How To Plan And Prepare For Your Daily Meditation Practice

It is a common misconception that meditation is only for people who are facing frequent episodes of anxiety. What we fail to realize is that the root cause of persistent anxiety is excessive stress. Considering the pressures of everyday life, be it during the academic life, or a professional one, the financial troubles, or those concerning the relationships, we are all being exposed to stress on a regular basis. It won’t be wrong to state that most, if not all of us are at risk of developing anxiety at some stage of life due to such a high-stress environment that we are all thriving in.

“Prevention is better than cure” is the new slogan of the world of Public Health. With the benefits that meditation has to offer, it aligns itself impeccably with the goal of preventing anxiety, depression, and other common mental disorders by addressing the challenge of excessive stress at an early stage before it gets any worse. Stress is a silent killer and its effects on the body and on your overall health don’t show up until after the damage has been done. This is what accentuates the importance of regular meditation for everyone in an attempt to keep stress in check.

Much like a workout regime, regular meditation requires a fair amount of planning and preparing yourself if you want to keep the habit for a longer term. In order to make the task easier for you, we have taken the liberty of crafting a comprehensive guide on how to plan and prepare for your daily meditation practice. Without further ado, let’s go through the guide and help you with planning and preparing for taking up the habit of daily meditation.

Having An Intention Is Important

As mentioned earlier, adopting meditation as a habit requires planning and preparing for it. And that begins with a firm and vivid intention to meditate on a regular basis. Starting with meditation without setting up an intention may work for a day, perhaps two, or even a week, but eventually, you will find the motivation fading away. Having an intention makes it easier to remind yourself of the reasons why you have chosen to opt for meditation. With a daily reminder in the morning before you start your day, you’d be able to keep up the motivation and regularly practice meditation and reap its benefits of keeping stress in check and making you more peaceful and calm. Much like you have an intention of taking good care of your physical body when you decide to take up a fitness regime, you must have an intention of being kind to your body when you plan and prepare for daily meditation.

Discipline Is The Key

The next thing that you need to effectively plan and prepare for daily meditation is discipline. It is recommended to decide on a fix time when you will practice meditation on a daily basis. The goal here is to decide a time with minimal distractions and interruptions, for instance, early in the morning before starting the daily activities, or right before sleeping when you are done for the day. The reason being; if you plan it in the afternoon, you may be at work and get caught up in a meeting and end up missing it for the day. Similarly, in the evening after work, you may get a call from your friend for an invitation to a get together with the end result being the same. Therefore, deciding on a fixed time and following it religiously is imperative for meditation to keep the “cheat days” at minimal, achieve the results faster, and keep the motivation fly high.

Environment Matters

If you have been making research into meditation for a while now, there must have been numerous occasions when you were told that the best part of meditation is that it is not time-consuming and can be practiced literally anywhere. However, it doesn’t mean that you can effectively meditate right in the middle of a huge crowd and excessive noise. Can you meditate at your home? YES; in your office? Why not? [restrict] But you need to ensure that you can find a calm and peaceful, quiet corner where you can practice meditation without distractions or interruptions. Remember, meditation is a game of laser focus. No matter how much you think you are in control of your attention, excessive noise will eventually scatter it all over the place, killing the entire reason why you are meditating and preventing you from relishing its true benefits.

Don’t Push Yourself Beyond Limits

It is true that meditation shouldn’t take up a lot of your precious time. It is usually recommended to meditate for approximately thirty minutes on a daily basis. However, it is indispensable to keep your goals realistic and realize that you can’t be a big short right in the beginning. Being sufficiently motivated to start with thirty minutes per day is probably not going to be a goal that is achievable for all of us. So why not start with just ten minutes every day, keep up the motivation, and work your way up to thirty minutes on a daily basis? It is more realistic and achievable and is less burdensome that translates directly into higher motivation for a longer term. Similarly, keeping the expectations in check is also of paramount importance. Let’s face it: you’re not going to meditate for a day or two and be permanently cured of stress and anxiety. Like any other workout regime, it is going to take some time for the results to appear.

Focus On The Procedure

It has been mentioned earlier but needs to be stated again because it can’t be emphasized enough that keeping up the motivation is the essence of planning and preparing yourself for daily meditation. Think about it, you take up meditation as a habit, you invest your time into it for a few weeks, you fail to realize any benefits at all; do you feel like continuing it for even a day more? OF COURSE NOT. And it is justified too since you expected to gain something out of it that you failed to get. This is a lesson in the importance of following the right procedure. You will experience the advantages of meditation ONLY if you are doing it right. So focus on the procedure, make your research, read about it extensively, practice its application thoroughly until you master it. Your entire motivation depends on whether or not you are seeing the results, and the appearance of results is entirely dependent on whether or not you are following the right procedure. If you would like to know more about the correct way to meditate, you may want to look at our article on “How To Meditate”. (Insert link to the previous article titled “Everyday practice of soothing home meditation for anxiety”)

Keeping A Journal Is A Good Idea

While planning and preparing yourself for daily meditation, it would be a good idea to start journaling about it. It can help you in two ways; first of all, it will make it easier for you to recall the meditation techniques that you have practiced and the effect that each of them had on making your more calm and peaceful, and helping you in coping with everyday stress and anxiety. Secondly, pouring your thoughts onto a piece of paper, especially the troubling ones is known to have a soothing effect on the mind. In other words, journaling your thoughts may synergize the effects of meditation in addressing the challenge of anxiety. Consequently, with better and faster results, you will create a natural proclivity in yourself towards meditation as a daily habit.

Materials And Equipment (Optional)

Here’s the thing; if you have decided to meditate, why not do it properly? While the equipment is not of absolute necessity, and you can regularly mediate without it, it would be a good idea to get a few things to enhance your experience. This would include a well-built chair that naturally supports the posture required for meditation or a meditation cushion that is sufficiently comfortable and helps in getting over the natural temptation to slump while sitting.

Conclusion

Meditation is an easy to adopt, time efficient, and effective strategy for anyone who takes his mental health seriously. Committing to meditation requires planning and preparing yourself to bolster motivation and promote consistency. It is not a decision that you would want to take impulsively. Our aim was to make the process as smooth and simple for you as possible. With our carefully designed guide on how to prepare and plan for meditation, it is now more likely for you to create a lasting habit for yourself to meditate every day. Now that you have the required information at your disposal, it is now time for you to begin planning or meditation and get a step closer to implementation. Rest assured, you won’t be disappointed with the benefits that meditation has to offer.
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