A Member checked in this week and told us where his practice had got to. He had been getting up about ten minutes earlier and spending those ten minutes meditating, and it had been going well. Then travel took over. He still does the centering before meetings and presentations, because that part has stuck, but the morning sitting had dropped off. As he put it, you get busy, and then you find an excuse not to do it.
I respectfully asked him whether he still brushes his teeth every day. He said he does, and he laughed, because he could see where that was going.
He is not alone in the pattern, and there is nothing wrong with any of this. When we are in two minds about something, there is a part of us that wants us to do it, and there is a part of us that wants us not to do it and wants everything to stay the same. That second part is simply winning more often than he or we would like. Nothing more complicated than that is happening.
The presence we develop through this work is something we all innately want. We are also frightened of it. The reason we are frightened of it is that it feels better than what we are used to and our system responds by trying to return us to the old place. It is not protecting us from something bad. It is protecting us from something unfamiliar, therefore uncomfortable, and can then be deemed unsafe and unallowable.
Another Member in the room had noticed this happening to him, and he had shared it with me some time ago. He had told me that when he meditates regularly for a stretch, he then stops for a while. What I put to him at the time, and what he agreed with, is that he stops because he has been meditating regularly. His system gets a taste of feeling really good and pulls the handbrake on. “Come on, mate, come down a bit, you’re going a little too well there.”
That reframes the whole experience. Most of us read a lapse as evidence that the practice was not working or that we lack discipline. It is at least as likely that we stopped because it was working. That may be your experience too.
The same Member has now built something practical around it, and I would recommend it. He runs a shorter meditation practice and a longer one. The shorter one is seven to ten minutes and he does it all the time, because nearly anyone can find seven minutes. The bigger one is thirty to forty minutes and he does that around three times a week. Having two options means there is always one that fits the day, so the day never becomes the reason he did nothing at all. He said the results he’s getting comes mostly from being consistent with the small one. Consistent in, consistent out. Longer meditation is not necessarily better. It is however great for training the mind to become centred.
He has also folded it into ordinary life in a way that is worth sharing. He has learned to do conscious breathing during conversations, so he can let go of the noise while he is in the middle of talking with someone. He described it as running a meditative state while he works. It took practice to get there, and now it holds.
For anyone who finds even the shorter practice difficult, there is a version below that again. Shut your eyes and decide that this is a meditation space for a minute, or three minutes, on a plane or anywhere. You are not reading, you are not checking anything, you are not doing something else. You are pausing. That counts, and it keeps the presence intact.
I did not start where I am now. In years gone by it was once a day, four days a week. Then it became five days a week, then seven, then mornings and evenings, and now there are intermittent ones throughout the day as well that sustain my mindfulness and presence. Nobody could stop me from sustaining that experience, because it is so good. The progression took time.
What makes it worth the effort showed up elsewhere in the session. The Member with the two practices described himself as having been a big worrier, and he was clear that he got it from his mother. He carried it for around forty years. He said it still creeps in a little, and that he does not experience it as much these days, as he has largely let it go. He now finds himself focusing on what is in front of him and asking what the next step is, and he said that is the thing that keeps him level.
Forty years of a pattern that came with him from childhood, loosening. That is not the result of a technique alone. It is the result of turning up to something small or shorter, often, for long enough that the part of him that wanted everything to stay the same stopped getting its way.
He shared something in this conversation that belongs here, which is that he has become more willing to say he does not have all the answers. He told a senior person in his team exactly that, and said he would not have said it a year earlier. What that does is give the other person permission to be equally honest, and the work gets done together rather than performed at each other.
So if you have fallen out of a practice of anything important to you recently, I would offer you a different reading of it than the one you may have given yourself. You may not have failed at it. You may have been doing well enough that something in you decided to ease off.
The way back is not a bigger commitment. It is a smaller one, taken more often, on the days you least feel like it. Life does begin a little beyond our comfort zone, and the discomfort of sitting down for seven minutes is a very small investment for what is on the other side of it. Seven minutes too long? Start with three.
“Most of us have two lives. The life we live, and the unlived life within us. Between the two stands Resistance.”
— Steven Pressfield
