One of the healthiest habits you can create for yourself, is a regular meditation practice.

And one of the truest and most useful sayings I came across many moons ago is:

“We first form habits, then habits form us. If we do not form healthy habits, we will unconsciously form unhealthy ones.”

Here’s a reminder of the many benefits of regular meditation:

• Reduces stress.
• Anxiety control.
• Promotes emotional health.
• Enhances self-awareness.
• Lengthens attention span.
• May reduce age-related memory loss.
• Can generate kindness.
• May help to fight addictions.
• It’s a core spiritual practice.

 

So how do we do this, with so many time-pressures from our daily life and our natural tendency to do nothing?

 

 

How to create a regular meditation practice

Focus on forming a daily meditation habit. This factor is the most important thing to do in the first few weeks and months.

Creating the habit of daily meditation practice is far more important than how long you sit for, what style you use or how good you think you are at it etc.

It can take anywhere from 18 to 254 days for a person to form a new habit, with an average of 66 days for a new behaviour to become automatic.

There’s no one-size-fits-all figure, which is why this time frame is so broad; some habits are easier to form than others, and some people may find it easier to develop new behaviours.

As a schedule example, say you have set yourself a goal of meditating for 30 minutes daily.

What if, instead of trying to use your willpower to get yourself to do this everyday right away, you formed a solid habit like the following schedule.

Week 1 – 5 minutes per day

Week 2 – 10 minutes per day

Week 3 – 15 minutes per day

Week 4 – 20 minutes per day

Week 5 – 25 minutes per day

Week 6 – 30 minutes per day

 

 

Why organise a regular meditation practice this way?

There are several important reasons, including:

• We only have so much will-power energy, once it runs out, we’re kind of stuck where we are.
• Habits, once formed, are harder to beak than to carry on. A good example is cleaning our teeth, we don’t think about it, we just do it.
• We’re no longer controlled by whether we feel like doing it or not.
• Meditation becomes our life-long companion

 

We receive many benefits of developing healthy habits, like a daily meditation practice. Also, our spiritual growth is a ripening process, which often progresses over many years, if we allow it.

Learning to form positive habits is a perfect antidote to our ‘I want it now!’ society, driven as it often is by the instinctive animal desires of our limited ego-mind. Insatiable urges driven on by a sales and marketing culture which seldom gives us a moment to breath.

Who will you be in two years? Or five years? Or twenty years? This is the vision of developing a daily meditation practice.

 

 

When the going gets tough

Life has its’ ups and downs. What do we have to support us when the going gets tough?

Regular meditation gives us a practice that helps to centre us; a safe refuge in the storm.

Without the safe refuge of a consistent meditation practice, we often end up just blindly reacting to what happens to us from the outside world.

Learn more about my online Meditation Course.

Why not treat yourself to a Meditation Retreat in the beautiful Devon Countryside?

Best Wishes,

David.

© D. R. Durham, All rights reserved, 2024.