My grandparents and my mom prayed the rosary a lot, and later in life, I had a priest friend of mine teach me centering prayer, based on Father Thomas Keating's work. That led to practicing different kinds of meditation off and on as I got older.
I'm not a practicing Catholic now. I didn't like what the church was doing with what Jesus had said, in a way. But I wouldn't say I'm not religious.
Practicing free speech on an open platform is a perilous path for any public figure, and there are no get-out-of-jail free passes in the court of public opinion.
For me, being in front of a camera is a matter of practicing and refining your art. I think, if you're telling a story worth telling, it's worth investing the time into developing.
I'm certainly not a practicing Jew. I would never claim, 'I'm Jewish.' That's not the first and foremost thing in my mind, as far as who I am as a person.
As a vegetarian eating a plateful of eggs, I found myself in this weird place where I didn't want to think about where those eggs came from. I didn't want to think about the treatment of the animals who produced those eggs. When I find myself trying not to think about things, it seems to me that I'm practicing avoidance.
I might have been just as happy to have been a practicing primary-care doctor. But as a medical student, I had interacted with patients suffering from neurodegeneration or acute clinical schizophrenia. It left an indelible mark on my memory.
I love New Orleans. I love jazz. I grew up practicing jazz piano, and that's just been such a cool genre to me. There's a lot of talent there.
To me, the object of practicing is to allow you to play what you hear. But you're always hearing new things, so you never get to the end of it.
Doing nothing would stress me out. So I am still pretty much active practicing judo with my friends, who are former judo athletes, to maintain our fitness as well as the friendships among us. In my spare time, I usually go jogging around the Gelora Bung Karno stadium or head to the gym.
The smartest thing I did in law school: asking my future wife to go out dancing with me. The smartest thing I did when practicing law: quitting. The smartest thing I've done in writing: following my own head and writing what I wanted to write, and nothing but.
I spend a lot of time practicing active imagination before I go to sleep. What I'm feeling will manifest as images through active imagination. And then I go to sleep, and those play out even more in my dreams.
There was a time when I was practicing law in New York and I wanted to find something else to do. So I ended up leaving the practice of law to pursue my art and it just happened to be out of Lego bricks.
I'm a natural piano player. So all the practicing I do at this point is in my head. If I don't play for a year, my chops aren't going to get any worse. I've spent my time playing scales, and I don't necessarily want to play any faster than I play. So everything I do at this point is more philosophical.
Developing Christlike attributes in our lives is not an easy task, especially when we move away from generalities and abstractions and begin to deal with real life. The test comes in practicing what we proclaim.
In my case, I belong to a group of aspiring and practicing biographers in Boston. We meet once a month for a coupla hours. It's become my lifeline - forgive the pun.
During the summer months of my high-school years, I befriended Dr. Robert Kough, a physician who cared for members of my family. Although he was practicing general medicine in a rural community when I met him, he was well equipped to arouse in me an interest not only in the life of a physician but in the fundaments of human biology.
It's very hard to be a practicing Christian in the 21st-century world if you set things up as, 'Everyone is against us. You can't believe modern science, modern media or modern political institutions because they're all conspiring against Christians.'
So many people are stealing Bikram Yoga. It's like you're practicing medicine, but you're not a doctor.
