The Pros and Cons of Making Meditation a Habit
And why meditation transcends itself as a habit
You wake up.
After a quick note of gratitude, you get up, brush your teeth, and drink a glass of water.
Next you walk to your cushion, fall into it, and start to meditate for 20 minutes straight.
You watch your mind, peacefully, taste some deep moments of empty silence and emerge with a deep sense of purpose and clarity, ready to tackle whatever comes.
Your day goes well, you’re more present and calm, and handle every obstacle you face with poise. In the evening you fall asleep as soon as you hit the pillow and on the next day you repeat the process.
This surely sounds like the ideal life, doesn’t it? Of course, important details are missing like your precise work, your relationship, your health, and other context, but when it comes to meditation and its benefits on your life, there’s hardly any more perfect scenario as a lay person living your modern life.
It does sound like a dream. But there are 2 important caveats to keep in mind before you get overexcited.
- It’s not a realistic start.
Hardly anyone begins to meditate and immediately sits down every day for 20 minutes. There are disruptions, moods, and other problems that make this seem like a mere dream. When you start to meditate, it’s common to experience more stress and mental unrest.
This has two reasons: First you’re training yourself to actually notice your mind. What before was a vague mental fog now starts to look more like the ever-present turmoil and stress you carry around. This can even make it worse in the short term. The second one is that you relax parts of your mind that keep check on other parts, which then can come up during your sessions and your day in general. These can create more stress to deal with.
So don’t immediately expect to meditate and reap the benefits of having a peaceful life. Start small and build gradually. Make it a system and pull the right levers. As James Clear describes in Atomic Habits to implement a new habit make it:
- easy: Start with 1 minute instead of 20
- satisfactory: Measure your progress visually.
- appealing: Use the type of meditation you like
- clear: Know exactly when and where to engage in it
This doesn’t guarantee that you will eventually meditate 20 minutes every day, but it gives you the best chance to do so. Be gentle with whatever comes up in and around meditation and focus on getting in the daily reps without overwhelming yourself. Because the goal is not the only thing that matters, but the process on the way. This brings me to the second more important point.
2. Meditation isn’t something you do 20 minutes a day and then drop again.
No, the goal of meditation is to see yourself clearly. What does it mean? In short, you’re not the subject experiencing life, but the experience of life itself, without any separation. You’re the limitless awareness lived from a human embodied experience, but not bound to it.
So, meditating for 20 minutes every day can be a nice way of improving your emotional regulation, sleep quality, pain tolerance, and social skills. It can make your mind more calm, creative, and clear. But it’s true achievement lies in radically transforming who you think you are. Not a separate thinking self, not even the witness of those thoughts, but boundless awareness arising as the world.
As long as your practice consists in sitting down and meditating to be a better self in the world, no matter how much you perfect this process, you’re missing out on the main insight.
But this in no way means that meditating in the morning, like I described above, is a bad idea. There is nothing wrong with improving your thoughts, body, and emotions in productive ways. But let the insights you gain transform your whole life. Let the realizations you make sitting down shift into your life, first through having micro-meditations all day long, which then blossom to encompass your whole life.
Don’t miss the 20 minutes, but even more than that don’t miss any moment.
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