How I finally picked up the habit of meditation.

Avinash M G
Nov 4 · 3 min read

Photo by Prasanth Inturi from Pexels

For the past four years, I was trying out new ways to improve my life. And one of them was meditation. Meditation was one of the mental exercises out there, which I wanted to make a habit of my life. I failed at that for a countless number of times, but for the past few months, I have been doing it consistently.
I knew how to meditate from 8th grade in school, but making it a habit was one of the challenging ones. When I started college, it was the first time I was away from my family. That gave immense responsibility to me. The organizers of my life, my parents disappeared suddenly from the picture. And it took me a while to realize that the chaos was eating me. I realized that I have to do something in order to bring back the order to life. And that’s when I started trying to build new habits.
But it was really tough, I never thought that it would be difficult to do something which I already knew. The first day was really great, I was able to do meditation for 20 minutes. The second day was okay, I managed to do the meditation for 20 minutes. But in a week my enthusiasm was lost and without even realizing, I had stopped meditating. After a few months again I felt like doing it, and I started doing meditation again. But the same pattern still followed. I was not able to push it beyond a week. I tried several times and failed, but recently I was able to make it a habit. I was able to push it beyond the 60-day mark. I believe that it’s few realizations about habit formation which made it happen, and I am listing it down.

Never focus on the goal. Focus on the path.
Whenever I failed I was not trying to do meditation, I was trying to push myself to the goal which I had set. I was focused on the goal, which was to do meditation for 30 days. And as few days passed by I felt like I am nowhere near the goal and that made me sad. Soon I gave up because for me to feel something good about meditation, I have to wait 30 days. But after reading the book Atomic Habits by James Clear, I started looking at it under a new light. I started focusing on the meditation itself. And this time I never kept a target for me to achieve. And somehow that helped.

Failure is not falling down but refusing to get up.
One of the reasons why I stopped meditating before was because due to some circumstance I was not able to do the meditation for a day or two. And failing to do for two days made me feel like I had lost because the goal was to do meditation for 30 continuous days. This time I told myself that it’s okay to skip a day or two, and that helped me get back to the habit without any regrets or guilt.

Like meditation I am sure that most of the skills that you want can be learned by making it a habit. Try using these above rules if you are starting to create a new habit. I would highly recommend the book Atomic Habits by James Clear if you are trying to improve your life.

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