Do you have a ridiculously simple, easily accessible, practically-a-placeholder version of the habit or practice you are trying to work on?
If you don’t have one yet, please consider choosing one.
For the last year and a bit, I’ve been working on adding more meditation to my life.
I started with a two week program that included guided meditations of various lengths. Then I did a mish-mash of various other meditations - guided, walking, drawing, breathing, timed – before trying a month-long program. Then I went back to the mish-mash.
At this point, I have meditated every day for over 14 months but each day hasn’t been an epic example of mindfulness – far from it.
Some days, I have done a 30 minute practice and some days I’ve practiced for 10 minutes but for many, many days, I have just done 1 minute of meditation.
And lots of times that 1 minute meditation was less than serene.
In fact, often my timer would go off after a minute and I would have to acknowledge that I had spent that minute trying to focus on my breath but hadn’t actually achieved that goal.
And yes, I realize that I probably needed more than a minute to be able to settle into my practice on those days but, at the time, I felt like a minute was all the time I could manage.
Even though my 1 minute meditations are very short and quite imperfect, I still count them as part of my practice.*
Those imperfect, slapdash sessions help me keep my momentum.
They help me to make sure that meditation is something I regularly do, not just something I hope to get around to.
Those messy minutes of attempted mindfulness keep meditation on my daily radar.
They are my easy back-up plan.
When I decided ages ago that I really wanted meditation to be part of my daily life, I picked a minimum practice that felt like it would be doable even on the most challenging of days.
And it has been.
Even on the worst day of this last year, the day my Dad passed away, I stood on my patio in the chilly darkness, looked up at the sky, and breathed slowly and carefully for 1 minute.
I could have let that day slide, that obviously would have been ok, but I didn’t need to. And having that little anchor of the everyday was actually really helpful.
Please don’t think that I’m suggesting that you *must* find a way to keep up your new habits even on your very worst days.
That’s not at all what I’m going for here.
What I’m hoping is that if you find an easy back-up plan version of your habit, one that is doable on any day, you will find more ease in the process overall.
I’m hoping that having an easy back-up plan makes your habit-building incredibly ordinary and perhaps almost automatic.
And, just like me with the minute of meditation, maybe the sheer normalcy of the easy back-up plan can help bring you some comfort on challenging days instead of feeling like one more damn thing to do.
Here are some teeny gold stars for your efforts today.
Every little effort counts. Yes, even a single rep, a minute of meditation or movement, or a few lines on the page. It all counts.
*Is this true meditation? I don’t know. Am I doing it ‘right’? Don’t know that either. Does this count? Yes, because I said so.