Types of Practice • Formal, Secondary Attention, Integrated or On The Fly
Types of Practice • Summary
Three ways to practice:
- Formal Practice — seated on your mat or cushion, ideally in front of an altar; 100% focus, nothing else happening.
- Secondary Attention Practice — a practice (breath, chanting, sensory awareness) running in the background while your primary attention is on daily activity — household work, driving, walking, writing.
- On-the-Fly / Integrated Practice — a practice applied in the moment, in direct response to what’s happening in your life (nerves, resistance, a car breaking down); full attention, but not on the mat.
Daily rhythm: commit to formal practice every day, weave in secondary attention practice whenever the opportunity arises, and reach for on-the-fly practice whenever things go sideways.
Edited Transcript from a Live Teaching on this.
Let’s talk practice, baby! (Prefer to watch a video? Scroll down & hit play!)
There are a few different ways to practise within Classical Tantra, how I teach and share it.
Formal Practice
The first I call formal practice. This is when you’re on your yoga mat or sitting on your cushion, ideally in front of an altar.
Altars are freaking amazing and incredible, as they really help focus energy and attention. If you’re comfortable working with an altar, it can be as simple as a candle. Just that. That’s the simplest altar you can use.
Formal practice is: you’re seated, on a cushion or mat, possibly in front of an altar, and the only thing happening is the practice you’re doing. For example, if you’re chanting to the goddess, you’re sitting there 100% focused on chanting to the goddess. You might have an image or a statue of that particular goddess on your altar. You may do it with eyes open, also focusing on the visual, or you may keep your eyes closed.
Secondary Attention Practice
Then we move into secondary attention practice. Sometimes we call it integrated practice, or, as one of my clients calls it ‘on-the-fly’ practice, and I kind of like that too. Secondary attention, on-the-fly, integrated, they’re all pointing to the same thing, though integrated can be slightly different. I’ll share on all of them.
Secondary attention practice is when you’re doing something like household work, and you’re also running a practice at the same time.
Your primary attention is on your daily activity — the thing you’re engaged in — but your secondary attention is on the practice.
This works best for breath practice, attention practice, or chanting. It’s really easy to chant while doing household work, to chant while driving, to chant while walking, for example.
Another secondary attention practice that can be really beneficial is focusing on sensory data. You might be doing household work and attuning to what everything smells like, looks like, sounds like, feels like, tastes like — or you could do that while going for a walk.
Breath is also used a lot in secondary attention — simply being aware of your breath, aware of the sensation of breath in your nostrils, while engaging in an activity. You could be writing a document and be aware of your breath at the same time.
That kind of secondary attention practice is really valuable, particularly because being in the breath and the felt sensation of breath orients you to the body — it stops you from going completely up into the mind. It keeps you in embodiment while also doing something, like writing a document, that could be quite cerebral or intellectual. That’s secondary attention practice.
On-the-Fly / Integrated Practice
On-the-fly and integrated practice — the slight difference here is that on-the-fly is something you do in response to something that’s happening.
For example, say you’re at the doctor’s office waiting for your appointment, and you’re feeling really nervous about it. As you’re sitting there waiting, you can do something like vagus nerve breathing, which helps you to come into a relaxed place. You’re responding to the conditions of your life and applying a practice that supports you in that moment.
It’s not secondary attention, because you’re not doing anything else — you’re waiting. You’re giving it your full attention, you could say. But it’s not formal practice either, because you’re not on your mat or cushion. You’re in the flow of your life as you’re doing the practice.
Another really good on-the-fly — or integrated — practice: the phrase “Blessings on the goddess for this unfolding.” You use this when something’s just happened and you notice you’re rejecting it, avoiding it, not wanting it to be happening — basically in resistance.
Like, you’re going somewhere important, and your car breaks down, and you’re freaking out and frustrated. That’s the moment to pause and go into “Blessings on the goddess for this unfolding” — say it a few times, because it shifts how you’re responding to what’s happening here and now.
This is the key hallmark of an integrated or on-the-fly practice: it shifts the habitual, conditioned reaction to what’s unfolding into a more spacious, relaxed, open place. Do that enough, and it starts to become automatic — which is freaking amazing.
Applying these Forms of Practice to Daily Life
So those are the different ways you can practise: formal practice, on the mat or cushion; secondary attention, when your primary action is elsewhere but you’re running a practice in the background; and integrated or on-the-fly, where you apply a practice or teaching in the middle of your daily life as things are happening.
What I suggest: every day, commit to a specific formal practice. Whenever the opportunity arises, weave in secondary attention practice. And whenever shit goes down, do your integrated or on-the-fly practice. That way, practice becomes something woven throughout your day — and that’s what makes it so incredibly potent and powerful.
Enjoy your practice!
