A little over a year ago I began to use the Calm app to start a meditation practice. I tend toward being anxious, wound up, and I’d been having trouble sleeping. I heard that meditation could help with all of this so I signed up for the app and a committed myself to giving it a try.
Yesterday, I had my 200th meditation, which I’m pretty happy about. Clearly, I haven’t meditated every day over the last year. Indeed, until about a month ago, there was a nearly 5-month gap when I didn’t meditate at all. This was when I was working on my big work project, and I was entirely focused on that. Probably I should have been meditating, but I got out of the habit.
In the last month or so, I’ve gotten back into the habit. I meditate every morning as soon as I am back from my morning walk. Usually, I head out onto the deck and do a 10-minute guided meditation using one of Calm app’s meditation programs. The one I like is “The Daily Trip” by Jeff Warren. Jeff also has a 30-day program on Calm for getting started with meditation, and I think I went through that program at least twice when I was getting started.
In my first run, prior to the 5-month gap, I did alright. At one point, I meditated for 72 consecutive days. But I was not seeing the results I’d expected. I thought I’d start sleeping better as soon as I started to meditate. I thought I’d feel less stressed out, less wound up, but that wasn’t the case. Kelly said she noticed a subtle different, but I didn’t.
This time around, it’s different. I can’t say why it’s different, but it is. This time, I can feel it helping me. I feel much more relaxed, much less anxious, and I’m deliberately taking the lessons I learn from meditation and applying them to real life situations. Take this past weekend, for example. We drove up to New York on Friday morning. Normally it’s about a four hour drive, but with the holiday traffic, it took us six hours. Normally, traffic like that would throw my anxiety through the roof. When I lived in L.A. I sat in traffic for eight years, to and from work. Today, sitting in traffic activates a kind of post-traumatic stress in me. This time, however, I tried to be open about it. I tried to simply notice the traffic, accept it, and continue listening to my podcast. Little things that annoy me on a long drive didn’t bother me. At times, I drove with a smile on my face.
This is one example, but over the last couple of weeks, I’ve noticed a real change in my behavior, thanks to the notion of equanimity that I’ve learned through meditation. It is really beginning to help.
I’m currently on a 28-day streak, but the streaks don’t matter to me as much as they did. I enjoy the short guided morning sessions as much as I enjoy my morning walk. I’ve even started to add in an evening meditation session, 20 minutes, unguided, where I try to relax and clear my head before going to bed. That is a tricky session so far, because my mind really seems to wander without guidance and I am constantly have to refocus on my home base. But that is meditation, after all.
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I’ve been using Headspace for a couple years. I started meditating for 5 to 10 minutes every day last year after a colleague inspired me to make it part of my routine instead of something I’ll do when I remember.
I managed a streak of more than 200 days (I think), and then missed 1 day too many, and lost my streak. Like you said, it’s not really about the streak. Still, definitely kicked myself when I saw the counter reset.
Still, just continued with the practice, reminding myself that it’s a “practice” after all. Not a perfected thing
The streaks are a double-edged sword for me. They are great for starting out and build the habit. But then I have to start to let go of them (usually around the 30 day mark when the habit is established) and stop paying attention. Otherwise, when I do miss a day (and, of course, I will) it can throw me off if I am too focused on it. I think of it has having to build up that streak again, instead of getting the meditative value out of each session, regardless if I missed the previous day. I’m trying to be better about that.