purpose of personal practice pages?

[estuary]

(totally time for taoist tongue twisters?)

 

...oh, ahem, focus here! back to topic at hand....

 

I've been browsing around and have found the personal practice boards of interest. Not sure if I want to start my own or not yet, but I thought I'd inquire into how you fine folks have used your own page, what you like about using that forum (or what's stopped you), and if it's actually helped your personal practice.

 

I'm working a writing project and there's really a lot of benefit to social accountability - telling someone else what you're going to do and then reporting on your progress. So I can see that having the PPD is akin to that, but I'm just curious if there's more to it than that. Also, asking this question up front saves me from the time-suck reading EVERYONE'S page would be. Sorry, I guess this counts as research-by-cheating...

[thelerner]

I've been in writers groups for years. What I've been taught is the secret to writing is to turn off the censor. Learn to let your writing flow without editing. Trust your fingers. Having a PPD page gives me an opportunity to write.

 

Just as important it serves as diary and recorder for past and future indiscretions.

 

And as important as that is it clarifies what I think. Truly I don't always know unless I start writing. Writing is part Ouiji board, part Rorschach test & word association rolled into one. I gain access to my sub conscious, even more so if I write by hand, where my script is filled with tells.

[estuary]

It's nice to get your different (though similar) perspectives. I kind of figured most people were using them for the purpose of accountability, but wondered if that was pretty much the gist of it.

 

It seems additionally there's the benefit of being able to pull in multimedia as a kind of scrapbook of the journey, the fact that it's accessible to others (and those self-selected for interest in the topic) but not the entire world and as a record so you can go back and say, "Oh, look, I really only meditated for 5 minutes a day at the beginning, I guess I have upped my time."

 

Those sound like good uses. I'll have to see if it's something I'd like to do - first though, I think I'll keep clicking around to see what folks are up to.