Tips For Building Your Home Practice

Continuously setting and renewing intentions

• Reflect on what matters to you. Suzuki Roshi says, “The most important thing is to remember the most important thing.” What are your aspirations and intentions to meditate regularly?
• How can you remind yourself of these intentions everyday?
• Could you share your intentions with your loved ones and ask for their support?

A fun & welcoming space

• Set up a meditation spot at your home/office, even if it is only a small corner. It doesn’t have to look fancy or be big! It can simply be putting a chair or a cushion in a spot that helps you feel calm (and then putting the chair/cushion away, if you live in a small space). Just find or create a space you can come back to, experimenting with a few options.
• If you can, decorate this spot with pictures, symbols or phrases that remind you of your intentions to practice mindfulness, so that each time you come to a space that is fun, comforting and motivating!

Turning meditation into a habit

• It would be very helpful if our mindfulness practice became a habit like brushing our teeth - something we do automatically. Habits are powerful and they drive our lives and decisions more than we think. An estimated 40% of our daily activities are performed in almost the same situations (hint: they are habits).
• Habits can even be stronger than our deepest intentions and motivations, because we often perform our habits without an awareness of what we are doing. We perform them on autopilot, based on cue - routine - reward structures we have repeated before. For example, you might really want to go to the gym when you leave the office that day, but you realize that somehow you are already halfway home - you have forgotten about the gym!
• Building new habits takes time, effort and an understanding of how habits work. A wonderful book on habit building (that I recommend you read) is The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg. If you don’t feel inclined to read the book, here is an HBR interview with Duhigg and here is a short video summary of the book.

• The main idea of habits is that habits have cues - routines - rewards. Your routine here would be your mindfulness practice. When building a new habit, you might want to use existing cues (for example, you meditate after brushing your teeth every morning, so that the brushing of your teeth becomes your cue to meditate) or you might want to keep the same rewards (let’s say you drink tea at 3 pm everyday, you meditate at 2:50 and then let yourself drink tea at 3:00) or experiment with new rewards (drinking a nice cup of tea after each meditation or journaling on the insights of your meditation) to help bring yourself back to meditation next time.
• Before you decide on a cue - routine - reward structure that you want to repeat, you might want to first discover what works for you. You can meditate in the metro, on the bus, while walking, first thing when you wake up, when you get to the office, in between meetings, as a 5 min work break, at lunch, at the end of the workday before you leave the office, first thing when you come home from work, before you sleep, when you sit down at your desk to work… There are countless possibilities. Experimenting and discovering times and spaces that work for you is critical. Once you do this, you can look into repeating those times and spaces again and again, making them into habits with specific cues and rewards.

Flexibility

• That said, some people (and I am one of them!) find a mindset of flexibility more helpful to continue their mindfulness practice over the long term. Rather than trying to stick to the same time / place every day, you can also commit to meditating every day and allow your daily meditations to take different configurations of space and time. This might look like: setting an intention to meditate for a total of 20 minutes a day, and allowing each day to unfold. One day, it can be 10 min on the bus + 10 min before bed. Another day it can be 20 min of body scan. Another day it can be 5 min standing meditation on the waiting line + 15 min of walking meditation at the park. As long as you work up to 20 min/day, staying flexible on how you get there.
• Even if you do create a habit of meditating at a certain time/space every day (which is wonderful, and congratulations!), allowing your practice to change as your life changes is important. What you might need from your practice today and what you can give to it can be different in 2 months or in 1 year.

Showing up to practice

• Mindfulness is a wonderful practice that keeps on giving and enriching our lives. In time, you might develop a love or a genuine appreciation for the practice. Even then, showing up to a daily practice can be challenging!
• You might want to take Gretchen Rubin’s Four Tendencies quiz to see if you are an upholder (focused on what should be done), questioner (need to justify to yourself what should be done), obliger (needs outside accountability) or rebel (needs freedom) when it comes to meeting inner and outer expectations. You can use her tips to set your practice expectations of yourself and to support your practice.
• You might want to keep your expectations of yourself soft and stable. Forgiving yourself as frequently as possible if you want to show up and you can’t, or you don’t. Bringing mindfulness to why you didn’t show up, noticing if there is something to learn from this challenge. Being mindful of your mindfulness practice.
• If you feel short on time, you might want to simply sit in your meditation corner for 1 minute. In that second, you can notice if you really don’t have time to meditate, in which case, you can get up and continue your day after a mindful breath or two, or if you now feel like you can meditate for 5 minutes, you can do a short practice before you continue on with your day. You can commit to sitting in your meditation corner for at least 1 minute each day. Setting a small and achievable daily goal like this, and then letting the moment unfold, can reduce the initial resistance.

Journaling

• Keeping a mindfulness journal to reflect on the challenges and insights of your practice can also be very helpful. Over time, this journal might become another reminder for you to practice (especially if you carry it with you at all times). You might want to read your journal from time to time to see your progress and renew your intentions. You might also want to journal together with others practicing mindfulness.

The power of community

• You might find it helpful to find mindfulness “buddies”, find or create a meditation group to practice with others. I lead a weekly meditation group Wednesday evenings if you are interested in joining us.

Sensing which practice you need

• When you sit down to meditate each day, you might want to check in with yourself and sense which practice will help you the most. Do you need a sense of openness, connection and compassion? Do you need to come back to the body, or to emotions and thoughts?
• If you do different practices in one sitting, you might sense if finding some presence first will help you, or opening your heart a bit first will help you find some easy presence. In other words, you can start by an awareness practice to be followed by a compassion practice, or vice versa.
• If there are practices you find especially challenging or interesting, you might want to repeat them to get more insight. If there are practices you find especially pleasant and easy, you might want to repeat them to find ease and presence. You don’t have to focus your practice on challenging meditations. Trust that as you cultivate awareness and compassion, you will naturally get insights into yourself and into the world, slowly over time.
• The most important practice of mindfulness is anchoring on the present moment with compassion. You might repeat this practice formally and informally every day with your chosen anchor. Over time, you can experiment with the duration of your anchoring practice (starting with 5-10 min, building up to 30 min a day).

Meditation tools

• You may find it helpful to use the free mobile application Insight Timer to time your meditations.
• If you are sitting longer, you may want to experiment with setting bells every 5-10 minutes to remind you to come back to presence (there is a setting for this on Insight Timer).
• You may want to explore the many different meditation teachers and their recorded meditations on Insight Timer and Youtube. Audio guidance can be especially helpful when starting to meditate, or when looking for new depths in your practice.
• When in doubt, or when overwhelmed with the amount of options out there, remember to always come back to central practices of mindfulness: setting a timer and anchoring with compassion.

Meditation postures

• When you take a meditation posture, it is important to:
  • Be comfortable enough so that pain or discomfort doesn’t become a distraction. Elongate your spine and neck and become tall and upright, without being stiff. Let the rest of the body hang from this tall spine.
  • Relax obvious areas of tension at the beginning of the practice, such as shoulders, neck, face, and hands.
  • Not create additional pain or injury if certain postures are new for you, and supporting your body (where there is pain or discomfort) with as many cushions, mats and blankets as needed.
  • Be still, letting the body achieve a sense of stability and balance. You can adjust your posture if it’s kind to adjust. If you do adjust your posture, and then you notice that every few minutes there is a desire to keep adjusting your posture, you can bring mindfulness to this desire, and experiment with it. What happens to the desire to move when you don’t act on it?
  • If adjusting or changing postures in the middle of meditation, do this so very very slowly and mindfully, so as to not interrupt your focus and presence.
  • Look for alignment:
    • Aligning your two feet, both fully on the floor (when sitting on a chair),
    • Aligning your ankles with your knees (when sitting on a chair),
    • Aligning your hip bones with your shoulders,
    • Aligning your spine and head.

• When taking a sitting posture, you might simply want to continue sitting on a chair. There is no need for a more “advanced” posture. When sitting on a chair,
  • If your feet are touching the floor, make sure that your hips are slightly higher than your knees. If you find your knees are higher than your hips, you might want to change chairs or put a thin cushion underneath you.
  • If your feet are not touching the floor, put a block or support under your feet to make sure your feet are not dangling, are flat and your hips are slightly higher than your knees. This will avoid tension or fatigue in the legs.
  • Let your arms fall gently on your sides, on your legs or on your lap.
• If you find it more comfortable to sit on the floor,
  • You might find it helpful to sit on a yoga mat or a folded blanket to avoid pain on ankles and legs.
  • Make sure your hips are higher than your knees. To check this, you might see if your upper legs are at a slight downward angle, and if your upper back is straight and long. If not, try putting as many cushions, blocks and blankets as needed underneath you and elevating your hips.
  • When sitting on cushions, blocks and blankets, make sure you sit on their edge (rather than their middle) to allow the upper legs to take a slight downward angle and to allow the spine to straighten and elongate.
  • You might also want to support your knees or other body parts that are in pain, by propping them up with additional cushions, blocks and blankets.
  • Let your arms fall gently on your sides, on your legs or on your lap.

• When taking a lying down posture (which might be helpful in case of injuries),
  • Lie down on a yoga mat or a blanket, extend your legs, and let your arms fall naturally on your sides.
  • Let the spine and neck lengthen by removing any cushions under the head.
  • If you get sleepy, try bringing your hands together above your chest (so that your hands fall if you sleep and wake you up). You might also want to bend the knees or keep your eyes open with your gaze soft on the ceiling.
• You might want to check if a standing or walking posture will serve you better, especially if you are tired, sleepy or restless. You can start the practice standing or walking to find some stillness and sit later, or you can sit first and start standing or walking later. If changing postures during a meditation, remember to move very slowly and mindfully from one posture to another, without interrupting your focus and presence.
• You might also find it helpful to do some mindful movement, yoga or stretching before meditating, to allow your body to open up and settle.
• Some meditation postures as examples: