When Practice Gets Smaller

August 2026 • Practice can become smaller without becoming less meaningful. Sometimes doing less helps reveal what we actually want to keep.

For a long time, I assumed that practice was supposed to grow.

If something mattered to me, I learned more about it. I practiced longer. I added another exercise, another form, another way of doing things.

This was especially true with Tai Chi and Qigong.

Over the years, I learned many different styles and systems. I practiced for hours at a time. I studied with different teachers, continued adding new material, and eventually spent many years teaching what I had learned.

Much of that was worthwhile. I enjoyed it, and I am glad I did it.

But somewhere along the way, my practice started moving in the other direction.

It got smaller.

I stopped trying to maintain everything I had learned. I kept a handful of practices I liked and let many others go. I stopped looking for new styles to study or new skills to master.

These days, Qigong is often something I do for about ten minutes before strength training. Tai Chi often comes afterward. Other times, I practice one or the other simply because I feel like doing it.

Walking has recently returned to my life too, but in a much smaller way than before. Decades ago, I regularly walked and hiked for many miles. Now I am starting again with short walks and letting the distance increase slowly.

None of this looks much like what I once thought serious practice was supposed to look like.

It would be easy to see that as a loss.

If two hours becomes twenty minutes, or fifty things become five, the usual assumption is that something has diminished.

Sometimes that may be true.

But a practice can also become smaller because you have become more selective about what you want to keep.

You may no longer need every form you learned. You may discover that a few familiar exercises are the ones you actually enjoy doing. You may stop trying to preserve an old routine just because it once mattered to you.

And you may find that the smaller practice still gives you much of what you valued in the larger one.

Perhaps it even gives you something the larger practice did not.

There can be less pressure to improve, less concern about keeping up, and less need to turn every interest into another project.

You can practice something because you like it.

You can walk the distance that fits today without measuring it against what you once could do.

You can keep a familiar form without needing to make it better.

You can do enough strength work to become stronger without making strength training the center of your life.

None of this means that progress is bad, or that a practice should always remain small.

I still like becoming stronger. I hope to walk farther over time. Sometimes I notice something in Tai Chi or Qigong that I want to explore a little more.

But those things no longer have to lead to more and more.

A practice can change with the person doing it.

Sometimes that means adding something. Sometimes it means returning to something you had neglected. Sometimes it means letting something go.

And sometimes it means discovering that what remains is enough.

That is one of the ideas I want to explore here.

Not how to make every practice as small as possible, but how to let a practice take the size and shape that fit your life now.