How I Finally Developed a Meditation Habit
If you’re anything like me, you’ve probably read about and heard endlessly about the benefits of meditation and mindfulness: peace of mind, enlightenment, patience, and all these other virtues that we are seeking. Then I had a conversation with Bhuddist coach and author Susan Piver and she said something that kind of rocked my world
Meditation is not a life hack.
Huh? I thought the whole point of meditating was to optimize my brain to do all these other things in my life.
The conversation I had with Susan made me realize that we have to come to our meditation practice without an agenda.
Meditation in other words is not a means to an end. It is the end. The point of the practice is the practice
The other thing that convinced to me to finally sit down and give a meditation practice a shot, was a chat with my friend and mentor Greg Hartle. He told me that “human beings are the only species with the capacity to pause between stimulus and response.” And the key to developing that capacity? Meditation.
Now that I was convinced, all I had to do was start meditating.
Chances are you’ve probably sat down to meditate and had all these thoughts
“I’ve got to be doing this wrong
“Shit this is taking way too long”
“Damn it this is boring”
“That girl or guy in the coffeeshop was hot”
“Why the hell am I having so many thoughts”
“Oh yah my breathing”
“WTF”
“F#$#k it, lets see what’s on redditt”
If you meditate under the assumption that somehow you’re magically going to make all these thoughts stop you’ll never start. Unless your brain dead, the thoughts are not going to stop. The biggest hindrance for me was wondering if I was doing something wrong. I think that’s something we all wrestle with when it comes to a meditation practice.
Another thing that I struggled with was the idea that I had to sit there for 30 mins doing nothing. As somebody with the attention span of a 5-year-old, this was too much of an undertaking. After reading Susan’s newest book Be Hear Now, I realized that consistency mattered more than the length of the practice. I started with 2 mins a day, worked my way up to 5, and now I’m up to 10 mins each day, and have kept it up for well over 30 days.
Download an app like calm or headspace and just sit with your eyes closed. Try 2 mins each day for a week, then go to 5. Eventually it won’t seem like it’s taking forever.
Once you realize that meditation is not a means to an end or a “life hack” you’ll be able to develop a practice more easily.
Listen to the Unmistakable Creative Interview with Susan Piverr
I’m the host and founder of The Unmistakable Creative Podcast. Every Sunday we share the most unmistakable parts of the internet that we have discovered in The Sunday Quiver. Receive our next issue by signing up here
