“You only need one thing.”
To ensure that you will always have a practice until you can practice no more, you only need one thing: dailyness.
Dailyness is available in print, ebook, and audiobook at Amazon and elsewhere.
The Dailyness Imperative
It’s hard to start a campfire when all you have to work with is matches, moss, and twigs. But once you have a viable flame going, all is well. Just add kindling and logs, and you’ve got yourself a fire.
After the flames die down, the coal bed stays red-hot for hours. To start a new fire, you need only add kindling and logs to the coals. But if the coals go cold, all the way to gray, then you must start from scratch, huddled over a fragile tepee of twigs.
If you have ever exercised with regularity and then stopped, and then scolded yourself for months for not being able to reignite your fire, then you know what I’m talking about.
Dailyness is about momentum. You have to work to build up momentum, and then once you have it, you can maintain momentum without a huge effort. I’m talking about doing sitting meditation every day, no matter what, so that your coals never go cold.
Not only does dailyness eradicate lapsing, it also clears up any possible confusion. You never have to remember if today is the day you are going to meditate.
Daily sitting will relieve whatever worries you may have about the quality of your sitting. When you know you’re going to meditate every day for thousands of days in a row, suddenly there’s no pressure. With a lifetime of tomorrows, it doesn’t matter how you perform today. You might be steady one day and fidgety the next, or maybe you feel like a slug and you are just going through the motions, grumbling the entire time.
I wrote all of that to say this: GO THROUGH THE MOTIONS!
It is necessary to sit on days when you feel logy and uninspired. Especially then. It doesn’t matter if you were out partying like crazy last night. It doesn’t matter if you have a cold. It doesn’t matter if you traveled halfway around the world. To ensure that you will always have a practice until you can practice no more, you only need one thing: dailyness.
More Words from Dailyness
Why meditate?
To make things better.
Why daily?
To make sure.
Among the nifty features of mindfulness is that you always know when you are being mindful, and you never know when you’re not.
I felt like shit. So I took up meditation. Then I felt great. So I stopped.