Adopting a Rule of Life: How to Practice Like a Monk in 10 Minutes a Day

by Shane Steinkamp

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Years ago, when I was young and excitable, I took vows in a Buddhist monastery. I learned fairly quickly that the 5:00 AM start of practice actually meant that my body needed to be out of bed by 4:00 AM. There are morning necessities to attend to, robes to tie correctly so that you don’t end up embarrassed at breakfast, and everything else that needs to be ready before the 5:00 rituals begin. 

And so you get up.

I have come to appreciate that the first Great and Mysterious Technique that monastic life teaches is simply showing up. It is not a particularly impressive secret, but it is one that I carried into my Rule of Life - Regula Vitae - even after leaving the monastery. When I altered my vow in order to live a monastic life in the secular world, showing up was still the first rule. 

In the beginning, showing up is usually the hardest and most important task.  What happens after you arrive is less important than arriving. If you do not arrive, you cannot practice. Once you arrive, the practice reveals itself.

Some mornings the mind is clear. Some mornings it is a cage full of monkeys armed with kitchen utensils. Sometimes prayer opens into something enormous. Sometimes you spend ten minutes composing a brilliant reply to an argument that ended three days ago.  None of this matters very much.  You showed up.

Over the years this gets surprisingly easy, and even the armed monkeys eventually learn to march in formation. Once the monkeys are in line, other things begin to stir, and not all of them answer so easily to your command. The monkeys are never the most interesting things living inside you; they are just the loudest in the beginning.

Showing up, more than duration or intensity, is where monastic discipline begins. The bell rings, and you go. You may be tired, cold, irritable, or engaged in a particularly compelling argument with yourself about why another twenty minutes of sleep would be spiritually beneficial. The bell is not interested in your argument. 

The bell rings.  You go.

When I talk with people about developing a Rule of Life, sooner or later someone asks about my own. I tell them that my day starts at 3:00 AM and I take three hours of personal practice. This usually gets a reaction. Three hours sounds like an extraordinary amount of discipline, especially at that hour.

But it does not feel extraordinary to me. I have simply done it for so long that there is nothing left to decide. I get up because it is time to get up. I practice because it is time to practice.

Simply showing up, consistently and over a long enough time, is how three hours of practice becomes ordinary.

Nobody begins that way, of course. Nor should you. When you are just beginning, ten minutes is plenty. Five will do.

Choose a time. Choose a place. Choose a practice. Make it small enough that you have no credible excuse for avoiding it.

When the appointed time comes, show up. Whatever happens during those minutes, let it happen. The mind may settle, or the monkeys may stage a rebellion. You may encounter the divine, or spend the entire time thinking about breakfast.

None of that changes the rule.

Tomorrow, show up again.

Something begins to change when you do this long enough. At first, you are practicing meditation, or prayer, or silence, or whatever you have chosen. Eventually, you begin to appreciate that the thing you have really been developing is the power of showing up.  Once you learn how to show up, ten minutes has a peculiar tendency to become twenty. Twenty sometimes becomes an hour.

And one morning you may discover that it is 3:00 AM, the world is dark and quiet, and you are getting out of bed with everything in you that has learned to awaken. 

Not because you have extraordinary discipline, but because the bell has rung. 

The bell inside you.

This is easier to learn in an actual monastery, which has actual bells. But what does the bell sound like in ordinary life? What if you cannot hear the one inside you yet?   Well, sometimes the bell is not a bell. You have to learn to recognize it and begin your practice just the same.  If you need an alarm clock, use one.  

I learned through practice to live without one - to live without being bound to time in that way. I sleep in cycles, and in some sense I sleep by ritual. Sleep itself is a practice. There is a way of entering it, a way of inhabiting it, and a way of leaving it - but if you are still working on that practice, use a clock. Later, if you want to practice the discipline of sleep, all you have to do is show up for it at the same time and in the same way every night.  

Sleep itself learns to listen for the bell.

When my oldest son August was an infant, my practice did not stop. I adapted to the eddies in time created by the pebble of his life. My wife took the late shift, and I took the early shift.  Somewhere around 3:00 in the morning, he would be ready for a feeding. He would roll over and begin to fuss. Because he slept in my bed, my body could usually anticipate him by ten minutes, and I would already be out of bed and ready to begin our practice. On the days he was early, I did not think of him as a crying infant interrupting my sleep.  

He was the bell.

He was a call to prayer.

And so the ritual began.

Feeding an infant while chanting is really no different from chanting without an infant. The words are the same. The breath is the same. The attention is the same.  But praying while holding an infant teaches you things that praying alone cannot teach you.  Some prayers require two breaths.  Sometimes the prayer is not the words, but two lives breathing together in the darkness.  

This is often a divine experience.

Moment to moment, I could no longer tell which of us was praying and which of us was the prayer. Then I got peed on.

You can try to fit an infant into your schedule, or you can discover that the infant is the schedule.  Even a poopy diaper is a call to prayer, ritual, and contemplation. 

I have lived this way for nearly forty years. My children came, grew, and eventually left home, and the rituals and prayers changed with them.

There were mornings when practice meant sitting under the steam heads in the shower with a small, sick child in my lap, chanting OM HREEM HAUM NAMAHA, hoping their cold would pass quickly while enjoying the moment of skinship. There were nights when practice meant standing beside a toddler's bed, sounding long, deep AUMs until a restless little soul finally surrendered to sleep. This proved considerably more reliable than Benadryl.

Potty training was not a ritual they covered at the monastery.

But there it was. I cannot entirely rule out the possibility that Satan pooped in my wife’s shoe, and while the available evidence points to a particular human child, the girl swears it was Satan. 

The sadhu in me questioned whether Kali Purusha would concern himself with so small a vessel, or possess the precision required to defile it so completely. These are mysteries upon which the Puranas remain regrettably silent. 

My wife, being Catholic, sided with the child.

Bath time. Brushing teeth. Getting undressed for bed. Cleaning up things that should not have been spilled, broken, drawn upon, vomited upon, or otherwise subjected to the creative energies of small children: A thousand little rituals repeated day after day.

None of them looked particularly spiritual, but that was part of the lesson.

And we all grew.  

When my children became teenagers, I made them a promise: “If you call me, I will come. No matter where you are or what your situation is, if you call me, I am coming. No questions asked.  I will pass through fire and water to reach you.”

Sometimes the bell was the phone.

And the practice was keeping a sworn oath.

The practice could not depend upon my life holding still long enough for me to practice. My children were growing. Their needs were changing. I was changing. So the ritual changed with us.

But the practice did not.

Show up.

Attend to what is in front of you.

Do what is required.

And tomorrow, when the bell rings - whatever the bell happens to be - begin again.

Somewhere in the midst of all those ordinary days, my practice had gradually become something powerful. What began as a small candle, barely flickering, had grown into a fire. I thought I was teaching myself to answer the bell. I did not yet understand what was growing in the space between its ringing. 

The children are grown now.

The bell has not relented.

In a strange way, my practice grew up alongside my children. Practice itself is something like a child. You do not bring a child into the world fully grown. You feed it. You make a place for it. You attend to it every day. At first it requires your deliberate attention simply to keep it alive. It grows in ways you did not anticipate. And, if you remain faithful to it, eventually it begins to have a life of its own.  It talks back to you. 

Practice is much the same.

Mine has had nearly forty years to grow. I am sometimes afraid of what it has become. Like my children, the practice I have cultivated now seems, in a real way, to have a life of its own. It calls me toward things and into places I could not have imagined in the beginning. I raised it carefully, but I no longer pretend that I am entirely in charge of it. 

These days there is room for other things, and sometimes I take extra practice -- or perhaps extra practice takes me. There are things I can do now that I could not do with small children around. Some practices are simply not suitable for infants, whether they are sleeping in your bed or still growing inside you. 

Some days I get up and sit zazen in a sauna at its maximum temperature for three hours. Some nights I may spend the entire night in Agni Sadhana. Some mornings I sleep scandalously late and don't get up until 4:00, and spend the morning studying sutras, scriptures, commentaries, poetry, philosophy, or whatever text has found its way into my hands. Sometimes I write. Some days I go alone into a particular wilderness and wear nakedness, ashes, and hunger beneath the sun all day or beneath the moon all night.  The path of the Dharmapala has taken me through all of these things, and through places for which no ritual prepared me. I do not always know what the path will require of me next. I have only learned to answer when it calls. 

One of the precepts says it plainly: “I do not know the way; the Way knows me.  I follow paths whispered up from the Earth…”

The practices themselves sound severe when collected together like this. Perhaps they are. But I did not begin with severity. I began by getting out of bed. I began by showing up. 

You must understand where you are on your own path. You cannot expect a practice that you have only just begun to sustain you through such things, any more than you can expect an infant to get out of bed at 3:00 AM and make its own breakfast.

If your practice is a child, give it ten minutes. Feed it every day. Let it grow.

One day you may wake at 3:00 in the morning and discover that the thing you once had to coax into existence is already awake and waiting for you.

You spent years calling it into being. Now it is the thing that calls you.

After enough years, you begin to wonder which of you called the other into being. 

Because, eventually, when the whole world is your living monastery, practice is no longer something you do.

It is something you become.

And so you get up.