Last night, a couple members of my step group and I were philosophizing about the steps. We were talking about how so much of the internal change we experience after each step is out of our control, and that, therefore, it’s futile to stress over whether we’re doing the steps “right.” Still, even though we knew this, we all agreed that it’s often difficult to keep our perfectionist tendencies in check. Then someone who’s working the steps for the first time shared a tool she’d been using to be gentle with herself: “I just view this journey through the steps as my practice run.”

When I heard her say the word “practice,” something clicked. I started thinking about yoga, which I’ve come to see as a metaphor for life, and how what my classmates and I do every time we step onto the mat is referred to as a “practice.” There are no yoga performances, pageants or competitions. Each week, we twist our bodies into various shapes and pay close attention to our breath with no end goal in mind. We do it for the sake of doing it, for no reason except to connect with the present moment. But still, something changes and improves over time. That something, however, is not that we progressively get better at each pose, that we edge closer to peak performance each week. Instead, we progressively get better at accepting our imperfections and limitations. We accept that the pose that was strong and precise yesterday might be wobbly and sloppy today. We accept the differences in focus and energy from session to session. We accept non-linear change.  We accept that practice is truth, performance is myth.

Yoga isn’t the only area in which the “doing” is referred to as a practice. Many Eastern religions refer to their particular set of prayers, meditations and rituals as a practice, allowing for human error and imperfection. But what’s really interesting to me is that even certain professionals, especially those in the fields of law and medicine, refer to what they do as a “practice.” Imagine the lawyer who’s expected to win every case, no matter how incriminating the evidence, or the doctor who’s expected to save every life, no matter how battered or disease-ridden the body? I’d guess recalling the term “practice” could put high-pressure situations in these professions into perspective.

I’m wondering what high-pressure situations all of us could put into perspective simply by viewing them as a practice. What if we all viewed our jobs as a practice? What if we viewed our marriages and our parenting as practices? What if we eliminated the word “performance” from our discussions on sex, and instead looked at lovemaking as a practice? What if we viewed each day as a practice, totally unrelated to what we did yesterday and what we might do tomorrow?