Every year, around this time, many of us decide to make New Year’s resolutions to meditate daily. I’ve been in that spot too. Usually, my efforts were pretty weak, and sometimes I wouldn’t even get halfway through January before realizing I’d already missed a couple of days. Some days, meditating didn’t even cross my mind.
This pattern can make us feel like we’ve failed, which hurts our self-confidence and makes us prone to failing in other areas too. My main problem was that these weren’t real resolutions. I hadn’t truly committed to them. I had no plan in place and wasn’t doing what was needed to make these goals a reality.
To really make a change, you need to set up the right conditions and do the right things. Simply making a resolution isn’t enough; you need to go further. Here’s what you need to consider if you want to follow through:
It takes more than just saying you’ll do something to make it a habit. You need to spend a bit of time making a plan and establish supportive conditions to help you stick with it.
If you want some help with building a regular meditation practice, we’re here for you! We offer a year-round program of meditation events to help you keep up and deepen your practice, along with a community of meditators for support and encouragement. Feel free to join us in Wildmind’s meditation community.
It’s important to have a good action plan. If you follow the advice given, you can successfully stick to your resolutions.
I started meditating in my car before work, finding a predictable time window five days a week thanks to flexible work hours. Initially, I aimed for half an hour, even if it made me a bit late. After more than two years, I’ve increased this to 50 minutes. My next goal is to get up a little earlier to see if I can manage a full hour. On Sundays, I meditate for another 50 minutes while waiting for my family during their church service. Saturdays are trickier, but I usually fit in a session if my wife works and I need to drop her off in the morning. It took me about 30 years to start, no exaggeration.
There’s never too much advice on how to make resolutions stick, and linking this to meditation is especially helpful. I’m new to the online Buddhism blogs and hope to contribute too. This is a very thoughtful article.