Just Sit: The Mindful15 Guided Meditations

 

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Sometimes, meditation feels like a struggle, but the points where we feel challenged are typically the best opportunities for growth in our practice. I know, if I’m feeling restless, bored, upset, frustrated… there’s something I need to learn to accept, something to which I need to apply non-judgemental awareness.

It can be difficult to sit on those challenging days, and very tempting to get up and and walk away. Of course, if you get up, you miss the opportunity to learn. Sometimes, a little attitude shift, a little re-orientation, is all that’s needed to keep you sitting in meditation.

This episode is inspired by what I learned in a guided meditation by Gil Fronsdal of the Insight Meditation Center in California. Gil is an inspiring and helpful meditation teacher. I listen to him regularly, and you can find his guided meditations and dharma talks at audiodharma.org.

 

This Week's Peaceful Moment

 

In the meditation, Gil coached us to find ease in our meditation, to sit easily with our breath. And, he said, if something came up to disturb this sense of ease, we could try to find ease with it, too. This coaching allowed me to relax into distractions and allow them to be present without feeling any dis-ease over their presence.

Would you like to give it a try?

Let's try a guided meditation with a build-in reflection period

For a 12-minute guided meditation to bring ease to your practice, forward the podcast or the video above to 1:24.

Next Week:

I hope you were able to cultivate a sense of ease during our meditation.  Don’t forget we publish a new mindfulness lesson every week on the Mindful15 Podcast. Next week, I’ll show you how to bounce back after a pause in your meditation practice.

If you’d like a reminder email, just go to mindful15.com/subscribe and subscribe to our newsletter. I’ll let you know when new lessons are online and I’ll also send you a free deep relaxation along with a copy of Your Meditation Action Plan, our step-by-step guide to building a healthy meditation habit that lasts a lifetime.

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At the end of some of my guided meditations, I coax you to set an intention to take your mindful state of mind with you as you move from the meditation into the rest of your day. But, why bother? Because setting an intention helps to lead you where you want to go.

Intention matters. In a study of long term meditators, D. H. Shapiro found that the results meditators achieved correlated with their intentions (1). Those who intended to pursue self-exploration achieved self-exploration. Those who wanted self-regulation attained self-regulation.

It’s easy to use intention to your advantage. Here are three ways to use intentions in your mindfulness practice:

1. Use intention to focus or to overcome obstacles during meditation

If, for example, you find it challenging to sit for 10 minutes, you might start today’s session by setting the intention to sit for the full 10 minutes no matter what comes up for you in meditation. You might set a timer for 10 minutes, get into meditation posture, close your eyes, focus on your breath, and say to yourself, “I intend to meditate until the bell sounds.”

You can go even further and add an intention about how you plan to deal with a challenge, “I intend to meditate until the bell sounds, and if I begin to feel restless, I will take one deep, relaxing breath.”

Setting an intention puts you in a mind set. It focuses your attention on what you want to accomplish. And, it can help remind you of an obstacle-handling strategy you want to apply.

Here’s another example. Perhaps you routinely find yourself getting frustrated or upset when a thought distracts your attention during meditation. You know that your reaction is not helpful, so you set this intention at the beginning of your meditation session: “I intend to be patient and kind with myself whenever I notice negative reactions to thoughts.”

 

This Week's Peaceful Moment: A Robin

 

2. Use intention to perform your daily activities mindfully

Intentions related to mindful daily activities can be broad or tightly-focused. First thing in the morning, for example, you might set an intention for the entire day: “I intend to be mindful of my reactions to other people today,” or “I intend to take three mindful breaths each time I pass through a doorway.”

But, you can also be quite specific: “During this meeting, I intend to be mindful of what Sanya says so I can truly understand her point of view.

3. Use intention to strengthen meditation habit-building efforts

If you’re working on creating a meditation habit, intentions can boost your efforts. In this case, you might use the same intention every day for several days or weeks, reinforcing your overall goal: “I intend to practice meditation today,” or “I intend to remember to reward myself once I’ve meditated.”

No matter what kind of intention you create, once you’ve set it, don’t ruminate about it, or fret over whether you’ll achieve it. Set it deliberately and then relax into it.

Reference:

Shapiro, D.H. (1992). A preliminary study of long term meditators: Goals, effects, religious orientation, cognitions. Journal of Transpersonal Psychology, 24(1), 23–39.

Invitation to meditate

For a 12-minute guided meditation including intention setting, forward the podcast or the video above to 2:07.

Next Week:

To follow up on our discussion about intention, next week, we’re going to explore goals. Do you have a meditation goal? Should you? Is it okay if your goal is different from some...

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In last week’s episode, I gave you some tips for boosting your willpower so you could reach your meditation goal, or any self-improvement goal for that matter. Today, I want to describe a method that takes willpower out of the equation altogether.

Willpower ebbs and flows and sometimes it’s just not strong enough to sustain your self-improvement efforts. Habits, on the other hand, are steady and automatic. Once established, they require no effort, and no willpower. The dictionary definition of “habit” is: A regular tendency or practice, especially one that’s hard to give up.

And, isn’t that exactly what you’re looking for? You want your goal-directed activity to be hard to give up so that you don’t have to struggle to make yourself perform it. So, let me show you how to create a helpful habit.

 

Habits have three components:

The cue - the thing that triggers the habitual action

The behaviour - the action that you want to perform habitually

The reward - the benefit of performing the behaviour

 

For example, let’s take my morning tooth brushing habit:

Cue: I get out of bed

Behaviour: I brush my teeth

Reward: My mouth feels fresh and clean, and that feels pleasant

 

To create a robust new habit, a meditation habit for example, you need to structure each of the three components carefully. Here’s how you do it.

Select the right cue

A cue is a strong impetus to perform the behaviour. It leads directly to the behaviour. If you want a behaviour to become routine, you need to set up a strong, reliable cue.

And, what’s stronger and more reliable than a habit? Although your cue could be something like an alarm, using a habit as a cue is much more effective. For example, let’s say you walk your dog every morning. You do it every day, without thinking about it, without struggle. It’s a habit. You might choose to chain your new meditation habit to your walk. Immediately after you return home from walking your dog, you meditate.

Effectively, you’re harnessing the power of one habit to create another.

 

Peaceful Moment of the Week

 

Select the right behaviour

Take care to choose the right behaviour. You want to succeed in performing the behaviour every time, because when you succeed, you get a reward and the reward is what strengthens the habit. If you fail in performing the behaviour, you get no reward and you’ll likely weaken the habit.

To begin with, select a behaviour that is so easy to perform that you cannot fail. For example, if you’re trying to establish a workout routine, you might choose to do one squat. Yes, just one. Of course, one squat per day won’t get you physically fit, but it’s where you need to begin to establish the habit. Once the habit is firmly in place, you can ramp up your performance, adding more and more exercise.

This might be the most difficult advice to follow, because it may feel like a simple behaviour isn’t worth doing, and because you might be anxious to achieve results. But, it’s the best strategy.

If you start by choosing a complex or challenging behaviour, there’s a good chance your mind will resist doing it. The human brain is evolutionarily primed to avoid exerting effort, so resistance is likely. If you give in to resistance, you’ll fail to perform the behaviour, and you’ll weaken the habit. Willpower may see you through for a while, but remember, willpower isn’t reliable. It’s highly likely that you’ll quit at some point and fail to sustain the habit.

 

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It’s the middle of December, time to begin crafting your new year’s resolutions. Or, maybe you don’t ever make them. Today’s episode, however, is not specifically about new year’s resolutions. It’s about reaching your self-improvement goals at any time of the year. Of course, on Mindful15, I make the assumption that your goals involve meditation, but the discussion here can be applied to any kind of goal setting initiative.

Gearing up for positive change can be exciting. Maybe you’ve read a self help book (or 10) full of testimonials showing just how effective the author’s method is and now you’re imagining how wonderful life will be when you reach your goal. In other words, you’re highly motivated and you feel a sense of excitement, maybe even exhilaration. You can’t wait to get started.

But motivation fades quickly, especially when accompanied by a high degree of excitement. You just can’t sustain that level of emotion for very long, so you can’t rely on it to drive your effort. Motivation drops when you come face to face with the fact that the goal you want to achieve requires long, regular, or maybe even difficult work that doesn’t feel particularly exciting or energizing.

Then what do you do? You fall back on willpower, the ability to control your behaviour and delay gratification to achieve long term rewards.

But willpower fluctuates. Sometimes it’s strong. Other times it’s weak. It’s just not a reliable way to foster goal achievement, and that’s why so many of us fail to make our resolutions stick.

How to boost willpower

Willpower involves decision-making. It’s the ability to decide to perform goal-directed activities over other options. If you consistently perform such activities, you’ll eventually reach your goal. If you don’t, you won’t. The problem, of course, is that these activities may not be what you want to do in the moment. Exercising willpower feels a bit like forcing yourself to take the right action instead of the fun/easy action. It can be hard to do.

One of the best ways to boost willpower is to remove choice, or reduce the amount of choice so that it’s easier to choose the goal-directed activity. Here are a couple of strategies that help:

1. Limit the number of options

If, for example, your goal is to exercise first thing every morning for 30 minutes, pick one exercise routine that you will perform every day, pre-select the place where you’ll exercise, and schedule a consistent daily exercise time. You can even select the workout clothes you’ll wear.

Make these decisions up front and stick to them for several weeks. This eliminates the need to make all these little decisions every day. The only decision left is whether to exercise or not. This still requires willpower, but you’ll not have depleted your willpower with the effort of choosing how, where, and when to exercise.

You can use the exact same technique with meditation. Decide what time of day you’ll meditate, choose a specific guided meditation to use every day, which will also constrain you to a specific amount of meditation time every day. Decide up front where you’ll mediate and even what you’ll wear. Stick to this plan for several weeks.

 

This Week's Peaceful Moment

 

2. Design your environment to make choices easier

Designing the environment involves optimizing all the conditions required to ensure you perform the goal-directed activity. Make it as easy as possible to do what you need to do...

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Do you ever have trouble sleeping? Do you find yourself lying in bed with thoughts of the day churning in your mind? A mindful evening routine can help calm your mind and improve your sleep quality.

Last week, I shared strategies for creating a mindful morning routine that sets you up for a relaxing day. Today, I want to provide tips for creating a mindful evening routine that lets you slow down, decompress, and sleep well.

Strategy 1 - Wind down slowly

It’s unreasonable to expect your body and mind to move from a stimulating activity or stressful day directly into a sound sleep state. It takes time to wind down, and ensuring you give yourself that time is a great way to improve your sleep and reduce your stress levels.

I recommend spending the hour before bedtime doing gentle, relaxing activities. To maximize results, extend this period to two hours.

Some things you should avoid during this wind-down period:

Strenuous exercise, because it puts your body into a state of alertness

Eating, because the body cannot relax fully while digesting food

Consuming any media that are stimulating, e.g., the news, an emotional TV/movie drama, sporting events, social media, video games, a murder mystery book, energizing music, etc.

Consuming alcohol or drugs (while these can make you feel relaxed, they also tend to interfere with sleep)

Although there are TV shows, videos, blogs, etc. that are not overly stimulating, it can be tough to find them. It’s easier to just stay away from screen of all types before bed. Furthermore, screens emit blue light, which stimulates wakefulness in the body. That’s another reason to avoid them. (Below, you’ll see a link to an article that provides more information on blue light and other sleep disruptors.)

Some things you could do during this time:

Gentle exercise, e.g., relaxing yoga poses, qigong, a leisurely walk, gently stretching, etc.

Reading something that does not provoke strong emotional reactions

Having a conversation with someone, but avoid topics that incite emotional reactions, e.g., politics, news events, finances, etc.

Playing (gently) with a child or a pet

Crafts or arts projects

Jigsaw puzzles

Listening to gentle, relaxing music

Reflective activities such as journaling or looking at family photographs

 

Peaceful Moment of the Week

 

Strategy 2 - Meditate

Your wind-down period is a great time to do some meditation. People who practice evening meditation often report being better able to let go of the day’s stressful events and the rumination they cause.

The length of the meditation is up to you. The longer you sit, the more calm you can become, but even five minutes of meditation is beneficial.

Strategy 3 - Do some deep relaxation

Deep relaxation is one of my favourite evening activities. You can even do this lying in bed. I often find I drift off to sleep before the relaxation is finished.

There are several types of deep relaxation and you can try them all!

Body scans - involve putting your bare attention on the body, one body part at a time; alternately, you can actively relax successive body parts

Progressive relaxation -  involves moving from one body part to another as in a body scan, but physically (and gently) tensing each area, before allowing it to relax

Autogenic relaxation - involves coaxing feelings of heaviness, warmth, and relaxation in successive body parts

Self-hypnosis for deep sleep - This involves classic...

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I have a friend who loved to slip into daydreams while meditating. She told her meditation teacher that she noticed she was being distracted by daydreams, but chose to keep daydreaming because it was so pleasant. The teacher said that was well and good if my friend intended to strengthen her daydreaming skills, but didn’t help much if she intended to build meditation skills.

To improve a skill, you practice. To strengthen a habit, you practice. Whatever you practice gets stronger. This goes for our reactions, too.

The positive skills, habits, and reactions we strive to grow improve with practice, but so do the negative skills, habits, and reactions we’d rather be rid of.

So, let me ask you: What are you practicing?

Are you practicing negative reactions? Anxiety, worry, anger, defensiveness, helplessness, fear - all of these grow bigger and more robust each time you enact them.

I’ve done it. I practiced outrage so much at work that I developed a hair trigger. The mere mention of a new management initiative - no matter what it was - was enough to make me feel angry and tense. Even the mention of a particular manager’s name did it for me.

 

This Week's Peaceful Moment: Mom's fountain in Cedar by the Sea, Vancouver Island, British ColumbiaThis photo is protected by copyright and used with permission

 

I now do my best to practice mindfulness at work. The outrage does still come up, but I strive to notice it and let it go. I practice acceptance and compassion, instead. It takes time and diligence to make a switch like this, and I still slip, but my skills get stronger every time I practice.

How about you? What skills and reactions would you rather build? Peacefulness, gentleness, kindness, compassion, self-compassion, helpfulness, acceptance, or anger, helplessness, anxiety, depression, hatred, and fear? You get to choose.

Next time you find yourself in a difficult situation, notice the reactions that come up, and ask yourself, “Is this what I want to practice today?” If not, choose to let go and practice something positive, instead.

Now, let's practice meditation together

For a 12-minute guided meditation on the circle of breath, forward the podcast or the video above to 2:16.

Next week:

Next week I’m going to share what the seasoned meditator knows about monkey mind, that unsettling state where your mind moves from thought to thought like a monkey swinging from branch to branch. If you’d like a reminder email, just go to mindful15.com/subscribe and subscribe to our newsletter. I’ll let you know when new lessons are online and I’ll also send you a free deep relaxation.

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Am I doing this right? I don’t think I’m capable of mediating. I can’t calm my mind. Maybe this isn’t worth the effort -- It’s natural for beginners to have some doubts about their meditation practice. Even seasoned meditators can experience periods of self-doubt.

Doubt can make meditation practice feel like a struggle, like a fight against yourself, and it can even cause some people to give up altogether. But, doubt can also be a teacher from which you can learn more about your habitual responses to uncertainty and confusion. Let me give you some ideas that can help you get through periods of doubt.

When I was a little girl, I wanted to learn to play the piano. My parents, however, couldn’t afford to buy me a piano. Their solution was to buy me a guitar, instead, and send me for lessons. I lasted through three lessons before I quit. You see, I was seven. I expected that I’d sit down with the guitar and play music. I didn’t realize I’d have to play Jingle Bells in the middle of June, over and over again, while regularly having to stop to correct mistakes. This was no fun at all, so I walked away. I’m pretty sure my parents were glad they didn’t try to scrape up the money for a piano.

What’s the point of this story? Sometimes, I think meditation students are a little like my seven-year-old self. If they don’t reach their expected outcome in short order, they conclude that they cannot meditate or it doesn’t work for them.

The roots of doubt

This is the point where doubt first creeps in, and it happens for a few reasons. Sometimes practitioners have overly optimistic ideas about the amount of practice required to build a skill. When the skill doesn’t grow fast enough, they conclude they’re doing something wrong. In other cases, practitioners don’t know what to expect from meditation, so they’re unable to judge whether they’re doing it correctly. And sometimes practitioners do have expectations. When their expectations are not met, they might conclude that meditation is not working. Let’s take a look a more in-depth look at these.

How do I know whether I’m practicing enough?

Aim for regularity in your practice and don’t fret over the length of your sessions. It’s the regularity that reaps results. I recommend daily meditation, however, if you can manage to meditate four to five days per week, that’s a good start. Don’t get caught up in worrying over whether you’re practicing enough. Just meditate as often as you can.

The longer you sit in any given session, the more chance you give the mind to settle, but if you can only commit to five minutes of meditation, then just do that. The benefits you get from a short practice reinforce the habit and will likely lead you to meditate more often for longer.

The bottom line: Give yourself permission to let go of the doubt and the concern and just sit as often as you can.

 

This Week's Peaceful Moment: Mandarin DuckThis photo is copyright protected and used with permission.

 

How do I know I’m doing it right?

Meditation is pretty simple (but not necessarily easy, which is why you need to practice often): Put your attention on your breath. Keep your attention focused on the breath. When you notice your attention has wandered away from the breath, return it to the breath. Repeat.

If you’re doing this, you’re doing it right. All other instruction is unnecessary. That’s not to say other instruction won’t make meditation easier, but if you never get that instruction, you still have all you need to meditate successfully.

If you think you’re doing it wrong,

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Establishing a steady meditation habit is often the most challenging part of meditation. Until the habit is well established, it’s common to experience days when you just don’t feel like meditating. Today I’m going to give you simple method for getting past this common obstacle.

Habits have a simple structure. There’s a trigger that signals it’s time to perform the habit. The trigger is followed by a habitual behaviour. The behaviour is followed by a reinforcing reward. Every time this sequence is performed, the habit grows stronger. If you want to build a habit, you need to be sure this sequence gets enacted regularly.

The trigger might be an event or a specific time of day. In episode 16, I taught you how to choose an effective meditation trigger. If you haven’t listened to that episode yet, you’ll find it at mindful15.com/habit.

Every time you perform the habitual behaviour in response to the trigger, you strengthen the habit. But, if your trigger to meditate comes up and you don’t follow with meditation, you’ll weaken the habit. So, if you skip meditation whenever you don’t feel like doing it, the habit won’t grow the way you want it to.

How do you force yourself to meditate when you don’t want to? I suggest you don’t try to force anything. That feeling you get when you don’t want to meditate is your mind throwing up resistance. If you fight against resistance by forcing yourself to meditate, the resistance is likely to increase. Instead, when your mind resists meditation, say to it, “okay, fine, I won’t meditate, but I am just going to sit here for a minute.” Then, sit down in good meditation posture for just one minute.

That’s it. Just sit.

When you do this, you are reinforcing the connection between the trigger and the habitual behaviour, even if you don’t do any meditation. The resistance is lowered a bit, because just sitting doesn’t cost you much. It takes just one minute of your time and very little effort is required.

 

This Week's Peaceful Moment: Yellow-headed Blackbird, Kinibrook Island Provincial ParkImage is copyright protected and used with permission. Please do not copy.

Once you sit down, your mind might give in and allow you to meditate for awhile. Maybe it won’t. In that case, get up. But, before you move on to the next activity, don’t forget to complete the habit cycle by rewarding yourself. Do this even if you just sat there for a minute, not meditating. Give yourself a little positive reinforcement. You might say to yourself, “good work,” or “well done.” If you’re tracking your meditation habit, consider this a successful day and add it to your tracker.

I’ve shared this simple method with a number of people, and sometimes they’re skeptical. It just sounds too simple. If you’re skeptical, do yourself a favour and just try it. Really, what have you got to lose? If you skip meditation, you’ll definitely lose. You’ll weaken the habit you’re trying to build. But if you try my suggestion, you just might find that you’ve strengthened your meditation habit, even if a tiny bit, and even if you didn’t get any meditation in today.

But you do feel like meditating today, right?

Join me for a guided meditation

For a 10-minute guided meditation, forward the podcast or the video above to 3:18

Next week:

Next week, we’ll explore the power of ritual in helping you establish a meditation habit. If you’d like to be notified when the episode goes online, just

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When was the last time you went a full day without checking email, texts, or social media? Can’t remember such a day? How ‘bout an hour? When was the last time you went a full hour without accessing your digital devices? Is that even possible?

Writer Linda Stone claims most of us live in a state of continuous partial attention. She says,

To pay continuous partial attention is to pay partial attention — CONTINUOUSLY. It is motivated by a desire to be a LIVE node on the network. Another way of saying this is that we want to connect and be connected. We want to effectively scan for opportunity and optimize for the best opportunities, activities, and contacts, in any given moment. To be busy, to be connected, is to be alive, to be recognized, and to matter.

We pay continuous partial attention in an effort NOT TO MISS ANYTHING. It is an always-on, anywhere, anytime, any place behavior that involves an artificial sense of constant crisis. We are always in high alert when we pay continuous partial attention.

Stone, L. (n.d.). Continuous partial attention. In Linda Stone. 

So, what’s wrong with that? After all, we’re glued to our digital devices because they’re useful and entertaining. Too much use, however, disrupts our ability to pay attention, and this is a big deal. Focused attention is essential to optimal performance at work, at school, and at play. Furthermore, that “artificial sense of constant crisis” generates stress and anxiety.

The antidote? No, I’m not going to ask you to give up your phone, but you really should take a break, a little digital device holiday, on a regular basis.

How to take a digital device holiday

The premise is simple, really: Regularly set aside a significant period of time during which you don’t use your digital devices.

Some health experts (e.g., functional medicine specialist Chris Kresser) advocate holidays of 5 to 10 days a couple of times per year. I certainly see the value in that, but it’s not where I’d start. Multi-day holidays can be difficult for some people, and as with meditation, the more often you take a digital device holiday, the greater the benefits.

I recommend taking at least one half-day off per week. Ideally, take a full day off every week, plus add a longer holiday of one to two weeks once or twice per year.

And yes, the idea is to COMPLETELY avoid the devices. No texts, emails, social media, online shopping, web surfing (no, not even to check the reviews on that new restaurant), etc. And -- gasp -- no podcasts! Personally, I also refrain from watching television during my device holidays, but it’s up to you decide whether to go this extra step.

 

This Week's Peaceful Moment: A mule deer at Elk Island National Park, Alberta, CanadaThis photograph is copyright protected and used with permission. Please do not copy it.

 

Here are some strategies to help you unplug:

Let those close to you know when you’ll be unavailable for texts, emails and calls. You might even challenge them try unplugging, too.

Set up an autoresponder to let others know when you’ll be offline and direct them to other sources of help, if that’s applicable.

Turn the devices off instead of just letting them sleep...

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This is the final episode in our Retreat series. Two weeks ago, I explained what goes on at meditation retreats and showed you how to find one. Last week, I shared my very first retreat experience, and gave you a heads up on how to behave. Today, I’m going to give you some tips for creating your own self-directed retreat.

Where should I hold my retreat?

There are a few options. You can do a retreat at home, and in some circumstances this might be your only option. If you’re able to leave home, you might choose to go to a residential retreat center, a rental home/cabin, or a hotel room. Leaving home has the benefit of taking you away from your routine, which helps you to disengage from your own habitual behaviour, but it’s not always possible.

Some residential retreat centres rent rooms by the day, week, or month to retreatants who want to direct their own activities. Many provide meals, and some offer organized activities such as group meditation, which you can choose to attend.

The following websites can help you locate a retreat centre. Some are easier to use than others and you’ll have to spend a little time to find a centre that offers self-directed retreats and provides an environment suitable to silent meditation practice.

Spirit Site

Retreat Finder

Retreats Online

Rental properties in private, quiet locations may also be suitable. I’ve rented cottages and houses in quiet communities that would’ve been perfect for a retreat. If you go this route, be careful to choose a location that allows you to conduct all of your planned activities. You might want space for walking meditation or yoga, you might want to meditate outdoors, etc. By the way, you’d don’t need to be at the top of a mountain or sitting on a beach at sunset to have good meditation retreat. These are images you commonly see in online advertising, but they’re overly romantic. A meditation retreat is about practicing mindfulness, not about having a beautiful, transcendental vacation experience.

Another location possibility is a hotel or motel room, but these are not ideal. They typically don’t have the facilities for you to cook your own meals, and eating in restaurants will disturb your practice. You could, however, bring ready-made or microwaveable meals. I personally also find hotel rooms confining, but if you plan for prolonged sitting periods, or if you can get out to a park for a few hours, they might work for you.

How long should the retreat be?

A retreat can be as long or as short as you want it to be. You could do a half-day, full-day, or multiple-day retreat. The longer the retreat, the greater the opportunity to slow down, disengage from habitual behaviour, and immerse yourself in mindful living, but do what suits you best.

What activities should I include?

The must-haves

Silent or guided meditation. Consider two or three sitting sessions per day and sit for longer than you normally would, perhaps 30 to 60 minutes at a time.

Walking meditation. This can be done indoors or outdoors, anywhere you can take at least 10 paces (then turn around). You’ll find instructions at mindful15.com/walk

Eating meditation.