What Matters Most for Practice
“Take Care” Of Your Practice
Like air resistance or friction, you don’t feel your little inner resistance or friction in daily life. However, when you try to continue practice, these small obstacles accumulate and grow bigger. It can’t be helped you face a challenge like this, but you need to find a way to overcome it before you run out of energy to keep practicing.
We often overestimate our ability and endurance to continue a practice, which leads us to fail.
We often ignore the resistance and friction inside us and tend to devalue the supportive others and environments.
Your body requires water to move. Likewise, your heart and mind need some fuel to take action.
Your brain asks for support, like writing down on a paper, to think.
Practicing is just the same. It’s natural that you can’t move on without support and refueling.
What can we do then?
Just take care of your practice. This action becomes a “practice,” too.
The Importance Of Refueling and Support
Others’ words will refill you with motivation and energy. They don’t have to do anything special. Just being by your side will help you a lot. A single spoken word of encouragement cheers you up, too. The voice echos inside you and strengthens the link of neurons. This means the action of speaking to others refuels them and yourself, too.
Empatheme, as a tool, mirror, method, and environment, supports your small system of practicing, which becomes your habit. Your minimal practice makes a system. A system that creates a path. A path that lets you look back on. You act out the practice through your body, look back on it, and feel it later. You will then be aware of the habit you made through the links with others.
The Presence Of The “Others”
Self-judgment is the largest resistance and friction that you would face. You also can’t get rid of it because it’s part of your mind. After all, everything is self-centered: your hope, your goal, your achievement, etc.
It’s easy. Let’s ease your self-judgment and rest your self-centered mind. How? You need not do anything special.
It’s the power of “the others” that does this, and not that of you.
Think about it this way: anyone or anything around you, including your voice or action, will become your partner.
You take a moment and imagine that you have a partner in front of you.
Now, you only have to turn these small actions into a natural flow and walk with their support and supply, step by step.
What’s “o b t s f c r i”?
“o b t s f c r i” is a sequence of eight distinct Empathemes. It helps you create a moment, which then turns into a system (you borrow the power of the so-called “self-organization”). We translated the Japanese “Aite Ni Fusu Ima” as “o b t s f c r i.”
“Aite Ni Fusu Ima,” in Japanese, means to leave out the moment to the others.
Just recall this word and say it aloud once a day. It only takes you two seconds, which accounts for only0.002% of your day.
Taking a moment to utter a short, one-breath-long word is the essence of continuing practice and making it a habit.
You are not alone. Because you’re a living human, you are always with someone or something else.
Minimal energy of you and the right time and space bear the tips for making your practice a habit.
Tiny Moments Add Up To “CELORAS”
The Empatheme method first creates a small moment (Empatheme) “o b t s f c r i” with a natural flow, then a system “CELORAS,” which lets you repeat, reflect on, and share your Empatheme. This system turns into not only your habit but also a path that connects people around you by linking with one another. If you can imagine a path that expands with lots of connections, that is our Empatheme community.