The word "routine" is really a powerful one. It is dervived from Latin, and from there it's found its way to French, where it means literally "a smaller road". In essence it means a path or a clearing in a forest.

By working with different parts in ourselves we little by little cut down our inner wilderness and make way for something else to appear. With our daily routines we create something alive inside us, a place of rest where we can take refuge when the going gets tough. I guess the tough get going like that.

Routines must be many-sided, I reckon. Just making a singe path in the woods is like putting all the eggs in one basket. Man is a many-storied machine, and so should be our practices as well. The big idea behind my Integral Life Practice is just that: by creating routines in body, mind, spirit and shadow, I actually make every respective path a bit stronger. Or that's my working belief, anyway.

As to my actual practice, I've now successfully gotten up at 6 am every morning for almost four weeks now. This week I started excercising daily in addition to that. Both of those practices have a behind them an actual value, that I wish to acquire into my being. Namely, self-reliance and will. Getting up early increases my feeling of being able to rely on my self, my promises, my being. And doing what I dislike almost the first thing in the morning is an attempt to create a small path to the refuge of Will, where I can have a certain sense of trust in "mind over mattress", as Robin Sharma put it.

Today I will give a lecture of sorts on the basics of AQAL philosophy of Ken Wilber. That should be nice. And it's just about two weeks before our baby should arrive! Kinda exciting, to say the least... :)

Final week of the first month has gone well. I've given up meditation and weightlifting for trying to build my ILP with baby steps. That is, getting up 6 am every morning, including weekends. Extremely useful: I feel so happy and so much more in control of myself than before.

What I used to do was force myself to engage in practices in order to be happy. Now I feel a tide turning. Why not try to do stuff to make myself happy in the first place, and build practices around that? I might be a bit shaky without the grounding effect of meditation, but at least I'm not feeling the Parent "shoulds" ordering the whole of my being as if from the outside.

I've really come to appreciate the emphasis of the Gurdjieff Work on building will before engaging in esoteric practices. Meaning that one must try to get some sense of order in the inner chaos by, (1) seeing the chaos and (2) creating a "deputy steward" who orders the chaos by assining every little self to their own place. In my own life that means figuring out the bottlenecks of my personal growth.

Although man is a many-storied-machine, with body, mind, spirit, and shadows all as one, I've found it tedious and troublesome to try and engage them all at the same time. What I see to be the sly man's tactic is -although acknowledging them all- to tackle one "bottleneck at a time". Starting with the 80/20 'neckers.

Pareto Principle, or the 80/20 principle means that 80 % of our results come from the 20 % of our efforts. I have seen that getting up early is way, way, way more important than mediation, weightlifting, reading comics...whatever. If I sleep in, all the rest is just repairing damages. So my first practice for making Integral Life a habit, is to get up early for a month to lock in the habit. So far, so good. Applying the 80/20 to my ILP seems to be the way to go.

Here are some random suggestions for effective change of habits:

1) One habit a time,
2) The worst bottlenecks first;
3) Doing what feels uncomfortable next,
4) Rewarding the inner Child by celebrating small wins
5) Finishing what I start.

All this is good for building the character needed for self-mastery that is needed for further growth. To try to tame the lesser hippie in me for the higher Hippie to manifest, that's gotta count for something, right? ;)

The best rock band to tramp the earth since the Who, playing the opening track from their 1999 masterpiece, Do the Collapse.

I have been a bit overwhelmed writing my other blog daily in Finnish. So here's a summary of the past two weeks of my 366-day Integral Life Practice.

In mid-week of week 2 in got sick. First  I thought it was my stomach, then I realized it was all of me. Having had occasional troubles with my stomach all my life (I dread my appendix! Don't ask.) I got to see having dissociated my head from my body and heart big time. All I could do was rest. That marked a minor major shift for me.

You see, doing nothing's a drag if you're an enneagram seven. Truly. For me, though, it turned out to be a liberating experience. I noticed just to what extent I escape into my head, into constant doing, into ceaseless motion. Having to stop was just what my inner doctor ordered. So I just lied down, finished a couple of books I had started before and enjoyed just excisting. What a thrill!

It also turned my ILP experiment on its pointy head. I started out with a full-fledged plan: 5xweek excercise, 6xweek meditation, 5xweek translating a book and studying for my Master's degree + shadow work whenever appropriate. I came to notice just how much I am demanding of myself. It wasn't fun. So I decided to start all over, building my experiment from scratch.

I set just one objective: get up early, at 6 am every morning for a month. That's all. Sure, there's stuff that comes with the territory and has to be done, like my commitments for the translation and the master's. But overall, I made a commitment to try and lessen my inner producer, and give more power to my inner director, so to speak. Loosen up and take it more easy. Starting out by being happy and then adding to that, gradually, excercises from my ILP plan.

Speaking of the devil. My plan is to have a pretty grounded and fairly steady diet of regular strenght & aerobic excercise, daily meditation practice, time commitment, reading, and shadow work by the end of the experiment. That is, just a tad under a year from now. Pretty different than starting from all of that and trying to desperately hold on to it, keeping it up "no matter what" for a year. Whew! What a relief.

One week ago I made a commitment for a long-term ILP. That's Integral Life Practice, a program for waking up body, mind, spirit and shadow. I have been practicing meditation, doing some yoga now and then, going to the gym occasionally, and even went to see a therapist for a few times (not that common in Finland, let me tell you). But my main problem remains the lack of long-term commitment, mostly in anything I do. So I kind of jumped in head first and made a commitment to keep up a form of ILP for 366 days, and hopefully for the rest of my life. It is, after all, an Integral Life Practice.
I most sincerely hope this does not sound like bragging (for that, I have a shadow blog "All the chicks I've boned"...that's a joke! Just a joke!) but that it might give to others or help me recieve ideas on Integral living. That's it for now. I intend to give a report of sorts probably once a week. And if you got any suggestions based on your own experiences or want to ask something please leave a comment. Thanks + cheers!
P.S. At the moment I am in Copenhagen with some friends & my wife, about to attend a Big Mind seminar led by Genpo Dennis Merzel Roshi. Very nice!

One of the best bands there ever was (and gladly, still is)! Certainly my reason for picking up the guitar in the first place. I just needed to share this!