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3 Steps To Making the Habit of Meditation Stick By Julie Smith

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People are suffering in record numbers with burnout, stress, anxiety, sleep issues and feelings of isolation. Many are coming to me when they are at a crisis point.  Whether they have experienced a breakdown in their relationship, burnout from the pressures of work, serious health issues, redundancy or losing a loved one.   Meditation can help ease this pain, but you must practise regularly to feel the benefits. Many students who have tried to build a meditation practise… but somehow life always gets in the way.  Perhaps you can relate? Julie Smith, makes meditation simple. With 20 years of corporate management experience, she understands the demands of working long hours and leading a busy life. Here, Julie explains how we can make a habit out of meditation and ensure it sticks. Meditation is like having good shock absorbers for your car. Just like good shock absorbers, meditation can make the bumpy road of life seem much smoother. This is no to say that meditation will prevent challenges from appearing. Or to that say that it’s bad to reach for meditation at times of crisis. If you meditate regularly you are more likely to view the challenges that you do face from a ‘different state of being’ that you experience as a bump in the road rather than a crisis. So, if meditation is so great, why can it feel so hard to build the habit of meditation?  95% of your actions are performed on ‘autopilot’.  That means that your unconscious mind is responsible for most of what you do each day. You are in a continuous loop of having a thought (in our mind) that causes a certain behaviour which in turn makes you feel (in our body) a certain way.   You become so identified with those thoughts and how they make you feel that it becomes your ‘normal state of being’. Literally, your brain has become hardwired. Anything outside that ‘normal state of being’ makes you feel uncomfortable.   It is difficult for you to think your way out of this because your conscious mind is fighting against both your mind and body. You consciously think ‘I should go to the gym’, but your body tells you ‘this doesn’t feel good’ and your mind thinks ‘tomorrow would be a better day’. §So how can you get past your mind and body?
  1. Step 1: awareness.Bringing awareness to the resistance that arises within you is the first step. When an uncomfortable thought or feeling arises, at least now you know where it is coming from. Awareness alone can be enough to ease the uncomfortable feeling.
  2. Step 2: Take action anyway. Taking new action builds new neural pathways in your brain and gives your body a taste of something different.
  3. Step 3: Repeat the action with joy. If you keep doing the action for 3 or 4 weeks, gradually the resistance will in your mind and body will fade and it will most likely start to feel good. The brain is also resetting its ‘state of being’ to a new normal.

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