I recently hit the milestone of meditating for 365 days in a row.
I am so pleased with myself.
I first started meditating (off my own bat, not when told to in a yoga class) probably 15 years or more ago, and up til this past year, the most I ever did in a row was around 21 days.
I never even believed it possible I’d meditate every day for a year.
I can relax now though, and maybe miss a day (once I got past 200 days, it felt like it would be criminal to stop now when I’d got so far!).
Am I zen?
Am I hell!
Am I calmer?
Certainly.
Am I less stressed?
Yes.
Am I taking better care of myself physically, mentally, emotionally, spiritually, and energetically?
Much.
Am I ace at meditation now?
Nope.
I still fidget, and fuss, and my mind wanders, and I look at the clock thinking “it’s only been 5 minutes? Really?”, I still resist doing it, I still have some really bad meditations.
By which I mean: days when I don’t feel calm and relaxed afterwards, where the guided meditation annoys me rather than soothing me, where I’ve struggled to relax physically and mentally.
The difference is now, that when I do all that, I don’t worry about it.
Because I know that some days you feel like a Zen master, and some days you fall asleep and wake up 2 hours later, and some days you just want to get it over with, and some days you feel like a total beginner.
But it’s all OK.
Because you show up anyway, and you practice.
It’s a meditation practice.
And slowly, it gets easier to relax the body and mind.
It gets easier to stop in the middle of a busy day.
It gets easier to say yes to meditation instead of ‘manyana’.
And the benefits (that you always knew meditating had) become glaringly obvious and it gets harder to justify not doing your practice.
And before you know it, your handy little app tells you it’s been 365 days.
(If you want to start a meditation practice, I highly recommend Insight Timer – the free version is awesome, and without that app I would never have made it to a year.)
Do you have a meditation practice?
Do you want one?
If you start now, in 365 days you could be saying ‘hey, I’ve done a year of meditating every day’!
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