First, what is a “practice?” How is it different from a habit, or a daily routine? The difference lies in awareness and intent. What we name a practice for ourselves is a consciously chosen habit, a (sometimes) ritualized doingness that is purposefully elevated from our other daily doings to honor the specific intent behind the action. Implied in the term practice is an intent to progress forward or deeper. This meaning is not intrinsically implied in mere habit. A habit tends to be an unconscious action.
Practicing Beauty is a particular sort of mindfulness. It is committing to an ongoing and progressive awareness of Beauty. Whatever you perceive as beautiful. It is cultivating the ability to choose a state of awareness that overrides or turns off that comfy awareness level I call our “automatic pilot”.
You know about automatic pilot: it directs those habits. It is that mental state that allows you to get to work without ever having to actually think about your route or make coffee in the morning while your mind is busy planning the day ahead… it is the “shorthand” of perceiving, doing, and communicating.
The primary purpose of a Beauty Practice is to:
- turn off the “shorthand” of our sensing and perceiving abilities, and turn on our more basic (yet often obscured) capabilities to “sense and understand”.
- To truly see and appreciate the harmonious and/or serendipitous relationships all around us; and
- create, cultivate, and nurture such wherever, and however we are each individually able to do so.
Practicing Beauty is re-training the eye and the brain to avoid oversimplifying generalizations and isolating fragmentation, to see with the heart and the soul, and to invigorate our natural capacity for wonder.