Ideally,
We would be meditating every day,
Consistently.
Perhaps as a morning time routine,
Perhaps as a night time routine,
But regardless,
We would be sitting in place,
Doing our chosen practice,
Day in and day out,
Regardless of life circumstances,
Regardless of motivation.
It's just something we do.
Like exercise,
We don't meditate to get better at meditating.
We don't exercise to get better at exercising.
We exercise to get healthy,
To be able to do our lives better,
To be able to function,
To be able to live longer,
To feel better.
So in the same way we meditate with a higher purpose than doing good meditation.
But even with all of these noble ideals,
Even with this intent,
When we're highly motivated,
The reality of our lives is such that sometimes we forget,
Sometimes we choose to avoid it,
Sometimes we don't want to.
And whilst all of this could be the subject of our meditation,
We could choose to investigate and introspect and focus on these blocks and use it to grow.
We don't always want to do that either.
So what I'm going to suggest to you today is that we look to gamify our meditation.
If you feel a little bit of a pullback at that word,
I just want you to sit with that for a little bit.
We're going to make it into a game because once again,
The best form of exercise is the exercise that you do just during your life.
If you're playing with friends or your kids or doing a sporting activity,
That's exercise,
But it's far more fun and engaging and fulfilling than treadmill work or weight work.
It's the exercise that just happens during the day,
As part of the day,
That you don't almost even notice.
So in the same way that you might exercise when playing games,
Let's work out some ways to gamify meditation for those days that motivation is a struggle.
So for this meditation,
We're going to be looking at mindfulness.
The basic approach is to pick a meditation object,
For example,
The sensations of the breath at the nose,
Or perhaps something that you see in your visual field,
The sounds you're hearing or the sensations of a part of your body.
It doesn't matter what you choose,
Just stick to it.
When your mind wanders,
You bring it back to that meditation object.
That's the practice.
Your mind wanders,
You bring it back.
Your mind wanders,
You bring it back.
Gently,
Calmly.
And the act of meditation is itself bringing it back to the meditation object.
Okay,
So that's a basic rundown of mindfulness.
But how can we gamify this?
There's a couple of ways.
The first one is just tracking our progress.
Get yourself a year-long calendar and put a big tick every day that you do your practice.
You might want to only practice for five minutes or two minutes,
Maybe 20 minutes.
Whatever goal you've set for your practice,
And if you don't have a goal,
Set a goal,
Put a little tick or a little M for meditation every day.
And the game is this,
Try and get as many ticks in a row.
And over time,
You will be successful,
And eventually that string of ticks will break.
When that happens,
That's okay.
Count up the ticks.
Count up the ticks and put your high score.
Maybe you got 14 days in a row.
That's your high score.
Your job now is to beat that high score,
Right?
Track how many days in a row.
That's one game.
But the next games are going to happen on the mat.
Get yourself a stopwatch and take a seat,
Prepare yourself,
Get into the position,
Maybe do some calm,
Relaxation breathing.
And when you decide to start,
Make the timer go.
And when the timer's traveling up,
Your job is to meditate for as long as possible.
And when you come to,
When you check in,
When you stop meditating,
Stop the stopwatch.
Notice how long you are able to stay focused for.
You might only last a couple of seconds.
That's fine.
You might last minutes.
That's also fine.
But once again,
In this game,
Your goal is to increase the time.
Your goal is to count up as high as possible.
Feel free to track this as well if you like.
And the final way you can gamify the meditation is to almost consider it a competition against yourself.
It's more of a reframing.
It's like a challenge against mire,
Against distraction.
Rather than sort of sitting there passively and just observing the breath,
You're sitting with the goal of like,
I'm going to hold on to this.
I'm going to maintain my focus.
I'm going to be very active in this approach.
And when distractions comes up in your mind,
When you notice it in the peripheral coming to the center,
You're like,
I see you.
I see you over there.
You're not going to distract me.
So you've got this dual focus focused on the breath and then also scanning the environment to make sure that you stay on task.
Now over time,
That approach and all of these approaches need to be let go of.
The meditation analogy of you've got a little splinter in your hand and how do you remove that splinter?
You get another splinter or a needle and pick it out and then eventually you have to discard those both of those needles,
Both of those splinters.
That's the analogy we're going for here.
That you have to discard all your practices and all your tools.
But remember our goal at the moment at least is to just get ourselves practicing consistently.
There's one final game in this game you need to do with a partner.
I call it eyeball wars.
I do it with my young son.
Once again,
It's mindfulness,
But it's a different sort of mindfulness and I'm framing it in a game for my son to keep him engaged.
The way you play is this.
You stare into one another's eyes,
You're allowed to blink,
But if you look away,
If you get distracted,
If you talk,
If you do anything but look at the other person's eyes,
You lose.
Maybe you see who can last the longest or you set a timer for the pair of you to last for five minutes,
Whatever you want to set it to.
You can either do it cooperatively,
Like encouraging each other to go for the distance,
Or competitively where you're trying to maintain that calm focus on their eyes.
You're observing their eyes,
You're seeing what you see.
Your mind starts to wander,
You bring it back to the focus of their eyes.
In this way,
It's not true traditional spiritual mindfulness,
But it's a very close approximation.
For a lot of us,
We're not at that level.
We need to discipline ourselves enough to just get seated daily.
Give those games a try and let me know how you go.
Have a great day.
