One of the challenges of developing a mindfulness practice can be found in those two words – ‘developing’ and ‘practice’. Most of us come to mindfulness because we want something to change, and so we tend to see it as a potential solution, and have an idea in mind of where we’d like to get to. And ideally, we’d like to get there straight away! However, learning to meditate serves us better when we can see it as part of an ongoing growth journey, one with no set outcome that we can succeed or fail at. And one which doesn’t have a set timeframe: mindfulness can support us for our whole life, if we let ourselves continue to grow through the practice.
This perspective flies in the face of much contemporary wisdom: some marketing messages make it sound as if mindfulness is like a light switch that we can learn to flick on. But to me, it’s more like awareness is a fire that we learn to get lit in the first place, and then keep tending. In this piece I’m sharing a little about this from my own experiences as a meditator, mindfulness teacher and human being. Here are 3 stages of practice that I’ve experienced myself, and what I learned from them about keeping that fire going.
1.The First Sparks
When we first learn to meditate, it may feel very new to actually bring some awareness to our experience, instead of living on autopilot. Initially, trying too hard to get this right can stop you from even catching a spark of mindfulness. Taking a goal-orientated approach can kill your practice before it’s even started (I should know, I had several doomed attempts at starting to meditate before I managed to establish anything sustainable). When we hold a particular idea about what mindfulness should look like, it can make us feel like we’ve failed if our experience doesn’t quite match that picture. For example, if we’re not feeling calm and peaceful during meditation, then frustration, disappointment and self-criticism can quickly take over.
If you find yourself feeling like you’ve failed and you want to give up meditation, try giving up something else instead. Try giving up the idea of trying to get somewhere in particular. Experiment with intentions instead of goals: when you meditate, just have an intention to bring awareness to whatever is happening now in your experience. The point of meditation isn’t to clear your mind or get rid of unwanted feelings. Initially, it’s actually about bringing awareness to all those thoughts, emotions and body sensations that flow continually through us. Of course, when we’ve been avoiding some of this, it can feel unfamiliar to bring full attention to how we are, and so short meditations can be more helpful than long ones to begin with. We’re building up our capacity to be with ourselves, just as we are. That won’t happen instantly.
Something else you could try letting go of is judging yourself for whatever thoughts, feelings or sensations that are present. It’s human to experience feelings like fear, sadness, uncertainty or anger, we’re not meant to never feel them. If we can stop judging experiences like these as ‘negative’, it’s a powerful step towards the self-kindness that can support your growing awareness. In your first experiments with becoming more mindful, it’s really important to celebrate any moments of awareness, however small. These are the sparks that will help trigger significant change in the long term.
2. Fanning The Flames
Once we’ve made a start with our practice, we might feel the urge to ramp it up a notch, and fan the flames of this new awareness. As we start to pay greater attention in this way, we may well start to bump up against the unwanted feelings that we’ve been avoiding or numbing ourselves to. It can be tempting here either to shut down altogether, or to try to reach some sort of victory over these feelings. Some mindfulness teachings advocate ‘sitting with’ our feelings, which isn’t necessarily bad advice, but it also isn’t something that can happen all in one go. Practising mindfulness doesn’t have to mean gritting your teeth and sticking it out to make it work. This is exactly what I did during one of my aborted attempts to build a practice: I tried to use mindfulness in a kind of ‘show-down’ with unpleasant feelings that I wanted to get rid of. What actually happened was that I moved towards an uncomfortable feeling too quickly, tried to stay with it for too long, and got overwhelmed. Because here’s the thing: your nervous system needs you to go gradually when you start bringing awareness to difficult feelings. So once you’ve got a flame of awareness lit, instead of fanning it with intensive practice, you can take an approach that’s more like gently blowing on embers to get your fire going.
How might this look in practice? Building a sense of stability can really help: finding something that feels supportive that you can lean into. This could be physical sensations of contact with the chair/floor, or opening your eyes to look at something, or a place in your body that does feel ok. A powerful resource to lean into is self-kindness, so it’s worth working with practices that cultivate this before you try to bring mindfulness to anything that you find particularly difficult. Initially, practising self-kindness might mean listening to the part of you that really doesn’t want to move closer to some bits of your experience, listening with love and respect – and then going at a pace that supports that part of you. This kind of pacing might mean that you pay attention to a challenging aspect of your experience for a brief moment, and then move your attention back to something that feels supportive, and build yourself up slowly to deepening your contact with your whole experience. Working with mindfulness gradually actually creates more significant long-term change than trying to force some kind of catharsis.
When you’ve had a small moment of ‘being with’ a difficult feeling instead of ignoring or pushing it away, there’s no need to press on for greater impact. That one moment is enough, for now. This way of ‘touching into’ new experiences, and then backing off again, is one of the kindest ways to develop your mindfulness. And it’s no less effective for being gentle. All of this can take a bit of experimenting – with different guided meditations, classes or ideas from books, until you find a way of practising that feels right for you. Giving yourself permission to try out different things can also help to grow your self-awareness and to trust yourself about what feels supportive for you personally, at this stage in your life. This can then form the basis of your regular practice.
3. Tending Over Time
If you’ve got the fire of your practice going, how do you keep it going? It’s totally natural at times to get stuck in a rut, or fall off the wagon for a bit, but we can see this all as part of the process. I find that it helps to be flexible and allow your practice to keep changing over time as you keep developing and growing as a human being.
If you start to feel like you’re doing the same old practice on autopilot, it might be time to freshen things up by doing a different meditation; my own practice seems to follow a natural rhythm between periods of kindness meditation and mindfulness with breathing (you can find guided versions of these on my website if you don’t know them). Or, if you are finding yourself drawn to a particular meditation, it could be helpful to work with that for a period of time to deepen your practice. For example, I spent a good 18 months doing daily self-kindness practice in order to grow a really strong foundation of this powerful resource.
Being responsive to your own circumstances is important too. There’s no point setting yourself up for frustration if a 20-minute meditation every day would be impossible to fit into your schedule at the moment. Perhaps informal practice is more realistic in some phases of your life. It may be that mindfulness is part of your life already, but you’re not seeing it. Try widening your definition of what ‘counts’: any time you are aware of your thoughts, feelings, body sensations and surroundings is a moment of practice, whether you are sitting in meditation or not.
Refreshing your inspiration can also help to keep that fire of awareness going. For me, a powerful way to do this is to be part of a community of other people who practice, by attending sessions run by teachers who have valuable experience to share. The internet is also a great resource: if I’m flagging a bit, sometimes reading a blog or listening to a talk can reinvigorate my personal practice.
Another trick I’ve found to support long-term practice brings us back not being outcome-orientated. This crept back in for me once I began to see myself as ‘experienced’ in meditation. When I notice I’ve slipped into some sort of goal, like ‘I’m going to do 40-minute breathing meditation until I have some sort of big breakthrough’, that tends to be my cue to let go of structured meditation altogether for a while. At those times I do some ‘just sitting’ practice instead, where I simply bring awareness to whatever is arising, without a set anchor or focus. This seems to allow for growth and transformation to unfold on its own timescale. Creating that bit of space by backing off from a desired outcome usually means that I get an intuitive sense of which type of meditation to re-engage with, when I’m ready to bring some structure back in.
It’s also worth acknowledging that sometimes, meditation practice can uncover painful material that needs to be taken into therapy to help us integrate it (in my view, this is all part of the growth process). We don’t need to expect meditation to be the whole of the path, and we can seek additional support as and when it’s needed. If we do bring in extra resources, it doesn’t mean we can’t continue to develop our meditation practice in the long term; my experience is actually the opposite.
Of course, everyone’s growth journey is individual, so there is no set template. While I’ve shared a few ideas here, my wish for anyone who is developing their own wellbeing practice is to learn to trust and support yourself, whatever is happening in your life at this moment. And to keep that flame of kindness and awareness alight!
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