New Year, New You, New Meditation Resolution?

If you’ve made a resolution to meditate every day, how’s it going?  If you’ve managed to make time, well done you and give yourself a huge pat on the back.  If you’re struggling to fit it in, then I’m hoping this blog will help.

I think sometimes we can come up with a lot of good intentions and then, as soon as the reality hits, we can find that we’re not doing what we set out to do.  Then it’s very tempting to just give up altogether.

But if we want to understand why we’re not using mindfulness, we can always use…  um…  mindfulness.  Here are two approaches…

1.  Take a look at the intention behind the resolution and then examine what’s getting in the way.

For example, we may think that if we’re going to meditate every day it has to be an hour.  If we don’t then find an hour for it, we might decide not to bother at all.

But it’s usually possible to find five minutes.  Maybe even ten.  And it’s a lot easier to build that into the daily routine, and then add to it when you’re ready to do so.

Changing habits isn’t easy.  Forming habits in the first place is the way that we learn to exist, so they are tied to our drive for survival.  Suddenly deciding to switch habits rarely works, for that reason.

2.  Take a look at the habit and bring curiosity to what is driving you to perform it.

We have developed, over the years, a number of habits that have helped us to manage our lives.  They have become embedded at a level that is beneath consciousness.  Some of them are positive and some not so much.

That’s not to say we can’t use consciousness to change them, but we do have to work with ourselves and not against.

Let’s imagine that you have a habit of watching TV as soon as you get in from work.  You want to put a meditation in there, but you get in, and you’re feeling tired, and maybe you’ll just watch five minutes… and then… you’ve watched for an hour and it’s time to cook or go out, or some other part of your daily routine.  Expecting yourself to not watch every day when you have watched every day for the past goodness-knows-how-long, is going to be tricky.  And here’s where we can use mindfulness to help.

Whether the habit is TV, or reading, or scrolling on your phone, or eating, or gaming, or a combination of these, or something else, you have come to this because it serves you in some way.  You may think it’s not serving you now, and you may really want to change it, but there’s a pull to do it, otherwise you wouldn’t be practising this activity regularly.

We need to spend a bit of time with that pull.  Instead of a formal mindfulness meditation, we could just spend a few moments investigating why there is such a pull to do this thing.

Notice what happens when you play with the idea of not doing the activity.  Bring your awareness into your body. Notice if there is an area of tension in your heart, say, or your solar plexus.  Perhaps somewhere else.  Make an agreement with yourself that you will spend a few minutes feeling this feeling, before you go on to the habit.

Be gentle.  Be curious.  Be kind to yourself.  Do you know what this feeling is?  Our body sensations are closely tied to our emotions.  So what is the emotion?  If it comes to you, great, if it doesn’t, don’t push.  See instead if there are any thoughts arising as you pay attention to your physical sensations.  Notice.  Don’t try to push the thoughts away.  Become an observer of them.

Perhaps write them down.

When you have spent a few minutes doing this, you may have a much clearer idea of why you feel so compelled to perform this daily habit.  Or you may have simply opened an area for enquiry.  Something to pick up again tomorrow, when TV time comes around again.

In this way we can use mindfulness to develop a mindfulness habit.  And also come to have a little more power over the habits that are already there.  Gradually, it may become easier to decide against that particular habit on some days.  And gradually, the habit of mindful enquiry might become more compelling, more embedded, until, very naturally, it just becomes a part of daily life, in the way that TV used to do.

We need to be gentle with ourselves.  We need to be kind.  We need to bring these things in in ways that don’t challenge our survival strategies.  And if we think of it that way, we may find that we can introduce a new habit very successfully, by working with the habits we already have, bringing enquiry to them, and then building on them, rather than trying to shoehorn something in that may, initially, seem like it’s going against what we’ve already built.

New Years Resolutions are not doomed to fail.  Unless we work against ourselves to fit them in.  If we look at the habits we have, we may find that by bringing curiosity to them we are able to let them go.