The transformative piece in meditation is not what you are doing (e.g., breath, emotions, posture) but the quality of attention you bring to whatever you choose to do.
Avoid rigidly sticking to one meditation style, as it can feel forceful and unhelpful if it doesn’t align with your current state. Instead, bring your life into your practice by adapting it.
After checking your body, do an internal check-in to assess your emotional state or mind activity (e.g., busy, emotional, calm) and choose a meditation style that responds to your current needs, such as loving kindness for tenderness or open awareness for calmness.
Before meditating, perform a quick check-in on how your body feels to determine the most suitable posture (seated, lying down, standing) or type of meditation (e.g., walking meditation for high agitation).
When encountering resistance or a desire for things to be different (e.g., due to injury), meet that feeling with tenderness and kindness, acknowledging it without trying to change or gaslight yourself into accepting it, which can be transformative.
Establish two or three go-to meditation practices to remove guesswork and prevent being frozen by choice. This allows these practices to become second nature and naturally surface in challenging real-life moments beyond formal meditation.
After selecting a meditation, commit to it for the entire duration without switching, to avoid being paralyzed by choice. This cultivates the capacity to live with consequences and discomfort, aiming for ‘good enough’ rather than perfect.
Cultivate the habit of intermittently asking yourself ‘How am I practicing?’ during meditation. This brief pause can help you tune into your current state and readjust your approach, such as introducing kindness to alleviate tension.
If you notice your practice isn’t helpful (e.g., exacerbating tension), adjust how you’re practicing. This could involve bringing in qualities like kindness to balance out the tension.
If you encounter resistance to performing a full body and internal check-in before meditation, revert to your default, go-to style of practice instead of forcing the check-in.
When trying to introduce qualities like kindness into your practice, aim for just ‘a smidge of a little bit more kindness’ than before. Even small increases are incredibly helpful, rather than expecting to instantly become completely kind.
Save or bookmark a few favorite guided meditations of different styles on your device to have ready access to options when deciding what you need. This uses tech connection time in a way that’s helpful for your future self.
Use guided meditations specifically crafted to accompany conversations to help ‘pound the learnings from the conversation into your neurons’ during practice.
Even seemingly non-meditative activities, like trying to choose a meditation, can become a practice if you bring quality attention to the sensations (e.g., phone in hand, scrolling actions) and internal states (emotions, body sensations) involved.