As of this morning I have completed 1,000 hours of meditation, spread across 2,990 days. That’s an average of 20 minutes each day that I meditated.
This has been my habit: To meditate once each day, for 20 minutes, no matter what. Sometimes, it’s first thing in the morning or—even better—right after 30 minutes of yoga. But sometimes it’s been on BART, or an airplane. Or it’s the last thing in a long day, as I struggle to stay awake. Lately, I’ve sometimes meditated while charging the car.
It took me many years to attain this habit. My first inkling was the brief meditation accompanying savasana (corpse pose) during yoga classes 20 years ago. When my daughter was coming, her mom and I attended an 8-week mindful childbirthing and parenting class, adapted from John Kabat-Zinn’s Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) course. Our resolution to keep up daily meditation didn’t survive the first months of parenthood.
Six years later, my therapist suggested I take the 8-week course again, and I did. I installed the app Insight Timer on my phone. I followed it up the 8-week MBSR course with an advanced 10-week course a few months later. Returning to meditation practice helped me control my anxiety and intrusive thoughts. This time I continued to meditate after the course was done—but with spotty frequency and regularity.
In May 2018, I realized I had to face facts: Meditation practice was beneficial to me, but only if I committed to doing it regularly. And “committed to doing it regularly” meant every day, no matter what. Since then, I’ve missed a day here and there. I missed a day just last week, after a streak of 600 days. But aside from the (very) occasional miss, I’ve always put aside whatever else was going on so I could get in 20 minutes each 24 hours.
Almost all my sessions—like 97%, according to my Insight Timer data—are silent sitting meditation. I sit on a zafu (cushion) atop a zabuton (cushy mat). I put a couple of army blankets under the zafu so I’m up a little higher. The secret to a comfortable sitting meditation posture is to get your kneecaps slightly lower than your pelvis. Then, you can hold your back straight, and balance your big ol’ weighty skull on top, without having to fight the tightness in your hips and back. To get your kneecaps lower than your pelvis, you need to be up a little higher (if you’re tight in the hamstrings and hips and knees, like many of us are). I keep a block or a blanket handy on each side to support my knees. Usually, I slide these further away as my hips open up during the session.
For some sessions—every once in a while—I’ll go for a slow walk instead, and focus my attention on the soles of my feet for 20 minutes. It’s a good option if I haven’t moved all day, or if I need to get out of the house. And sometimes—especially when my concentration has been slack, or I’m feeling stuck—I’ll tap into one of the thousands of guided meditations on Insight Timer. Many of these guided meditations lean toward spacey new-age affirmations, which I don’t care for, but there are some really good ones, too.
One guided meditation in particular helped me improve my silent practice. In the 20-minute recording, the guide instructs you to direct your attention to your breathing and then to be attentive to the moment when your attention begins to drift into thought. The practice here is to watch the thought arise and make a conscious decision whether to follow it, or to return to the breath. It feels like exercising a muscle: At first, it seems very difficult to do consistently, but it becomes easier over time. Or that’s the claim. I still often find myself having followed a thought, despite my intention to consistently return to the breath.
In her book How to Meditate, Pema Chodron identifies five qualities that come forth over time spent in meditation:
- Steadfastness (loyalty to oneself, perseverance)
- Clarity (seeing what you do, self-awareness)
- Courage (to fully experience emotional discomfort and tribulations in life)
- Wakefulness (presence, being, relaxing with the unknown)
- Flexibility (all this is no big deal)
A thousand hours in, I feel that I’m just getting started on all of these. It’s been a good journey—not an easy journey, but one that has been rewarding in myriad ways, most of them ineffable. I’m certain my cerebral cortex is thicker for it, my cortisol levels lower. Mostly, I am grateful for my growing ability to return, at any time, to a place that feels like home.
