I want to suggest to you that motivation shouldn't be necessary to get you to meditate.
This is an interesting concept because a lot of the time,
A lot of what we do in life is driven by motivation.
We feel hungry,
We eat.
We feel tired,
We sleep.
We need money,
We work.
But for something like meditation or exercise,
A self-care,
A self-improvement sort of activity,
It's hard to just do it.
We wait until we're motivated and then we take the action.
This is better than nothing.
It's better to do a little bit or to do something rather than to do nothing.
But unfortunately,
If you wait for motivation,
If you wait until you have all of your ducks in a row,
Until the lights are all green to start meditating or to do your meditation practice,
Chances are you'll do not enough.
Chances are you won't be meditating that often.
Chances are it will be sporadic at best.
I want to propose an alternate approach to meditation.
One that takes away motivation or rather uses it to set you up to be able to meditate daily.
Rather than using your motivation that you have to meditate,
Perhaps even to click onto this track and listen to it,
Rather than using this motivation to meditate once,
Use that energy to establish a routine.
Use it to establish or to figure out a time in which you'll be able to work out when you can meditate daily.
When,
Where,
And how long?
When is the easiest to answer?
Morning,
Night,
Lunch break,
Somewhere that you know you will have some time to yourself consistently.
Personally,
I do it in the morning.
I wake up,
I get my coffee,
Go to the toilet,
All of that sort of stuff.
Then I sit down and meditate.
Then I go exercise.
That's my morning routine.
I do it every day.
For other people,
That doesn't work.
They need to do it at night before bed or during a lunch break or as they arrive or just as they're leaving work.
They peg it to something.
Maybe they drop the kids off at school and in their car they do a five-minute session.
Speaking of duration,
So you've worked out when you're going to do it,
You need to work out how long you're going to do it for.
I suggest to people to start small,
Even as small as one minute a day,
Just one minute.
You've got that time.
You can squeeze that in.
That won't detract from you doing these longer sporadic sessions.
By all means,
Do them.
But also,
Every day,
Do a one-minute session,
Just one minute.
When that's locked in,
Build it up to two and then three and then four.
I do 20 minutes a day.
Any more and I find that too much of time has been spent on the activity and it takes away from my other tasks.
But 20 minutes is a good one for me.
But I didn't start there.
I built up to 20 minutes.
I'm suggesting that you do too.
Start small,
Build up because it's easy to start off with heaps of motivation once again,
But when that motivation wanes and you're sitting there for a long time,
You're like,
Oh my God,
I don't have the time for this.
Maybe you don't.
Cut it back down.
But cut it to a time that you know you can do.
That's why I build it up.
One minute,
Lock it in.
Do one minute for a couple of weeks,
Maybe a month,
Then two minutes for a month,
Then three minutes for a month and so on.
After a year,
You're meditating for 12,
13,
15,
20 minutes,
Right?
But it doesn't feel like it's taking too much time.
The final thing I would suggest would be to track your progress.
Make sure you are doing it daily.
Get yourself a calendar,
A yearly calendar,
And put a little M or a little tick on every single day that you meditate and see how long you can get that string of ticks to go.
Now,
In this way,
What you're doing is you're taking motivation out of the picture.
It makes meditation just something that you do in the same way that you will eat and drink and sleep and do all of the other things that you should do for your mind and your body.
You're making meditation into that thing and you're forcing yourself to do it based on the fact that it's a habit,
That it's a routine.
Because once again,
You may not be motivated.
An exercise analogy works well here.
Sometimes we love the idea of exercise,
We just want to move our body,
We've got this excess burst of energy.
Other days we don't,
But we still should do something every day.
The cumulative benefits of doing a practice every day cannot be understated.
Same is true for meditation.
Doing it every so often is great,
But doing it every day is significantly better.
So I implore you,
Use the motivation that you have now,
Not to just sit and meditate once,
But to establish,
To figure it out,
To work out where you're going to meditate,
When you're going to meditate,
And how long.
In terms of where,
Pick a spot where you won't be interrupted.
In terms of when,
Work out a time that works best for you.
Morning,
Noon,
Night,
Peg it to a behavior,
However you figure it out,
Lock it in.
And start with a small amount of time.
Start at one minute and build it up and up and up until it's set.
Yeah?
Do that now.
And have a great day.
