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An excerpt from The Power of Daily Practice 
by Eric Maisel, PhD

Are you trying to finish your novel? Do you want to build your own business? The impact of having a consistent practice focused on your life goals cannot be underestimated. Prolific author and creativity coach Dr. Eric Maisel has been working with artists and creative people for more than thirty years. His new book, The Power of Daily Practice: How Creative and Performing Artists (and Everyone Else) Can Finally Meet Their Goals (New World Library, September 8, 2020) is a thorough and holistic approach to meeting the goals and challenges of creating an authentic and effective daily practice.

We hope you enjoy this excerpt from the book.

In my experience, the simpler the practice, the more powerful it is and the more likely you are to maintain it over time. One reason that it ought to be kept simple is that if there is even a whiff of difficulty or complexity attached, it becomes really hard to crack through everyday resistance and get to your practice.

You wake up in the morning. Maybe you’re going to write, and maybe you’re not going to write. On one side of the ledger is your desire to write. On the other side are all of your bad feelings about your current book manuscript. Those bad feelings produce a heaviness that as likely as not will prevent you from writing. If, however, you have a simple daily practice in place that begins with a super-simple mantra, like “I write every day,” you’ve increased your chances of writing on that day, even as heavy as you feel.

If you feel heavy and you also have to face a complicated practice with lots of demands (A thousand words every day, damn it!) and lots of moving parts (Is the temperature sixty-eight degrees? Is the light coming in from the east? Has the rooster next door crowed three times?), that emotional heaviness combined with practice heaviness is a recipe for a writing day skipped.

Simplicity is both a cognitive sort of thing and a felt sort of thing. As a cognition, it might be a thought such as “I’m off to my practice” or “Time to practice” or “Here I go!” As a felt sort of thing, it is the same body lightness that comes when you anticipate something being easy. It’s like a sigh and a smile rather than a groan and a frown. It’s like a pillow rather than a rock. Picture something being really easy. Feel the ease in your body?

You might combine these two ideas, of simplicity and of ease, into the following ceremonial mantra: “I’m light, and I’m off to practice.” Imagine how lovely it would be if every day you were able to say, “I’m light, and I’m off to practice.” Can you remember the childlike simplicity of running out the door to play? There was nothing in the world easier. Be as easy as you can be and keep your daily practice as simple as is humanly possible.

Remember that we’re talking about your practice itself and not the content of your practice. The content of your practice may be very complicated. Maybe you’re working on a hard problem in physics or in the app you’re creating. Your practice can still be blissfully simple. Even if the song you’re writing is challenging, your practice can still be simple. Even if the mathematical problem you’re trying to solve is knotty, your practice can still be simple. Keep this important distinction in mind.

Robert, a workshop participant, shared his experience:

I got very excited about the idea of a life purpose practice where every day I would look at my list of life purpose choices and decide which one or two I was absolutely going to get to on that day. If I’d kept it that simple, it would have been a beautiful thing! But for some reason I had to overlay it with all sorts of demands: that I prioritize my life purpose choices, that I tackle at least one from my top three choices every day, that I spend an equal amount of time on each life purpose choice so as not to shortchange any, and fifteen other demands.

It started to feel like the worst kind of job imaginable! I had to chuck that whole way of looking at my practice out the window and return to the beautifully simple starting place: looking at my list each morning and making a choice or two. Period. That made all the difference! It turned a chore into a light thing.

Sandy explained how it worked for her:

I had a hard time defining my practice. I wanted to write, I wanted to paint, I had health issues I knew needed addressing, I was craving a spiritual practice or maybe something like a meaning-making practice...I couldn’t make up my mind what my practice was “really about.” So, of course, I never started it, and I never engaged with it.

It wasn’t working trying to decide what was most important. Each thing was important in its own way. I was about to throw in the towel, and then I had an inspiration. I decided that I would take “simple” to mean just showing up. I would just go to my designated daily practice space in the spare bedroom and do whatever needed doing on that day. I would just go there and stay put for an hour.

That kind of made for a magical change. One day I would work on my nonfiction book. Another day I would research alternative health treatments. Another day I would sketch. I realized that it didn’t matter what I did — each thing had its own importance and its own resonance. My practice simplified itself to “I show up for an hour.” And during the next two months I got a lot written, I created a new health regimen, and I made a lot of meaning, one hour at a time.

Food for Thought

What does a simple practice look like to you?
Is it your nature to make things more complicated than they need to be? If so, what might you do to rein in that impulse when it comes to creating your daily practice?
Explain in your own words how a practice might be kept simple even if the content of the practice is difficult or complicated.

Eric Maisel, PhD, is the author of more than fifty books on creativity and personal growth, including The Power of Daily Practice. Widely regarded as America’s foremost creativity coach, he writes the Rethinking Mental Health blog for Psychology Today and facilitates creativity and deep writing workshops around the world. He lives in Walnut Creek, California. Find out more about his work at EricMaisel.com.

Excerpted from the book The Power of Daily Practice. Copyright ©2020 by Bridgit Dengel Gaspard. Printed with permission from New World Library.

I go through periods when I have deja vu constantly, like almost every moment, and sometimes these periods last for weeks at a time. (Then things go back to being normal.) What do you think this means? Is there some action I should take?

Devane

Astrea:

Being a Leo, you're probably having lots of flashbacks to your past lives. Since Leos aren't usually on their first incarnation, you no doubt have many lives to flash back to as well.

Now that you're grown in THIS incarnation, these lives are bombarding you to give you information you need so you don't make the same poor choices and mistakes you've made in your Before Times. Having these flashbacks for days on end may be troublesome, but they're probably important in some way.

Remember that there are other worlds beyond the Earth. Being a Leo, you might have lived in another dimension or galaxy in the past, and it may be important to your spiritual growth to get in touch with more than your past lives on Earth.

Be sure to keep records! Get a special notebook to record these experiences in. Write down every detail of what you see, hear and feel as it comes to you. Pay special attention to how your surroundings look and what you're wearing if you can see those too.

If you can't write things down when deja vu is happening to you, then do it as soon as you can when you come to. As you make more and more entries into your Deja Vu Diary, you'll begin to see patterns of choices and consequences from your past lives.

Pay very close attention to the other people you see in these moments too. Some will be Angelic Beings who are trying to guide you, and some are real people you've been with before and will probably meet again in this life. This experience is preparing you for those things to happen - you're being kept open to all sorts of possibilities for positive change in this life.

Once you've sorted through this Universal Information, the deja vu will subside and you'll be able to incorporate the lessons you learned in your past incarnations in this one.

You have a special purpose in life or this wouldn't be happening to you now. It's so important that you find out where and when you've been, not only for your own future but so you can help others find their way too.

You've been Chosen. Sometimes that's a pure blessing, and sometimes it means there is a lot of hard work ahead, but whatever you discover, I'm sure it will lead to a lifetime of greater happiness and spiritual reward.

*****

Susyn:

Deja vu comes from the French language and means already seen. There are many theories about deja vu. Most people describe it as a sense of being in the midst of an event, place or conversation that feels like it has already been experienced. Having deja vu frequently can make us feel very unbalanced, as this creates the impression that we're repeating things over and over.

The deja vu sensation is very common - it's experienced by roughly 70 percent of the population at one time or another. Deja vu has even been the subject of a number of movies.

Metaphysically, deja vu is viewed as evidence of psychic ability or extra sensory perception. Here it suggests the ability to see or recognize an experience before it happens, hence creating the sense that it has been experienced before.

There is also the possibility that these incidents are evidence of prophetic dreams we might have but not recall until we are faced with the event in real life. Yet another theory is that these memories come from past lives, like when we encounter a stranger that feels strangely familiar.

Scientists and researchers have attempted to attribute deja vu to neurological causes or the side effects of various medications. However, because it is such a common phenomenon, researchers have been unable to tie it to any one cause.

Most likely, your frequent experiences with deja vu are signs that your psychic abilities are on the upswing. Delving into more metaphysical studies or finding a way to share your gifts with the world should balance out these episodes.

There is no need for alarm when they happen; your awareness of them is simply a wake-up call to pay closer attention to the development you are going through. Once you take action to encourage your psychic powers, you may see these deja vu experiences either fade or transform into important signs and messages that you can then interpret or act upon.

It will be helpful to record these incidents in a journal, as once you put them down on paper, you may begin to see a pattern or discover deeper meaning in them. Paying closer attention to them is all you need to do until they reveal their true higher purpose in your life.

Astrea:

Many times in life we hear, "You will always have what you NEED, but not necessarily what you WANT." Your spirit must have needed to experience the feeling of leaving your human body, and the suggestion in the next chapter of Sylvia Brown's book was all it took to get you there.

Even though you hadn't read it yet, your SOUL recognized the title of that chapter as something it had been seeking, and your soul, knowing that you had that reference to read after your experience, got with it and out you went!

While I don't usually recommend her books, Sylvia Brown has a wide reaching and powerful effect on lots of people. A Gemini like you would be able to relate easily to her writing and put it to good use. Synchronicity - you gotta love it!

I like your description of "getting caught." That's exactly what it feels like, isn't it? One minute you're free and hovering above the room, and the next minute, ZAP! back down into your corporeal form you go!

As a little kid, I loved that "feeling of return." With practice, most of the time we can control that event, but sometimes, when our physical ears hear a distracting noise or something else occurs to knock us back into reality, back we go. With practice you will be able to control your return better.

I find it interesting that you were visiting your mother-in-law and not someone in your own genetic family. Evidently, you and your husband got married for reasons that are even deeper than love. His family's interest in "psychic stuff" will nurture your children in such matters and help them to grow into their own abilities.

You'll never have to be concerned that when your daughter visits them, she'll be discouraged from exploring her own psychic life and power. My parents encouraged me to develop my psychic senses in a time when it wasn't nice to even discuss such things in public. Heck, it's STILL not considered a great topic at the dinner table in some families!

Your kids will get to talk about it ALL and ask questions and read and study. This is going to give them such an edge in life! Talk with your husband about how you want to present this to your kiddos, so that you are united in your approach and ready to tell them their experiences are all natural and okay.

A word or two of warning: Geminis often have difficulty staying grounded in REAL LIFE. Don't get so strung out on your ASTRAL life that you neglect what you're doing here on Earth.

You are at the beginning of a long journey to learn where your power really lies. Try to be patient with this process and take your time.