Three Levels of Practice
A friend of mine recently brought up the question of how to communicate experiential practices to businesses. Pondering on this I came upon the thought that there seem to be three different levels to view the practice on.
1. Activity
On the superficial level each practice is simply the activity we do, be it corporate yoga classes or musical improvisation workshops. Viewed this way, many practices seemingly don’t develop any tangible business skills and appear mostly useful for their immediate effect of relaxation, energy, etc.
2. Metaphor
If we go one level deeper, we can see each activity as a metaphor of a business activity. We can then use the activity as a laboratory to test out various mental models, e.g. yoga might be used to explore questions such as “Which is better, a slow stretch or a fast, jumpy movements?” And music might help us look at thoughts such as “What is the importance of a common idea and tune?”
Note also that these metaphorical explorations can take the form of key learning points, an intuitive understanding, and anything in between.
3. Embodiment
Deeper still we find embodiment. Here we can observe the characteristics that the practice cultivates moving from physical attributes into ways we live our lives. Yoga, for example, might help us bring resilience into stressful work situations, and music can get us in tune in more ways than one while building our capacity of entering flow states.
Applying these three lenses can help us deepen our own practice and offers an interesting way of building workshops for other people. And for you Ken Wilber fans out there, the levels roughly coincide with body, mind, and spirit.
