Five Keys To A Sustainable Meditation Practice

What to do when your practice feels wobbly...

“The key to dealing with resistance is not to try to fight it, but bring it along with you. Name the resistance and welcome it. Make a seat for your resistance next to you at your meditation spot. Every experience has a place on the cushion, especially resistance.“

Recently, on an episode of The Road Home podcast, I shared five keys to making meditation practice more sustainable. That’s something that people are often looking to do in January each year, as we set new intentions and aspirations for the 12 months ahead. But it's also good to revisit what makes our practice sustainable a little later in the year, when our habitual momentum has gotten the best of us and we feel a little bit lost. With the world beneath and around us feeling more like a fast-moving earthquake than a stable ground, I thought I would share these five keys in writing. You can check to see which of these five is present in your practice right now, and which you might want to reconnect with.

1. Read, Listen, or Watch Something to Get (Re-)Inspired - usually when the ideas that form the backbone of meditation practice feel fresh and vibrant in our mind, we have the energy to show up because we remember why practice helps us. It might be a conceptual metaphor that animates us, like someone describing what it feels like to live in awareness. Or it might be a model of the teachings: remembering the voice of a teacher or leader, or friend who inspires us on the path, and gives us a feeling of possibility when we remember them. Or it might be a story someone tells about their struggle with a difficult mind-state, like depression or rage, that connects you to the humanity of your own struggle. So, my first piece of advice is to read, watch, or listen to something that has already inspired you in the past. Revisit something that led you to work with your mind and be more present with yourself and your world at an earlier stage of your journey. The first book that inspired me when I was a teenager was The Myth of Freedom by Chogyam Trungpa. You could take a book and reread a few pages or a chapter or two. You could revisit a podcast about psychology, neuroscience, spiritual life, or Buddhist principles.

   
   You could also get re-inspired by hearing about somebody who used these contemplative practices and did amazing things to make the world a better place. It could also be reminding yourself of the subtle ways you have felt different or shown up more fully in your life when your practice was consistent the last time. The last time I practiced every day for a week, how did I feel at the end of the week? No matter what, reflecting on, and revisiting previous inspirations is always helpful to give yourself a “power up” to commit to your practice more regularly.
   

2. Memorize Simple Practice Instructions - this one can be a little bit controversial because over the past 10 to 15 years so many people have started using guided meditation instructions or apps, rather than learning practice techniques on their own and guiding themselves through a session once they are familiar with the technique at hand. But one of the classic obstacles in mindfulness meditation is forgetting what you are doing on the meditation seat, and there’s some aspect of memorization that will always be the key to immersing yourself in a practice. Remembering what you’re doing is as important as remembering why. It's true for playing music, it's true for yoga asanas and it's definitely true for Meditation. Mindfulness of breath meditation has three or four basic steps, depending on who is teaching. In the Tibetan tradition, there are seven points of seated meditation posture that it’s nice to go through when you take your seat as a quick body scan. There are many other instructions for different techniques, but whatever instructions you’re working with, it’s good to have them memorized in a few words per step. 1. Take Your Seat and arrange your posture. 2. Check In with Your Mind. 3. Begin gathering your mind to each easeful breath. 4. When you’re lost in thought, note “thinking” gently and shift attention back to the next breath. Other techniques might have more steps, but it’s good to know them like a recipe you’ve cooked before, whatever technique you decide to do.
   
   Sometimes it really is the repetition of the practice with memorized instructions in mind that helps get us into the space where the practice is in our muscle memory, and it’s from this place that we can start feeling confident enough to do it every day on our own.
   

3. Commit to An Attitude of Friendliness and Self-Compassion, No Matter What. In the book The Road Home (back in 2014, when Facebook was slightly less absolutely dystopian) I said that meditation is about “Accepting Your Own Friend Request.” This turn of a phrase was about that lighthearted curiosity of a new friendship, which is exactly what that it takes to appreciate, and even occasionally enjoy (imagine that), the practice. The people who tend to make meditation part of their daily life are genuinely curious about the way their mind works, sometimes even to the point of fascination with perception, emotion and awareness. On the other hand, if you consider meditation an act of trying to wrestle a wild beast into submission, it's just not going to be fun, period. It’s going to be fruitless work that leaves you tired and maybe even feeling ashamed, because wrestling your mind is like wrestling outer space. You don’t have to wrestle, you just have to give awareness a quiet space to be itself. Sure, settling the mind is a great outcome of meditation, but settling tends to work the way gravity works — at its own time and pace. Sometimes it takes a long retreat to even turn down the volume of thoughts the tiniest bit. But that’s not the job of a daily practice. Your job in a 10-20 minute sit is to develop a gentle attitude of staying with yourself, which requires a lot more curiosity and friendship than aggression. Let your perfectionism take the day off and just see what happens if you take a genuine interest in whatever your mind does.

   
   This attitude is also crucial in working with your resistance to practice. The key to dealing with resistance is not to try to fight it, but bring it along with you. Name the resistance and welcome it. Make a seat for your resistance next to you at your meditation spot. Every experience has a place on the cushion, especially resistance.
   
   
   

4. Connect With Rituals of Practice - you don't need to have any religious or spiritual affiliation to do these practices. But we've possibly lost something in our rush to present mindfulness without any spiritual background. We may have lost a lot of things in fact.One thing we lost is an experience of the sacredness of having ceremonies of practice that make the practices come to life and give them a container of “specialness” so we actually want to do them. These containers and rituals don't have to be a big deal. In fact, if ceremony becomes too big a deal, we often spend more time on the ceremony than doing the actual practices that we are here to do. In establishing a simple, sacred container, the three things I do every time I sit down are: 1) make sure my devices are silent, and in another room (and exception to this would be if you prefer to practice with a guided meditation, which is totally fine as I said above). 2. Light candles and offer incense to unseen beings and ancestral protectors (I know, woo af, but it works!). 3) Close with a bow to honor my effort to show up. I also do opening and closing chants from my Buddhist lineage of practice, but that’s highly optional. Don’t overload the rituals you choose, but whatever rituals feel right to you, make sure you do them to help build the “container” of your practice!
   

5. Community (Sangha) - This is one is the most straightforward in theory, and the hardest in practice. We live in a highly individualistic society, and we’ve all been engrained with the belief that success or failure are matters of great individual effort. Look, I work hard and I know that personal effort will take you far in life. But personal effort is always based on the company we keep. Putting yourself in community with people who are practicing will make the effort so much easier. It’s pretty simple - If all your friends are going to the bar, there’s a much higher likelihood you’re going to be drinking. If they’re hiking, a better chance you’ll get outside. If you have friends who meditate, you can help each other, and hold each other accountable in a positive way for your practice. Community is more crucial now than ever before, and it also happens to be the way to make sure you meditate on a regular basis.

   
   Later this month for paid subscribers I’ll offer a guided audio meditation, and there will be an invite to a group meditation and Q&A on Thursday mornings starting April 3, 8-9am ET, if you want a little online help with the community piece.

It’s March of an absolutely insane —and perhaps revolutionary — year. It’s a good time to recalibrate practice if it’s fallen off the rails recently, chances are more than one of these five things are missing. Perhaps this week, you can think of emphasizing just one of these five, and how it helps you ground more in daily meditation practice.

Please consider supporting this work (the podcast and substack) with an annual membership or a founding membership if you’re able. Coming up on the public The Road Home podcast later this week was my interview with Dharma teacher Susan Piver on the Heart Sutra. Coming up for paid subscribers is a conversation with astrologer Juliana McCarthy about Buddhist prophesies of this current dark age and what might lie beyond this historical moment. Later in March month for paid subscribers I’ll offer a guided audio meditation, and there will be an invite to a group meditation and Q&A on Thursday mornings starting April 3, 8-9am ET.