"I Don't Feel Like Meditating..."
"I Don't Feel Like Meditating..."
What to do when you procrastinate over your mindfulness practice.
You have learned about the benefits of mindfulness for your health and wellbeing.
You have understood what mindfulness is all about and how to practice it effectively.
You are convinced that having a regular mindfulness routine can make a positive difference to how you live your life.
With enthusiasm, you plan to sit down tomorrow and practice mindfulness meditation for 20 minutes. You feel good for having made such a healthy decision.
But when the time comes, you find yourself battling a familiar sense of growing inertia towards the practice you were so determined to do just yesterday.
Maybe later, you tell yourself. I’ll meditate in a bit.
And then you go back to scrolling on your phone, or you find another task to get busy with.
Before you know it, you have missed the time you had carved out for meditation.
Feeling dismayed and a little ashamed, you berate yourself for delaying and missing your meditation, and you resolve to make things right the next day.
So the next day arrives, and the exact same pattern repeats.
Does the above scenario sound familiar?
In my years of teaching mindfulness, one of the biggest challenges I have observed about living mindfully is to actually practice it.
Unfortunately, mere intellectual understanding about mindfulness just doesn’t cut it. Knowledge certainly helps, but we need to acquire the skills of mindfulness in order to truly live better.
The only way we can acquire these skills is to practice, practice, and keep practicing.
Sometimes, we practice for a while and we stop. Other times, we don’t even get to the practice at all.
Mindfulness is known to help with procrastination, but what if we are procrastinating about mindfulness itself?
We could approach procrastination over mindfulness like how we would approach procrastination towards anything else.
It helps to look more deeply into the perplexing phenomena of postponing important actions.
When we procrastinate, our mind is toggling between the future and the present.
Projecting into the future invites a reminder of the discomfort we may experience from taking the action - perhaps boredom, exhaustion, stress, self-doubt, or even disappointment from failure.
Simply imagining and ruminating over future discomfort can feel as if the displeasure is already here with us.
In a bid to avoid discomfort, we try to delay feeling uncomfortable by seeking short-term pleasure and immediate gratification in the present.
Immediate gratification can manifest in the form of losing ourselves in entertainment and food, engaging in idle talk, or finding some other task to occupy the mind and body.
When the pleasure inevitably wears off, we are confronted with the reality of having made an unwise decision and not being as productive as we had wanted.
And yet the procrastination continues and becomes chronic overtime - a default (and flawed) coping mechanism for dodging discomfort.
I, too, have personally experienced periods of time where I frequently procrastinated about meditating.
The truth is that meditation practice requires discipline and effort, and even as a mindfulness teacher who knows this well, there are moments when I fall back into a familiar state of idleness and disinterest.
I would either lose myself in the mindless consumption of media content, or find myself getting busy with everything else except meditating.
In Dharma terminology, we refer to this as “sloth and torpor” - or laziness and lethargy.
A significant hindrance to making effort in cultivating the mind, sloth and torpor include physical or mental sluggishness, a tendency for withdrawal, and a preference to disengage.
Overcoming such a hindrance becomes an important part of our practice - how else would we rouse the energy to sit up (or sit still) and actually meditate?
So here are some good strategies that have supported me in managing procrastination and sustaining my practice over the years:
Pause & Be With The Procrastination
When we feel discomfort from imagining ourselves taking action, the usual first reaction is to want to avoid or get rid of the discomfort through distractions. This is the typical “doing mode”, where we feel the need to do something to try and fix an experience we don’t like.
When I notice that discomfort, I make it a point to take a pause and just be with the unpleasantness of the experience.
Observe what is present.
What emotions are here? How is my body feeling? What thoughts have arrived? Are there any impulses to behave in a certain way?
Notice self-judgement.
What thoughts do I have about myself procrastinating?
How do these thoughts make me feel?
Do these judgements show up in my body as well?
Deepen this introspection.
What is really holding me back from meditating? Is it just boredom or avoidance of discomfort?
Is there a striving element in my approach towards my practice - a fear of not doing it well or not achieving the outcome I want?
Remember The “Why” Of Your Meditation
We should recognise that we have the tendency to be forgetful.
There must be a reason that had prompted us to want to meditate in the first place, and overtime we might lose sight of that original intention.
Whether it is for clarity of mind, to regulate our emotions, to be more personally effective, to change a self-destructive behaviour, to improve a relationship, or to free ourselves from misery, reminding ourselves of the “why” can reinvigorate our energy and reignite our motivation.
Writing and journaling can serve as a helpful form of self-reminder. I often jot down the intentions of my practice on paper and put them up somewhere visible and accessible in my home, so that I can read them and be motivated by them every day.
Whenever I feel inspired about practicing meditation, I note down my thoughts in my digital journal and revisit them from time to time, especially when I notice myself slipping back into procrastination.
Personally, invoking a sense of urgency also works well for me, where I consciously remind myself that I really don’t have much time.
Every minute spent on idling equals one precious minute lost in paving the way for a healthier and wiser way of life.
Take It One _____ At A Time
The thought of taking on a meditation practice may feel overwhelming and trigger anxiety over our ability to manage the experience.
When we hold expectations towards how our meditation practice should turn out, the feeling of being overwhelmed only gets magnified.
When it comes to my own meditation practice, I often remind myself of the non-striving attitude of mindfulness.
Non-striving here doesn’t mean that we do nothing.
Rather, it teaches us to let go of unnecessary goals (such as perfectionism) and not be too fixated on outcomes or results from our practice.
It encourages the practitioner to do less and be more. There is no need to look too far ahead into the future. Instead, we open ourselves to our present experience only as it unfolds and reveals itself.
One way to cultivate non-striving is to take our practice one _____ at a time.
If thinking about meditating every day for an entire month stresses you out, break this down and focus on meditating one week at at time, one day at a time.
If imagining yourself meditating for 20 whole minutes feels overwhelming, break the meditation down into 5-minute intervals, and approach it one interval at a time.
If even five minutes seem dreadful, practice being with your meditation experience just one present moment at a time.
Explore Different Ways of Meditating
Other practitioners you know may be sitting still and observing their breath for one hour every day, but you don’t have to do the same.
What makes a meditation practice sustainable is when it works for you and is seamlessly integrated with your way of life.
Explore being creative with the way you design your practice:
While there are different ways to meditate, the general framework for making it work is to ascertain your energy level and manage that.
If you are or have been feeling sluggish or lethargic, engage in movement meditation like mindful walking or stretching. Or adopt a standing posture rather than a sitting one.
If you are noticing withdrawal or disinterest, engage in a more contemplative type of practice, such as self-compassion or loving kindness.
If you are feeling restless and distracted, perhaps a meditation with a guiding voice might be more helpful than one practiced in silence.
Consider optimising the design of your physical space so that it supports you in meditating more effectively.
If practicing alone feels difficult, seek out communities to practice with together.
Or reach out to your accountability partner, who from time to time reminds you about the importance of your practice.
Find Joy In Your Meditation
The thought of meditating might feel tedious and effortful, but there is space for feelings of joy in our practice.
Joy feels rewarding to the mind and body, and can serve as a motivation for continuity of practice.
You might have experienced moments of calmness, relaxation, or even liberation in your previous practices. Bring them to mind as a way of encouraging yourself to practice again.
And when a moment of joy does arrive during your meditation, award that moment your full attention and presence while it is here.
Other ways of finding joy in meditation is to practice loving kindness, where we send kind and loving thoughts of well wishes to others, and perhaps contemplate our interconnectedness with the communities we are a part of, or the world we inhabit.
Three Related Articles:
Two Podcast Practices:
One Parting Wisdom:
“The trouble is that you think you have time.”
— Jack Kornfield