In light of solidifying good habits, I’ve set out to try and finally establish meditation as a daily practice. So far, I’m 7 consecutive days in.
To assist in getting these habits to stick, I’m using a combination of techniques that coincide with the 4 components I outlined yesterday. To recap:
- A plan
- Skin in the game
- Direct feedback
- A dedicated time of day
I wanted my plan/goal for meditation to be a little bit more than simply “10 minutes a day, every day”. So I have thrown in a little bit more specificity and randomness to make the goal more enticing.
You see, I live very close to Golden Gate Park here in San Francisco. The park is not only quite large (more than 1,000 acres), but it has a lot of benches scattered throughout, which makes for excellent meditation settings.
As such, my goal is to not only meditate every day for 10 minutes, but to find a new bench every day to practice the meditation.
This adds an element of “newness” to each meditation sitting, which keeps the practice fresh and exciting every single day.
As far as having skin in the game goes, I’m not quite there yet.
Right now, I’m using the free guided meditations from the Headspace app. My plan is to eventually subscribe to the full package of guided meditations in Headspace, though I’m not quite sure when I’ll take the plunge.
I’m confident that the sooner I do it though, the more likely it is that this habit will stick.
The app has been great for feedback purposes. At the very least, I can see how many total minutes I’ve meditated. Plus, I can determine how I feel throughout the rest of the day to see what kind of impact meditation is actually having on my life.
Finally, I’m making this a part of my morning routine. Sure, I get started on my work an hour later than I normally would, but the hope is that my work day will be much more efficient because I took the time in the morning to practice meditation, and really just take in the fresh air and beauty of the place that I live.
I don’t imagine I will live in this great location forever. So while I’m here, I may as well take full advantage of it.