Hey everybody,
Welcome to Bringing Meditation to Life,
A podcast in which we immerse ourselves in the intersection of meditation and everyday life,
In which we look at the ways meditation illuminates and deepens our experience of daily living and the ways life itself does the same for our practice.
I'm your host,
Neil McKinlay.
I walked a lot in the time before COVID.
This wasn't anything deliberate or intentional,
Really.
I simply liked moving around in this way.
Between going to work and the beach and wandering the neighborhood and picking up groceries,
It all added up to,
Well,
It added up to enough.
I wasn't really consciously aware of the fact.
I felt good about the amount of movement in my life.
It was,
As noted,
Good enough.
With the restrictions and limitations of COVID,
However,
This gradually changed.
Both the frequency and the duration of my walk eroded over a span of several months,
And by the fall of 2020,
I no longer felt good about the amount of movement in my life.
It was,
Apparently,
No longer enough.
A few vague attempts to remedy this situation had little to no effect.
Broad admonitions to walk more did nothing to alter my behavior.
And at a certain point,
I began to wonder if some more precise and objective,
One might say some more rigorous means of holding and measuring my walking routine might exist.
This was when I remembered the step counting app that came bundled in my phone.
This was when I started to regularly track my daily and weekly and monthly step count.
It took a while for me to remember to always take my phone with me when I left the house.
It took a while for me to get a sense of what might be a reasonable number of steps to aspire to each day.
I soon did both these things,
However,
And before long,
That sense of enoughness had returned.
That sense of enoughness had returned,
And I once again felt good about the amount of movement in my life.
For me,
This situation has many parallels with our attempts to establish and maintain a regular meditation practice in our lives.
People commonly ask me,
How do I do this?
How do I establish a regular practice routine?
While I don't believe there is one infallible,
Definitive reply to this inquiry,
Finding ways to assure the enoughness of our practice does seem to be a helpful piece of the overall puzzle.
And while sometimes a relatively informal approach to daily practice seems adequate for us to realize this enoughness,
That is,
An approach that features a broad and general commitment to practice,
At some point today,
For instance,
While sometimes this does seem adequate,
At other times in our life we need something more precise.
We need something more objective and rigorous.
We need the equivalent of a meditative step counter.
This might take the form of a precise time of day that we practice,
Or a precise length of time that we practice for.
It might involve taking a class or a workshop,
Or making shared commitments with a friend.
It might be anything,
Really,
That gives definitive shape to our daily practice routine,
That provides that sense of holding and guidance that sometimes seems necessary for all of us.
Discerning what,
Exactly,
This anything will be.
Well,
This,
Of course,
Is ours to discern,
As is the broader question of whether we need to adopt a relatively open and informal approach to daily practice,
Or a more rigorous step counter-like approach.
As is,
For that matter,
The question of just what constitutes enough for us.
This is all part of the task and challenge and journey of discovery that I like to call bringing meditation to life.
Thanks for listening,
Everybody.
As always,
You can learn more about myself and my work at my website,
Neilmckinley.
Com.
Till next time,
Take care,
And be well.
Let's keep doing this work together.
Let's keep bringing meditation to life.
