Maintenance / Practice
The everyday hygiene of staying Self-led when life isn’t a session.
Description
Parts work isn’t a one-off intervention, and an hour a week is not much of a dose. Daily check-ins, journalling, mapping, small unblendings on the spot: these keep access to Self-energy available when you need it rather than when you have booked it. Mostly it prevents backlog, which is the thing that turns into a crisis.
Two we actually use. The first is a bad time log: when something bad happens, write it down with the date, plus how you feel, what you expect to follow, and why it is bad. Then set two reminders — a few weeks out, a few months out — and go back and read it. What you accumulate is evidence about your own forecasting, and for most of us the finding is humbling. The Taoist farmer keeps saying “maybe” for a reason, and the parts that catastrophise respond much better to their own track record than to reassurance.
The second is a review: pull out old notes and ask, of each part, where are they now? Did the agreements hold? Usually you get the pleasant answer — that stopped being a problem at some point and nobody noticed. Occasionally you don’t, and that is the useful one.
What Maintenance / Practice is NOT:
Not perfectionism, and not constant self-monitoring — a system under permanent observation does not relax, and a daily practice that has become a manager’s KPI has changed sides. Also not a substitute for having a life; the point of the practice is the life.
Examples:
Two minutes in the morning: who’s up today?
Thanking the protectors before the meeting rather than after the meeting goes badly.
Reading what you wrote six months ago about the thing that was definitely going to be a disaster.