Taking Stock as a Skill

Marnie and I have been taking stock now that we’re empty nesters. With one kid in college and another in grad school, life is different. We’ve been talking about how to spend our days, how much to travel, and what our next house projects should be. That’s one kind of taking stock, and it’s the kind most people mean when they use the phrase colloquially.

But there’s a different kind of taking stock that takes less time. It’s an invitation to stop, feel the body, notice the mind, and then let what you find help determine what you do next. Rather than looking outward at how to spend our time, we look inward. Thānissaro Bhikkhu, from Metta Forest Monastery, calls this practice “taking stock.”

If you come to my classes often, you might recognize that I encourage taking this kind of internal inventory at the beginning of most of my yoga classes. This practice sounds easy, but doing it on a regular basis is not, especially since we spend most of our lives on autopilot.

It’s important to remember that checking in is only part of the practice. Plenty of us check in. We notice when we’re tired, wound up, or grumpy. Then we go do the thing we were going to do anyway.

The practice of taking stock ends with a choice. You ask: “given what I just found, what should I do now?” Maybe you send the email or close the laptop and go outside. Perhaps you say the harder true thing instead of the easier one. Whatever you notice informs your next move.

Break It Down

If you prefer a nice list of guidelines, here’s one that breaks this down:

1. Stop (“hammer time,” as the song goes). Interrupt whatever you’re doing, even for thirty seconds.
2. Check the body. Is there tension? Tiredness? Ease? The body isn’t an afterthought. It has information.
3. Check the mind. Is it still running? What mood is here? What direction are your thoughts pulling?
4. Decide. Given what you found, what’s the next skillful move? Sometimes the answer is “keep going.” Sometimes it’s, “uhhh, nope, not that.”

The fourth step is what turns this from awareness into practice.

A Study of Yourself

So much of daily life is outer activity: moving, doing, responding, planning, and the like. When the activity dies down, whether after a hard week or the end of a busy day, you’re left with what’s inside. Taking stock is a practice for reconnecting with yourself.

You have skillful potentials, like patience, generosity, or the ability to breathe through a hard moment. You have less skillful potentials, too, such as impatience, self-criticism, or the phone-first habit. The point of taking stock is a choice, not a judgment. You get to decide what you want to develop.

Patanjali has a word for something similar: svādhyāya, self-study. It’s one of the five niyamas, the personal disciplines that form the ground for practice. Taking stock is a kind of svādhyāya you can do in thirty seconds while the coffee brews. Different vocabularies for the same skill.

Where to Use It

In an ideal world, this would be a practice you do all day long, all the time. Constantly taking stock would be a pretty useful skill. But maybe to start, just try this practice at strategic points in your days. For instance, before you check your phone in the morning, you might consider if you really want to interrupt the peace of your morning, if that’s what you notice in your body and mind. I like to take stock before I respond to an email if I’m feeling even a hint of anger or frustration. Or perhaps you notice you’ve been scrolling for twenty minutes and don’t remember why. The chances to stop are virtually endless: before you take that next/first bite, in the middle of an intense project, or whenever something feels like it might be important.

This is a practice you can do in ordinary life without anyone noticing. You don’t need to close your eyes or get comfortable on your meditation cushion. You might just stop asking “how are you?” as a habit and start asking it as a real question. Or maybe you practice turning that question back to yourself.

An Invitation

There is no better time to start than … tomorrow morning (I bet you didn’t expect that). After you wake up, and before you reach for the phone, take thirty seconds to notice your body and notice your mind. Just see what’s there. Then decide what to do next.

If it honestly feels like it’s time to start scrolling, that’s information too. Take stock of that.