. I am So Much More than the too small stories of who I think I am.

• Developing resiliency and welcoming more of myself to the deliciously full banquet table of my life.

• More presence in the process, which is deeply human - versus exaggerated emphasis on product, which divorces us from belonging, earth, and being fully human.

What gold might you find in practice?

This inquiry is what drives me in creating space that is safe enough for us to explore being in practice beside each other.

A place safe enough to imperfectly return to.

A place to “f*ck around and find out,” haha!

Within the PRACTICE community there are rich and deep conversations about what it means to have spiritual and creative discipline and pathways to one's interior within our current spiritual context without exterior pressure or coercion while still offering right size influence as we walk beside each other. We practice being in community — and practice re-membering what that really is through opportunities to be in vulnerability, play and deep talks with each other. We breathe a lot, and laugh and pause and really listen to each other.

All are welcome: creatives, mystics, contemplatives, generative disruptors and wild ones. Let’s see what we can make beside each other!

If this lights you up, know you’re always welcome.