200 straight days of meditation; now what?

I love my Ten Percent Happier meditation app. Yes, I blog about it probably too often, but I really feel moved to express my love for it publicly from time to time. What’s to love?

• It’s on my phone, so always available for meditations from 1 to 60 minutes
• The meditation teachers are some of the leading ones out there (which I admit I like)
• The meditations are sorted into categories for all sorts of sphere of life and types of emotions and experiences
• The presence of the app and the guidance provided by the meditations creates a structure within which I can settle (or not) into meditation
• The pitch of it is just right for me– the right amount of Buddhism, the right amount of practical guidance, all with a smidge of humor

This morning, when I opened the app to do my first-thing-in-the-morning meditation, I got a notification (complete with electronic confetti– the best kind) that I had meditated for 200 days straight. Sadly, I was too slow to capture it in a photo to share. But trust me, it was festive and gratifying.

I’ve been regularly meditating since 2020, almost every day. I’ve written a lot about this most recent return to it: here here here here, for example.

What does it mean to me to have managed 200 days in a row?

• I’m proud of myself– doing anything like this for 200 days in a row feels like an accomplishment in establishing a habit that I really want for myself
• I’m aware of having made progress over both the past 200 days, and the past 2 years of developing a meditation practice
• I decided that doing 3 minutes of meditation in a day was better than doing none; I do ten slow deep breaths, which takes about 3 minutes. Done.
• Each day is different, in terms of my needs, feelings, attitude towards my practice; also other factors influence how the actual sitting goes.
• Even though I now have laid down the tracks of a habit, each day is different; each day is a new challenge. The ever-present challenges and new lessons of meditation remind me that I’ll always be a student. And I like that.

There’s comfort in habit. But it takes attention to keep it going. However, the habit helps me with the attending to it. That, and the app. It’s called Ten Percent Happier. I didn’t want to forget to mention that… 🙂

Readers, do you keep track of milestones like 100 days, 200 days, etc. for your daily practices of movement or stillness? How do you think of it? I’d love to hear from you.