You’ve been practicing you your entire life. You have always been the author of your own experience. A journal (and specifically the book, Practice You) is an invitation to become the author of a sacred text of your own design, an opportunity to write a personal field guide to your highest self.

How can you practice your best self? Having endured times of doubt, disconnection, and insufficiency, I’ve learned that the only way out of that morass is to go inward. In self-observation, study, and reflection on the offerings of my teachers, my understanding continues to unfurl.

When I turn to my own journals for the wisdom I need, I learn countless lessons from looking back on my own questions, then revisiting and refining the answers. Those two decades worth of notebooks hold medicinal wisdom. This wisdom reveals and heals negative assumptions, unearths forgotten resources, and provides essential reminders from within my own experience.

Explorations in Practice You

Within these pages you will find a series of Explorations. There is one for each of nine aspects of your being. Each Exploration offers instructions and inquiries to help you design new attitudes, contemplate fresh perspectives, and stay on track with your intentions.

The Benefits of Writing and Reflecting

When you write and reflect, you will uncover habitual emotions, thought tendencies and chosen habits. You will refine your own voice and vision, recognize what makes your heart happy. You will learn to invite the circumstances, insights, and energetic connections that will help you to be of service to yourself and the world around you.

Meant to move you to give voice to your most unfinished, raw, passing emotions, this journal will help you to refine your listening, elevate your inner dialogue, meet your deepest self with compassion and love, and amplify the inherent intelligence of your own heart.

Don’t be afraid to make a mess or to be precise and clear. Be YOU, as you are, every time you write in your journal. When you reflect on your musings, put your attention on the baseline softness beneath it all—the sweet, almost childlike longing to be heard, felt, seen, accepted, and loved for precisely who and where you are.

Let the pages of your journal spark a sense of reverence for your own path. Let them be a sanctuary in which to gather your perspectives, your priorities, your practices, your purpose, and your prayers.

You are the author of this book; your words make it sacred. Practice You.

Excerpted from Practice You by Elena Brower. With Permission of Sounds True.

Elena Brower

www.artofattention.com

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