I have followed and taught on the work on Spiritual Disciplines by Richard J. Foster and Dallas Willard. Some people call them Spiritual Practices due to negative connotations of the word discipline.
If you have tried to develop a regular practice of study, prayer, meditation, and silence and found it difficult to sit every day, or even every other day, then you have met what the writer Steven Pressfield calls The Resistance. He defines it in his classic book for creative people The War of Art.
He discussed it recently in his email newsletter. “We have a practice in order to confront and overcome Resistance. A practice by definition defeats Resistance because it produces work every day with total focus and dedication. And a practice is lifelong, so we know we’ll never quit.”
He explains further with thoughts that should help us in our own spiritual practice if we but infuse them into our lives:
I was years into the act of having a practice before I even thought about its efficacy as a strategy to overcome my own Resistance. Resistance was (and is) a given for me. It wakes up with me. I know I will have to face it every day, and I know it will never diminish or relent or go away. But I have a practice. That’s all I need to know. I know at a certain time of day I will go into a certain room. I will enter with a very specific mindset, i.e. “Leave your problems (and your ego) outside.” And I will engage in a very specific (though infinitely varied in the moment) enterprise. I have left Resistance outside as well. It is not allowed into the space where my writing practice takes place.
Faith Venture 
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