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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