9 Tips That Will Help You Create a Daily Meditation Practice

Learning how to meditate is one thing, but maintaining a daily practice is a whole other thing. It’s very easy to neglect your practice and it happens to most people at one time or another. You decide to skip a session today because you feel tired, then tomorrow you realize that if you skipped one day, you can skip another, and there you go…

There are many reasons why people fail to establish their daily meditation practice, some of them being the following:

-        You are not prioritizing your mental health.

-        Like other members of the Homo sapiens species, you struggle with habit formation.

-        You don’t hold yourself accountable.

-        You confuse giving up with self-compassion.

-        You constantly compare your meditation experiences and then feel that you’re “not good” at meditation (no such thing exists).

-        You begin experiencing intense emotions and then avoid them by not meditating.

I could list a dozen other reasons people give me, but it might be a better idea to talk about different ways in which you can overcome or avoid them all. Knowing how to make your meditation practice a daily habit is the key if you’re hoping to reap the long-term benefits from the practice.

1.      Keep it simple

Your meditation practice doesn’t need to be complicated.

In fact, it’s advisable to keep it simple. While you can experiment with different methods from time to time or switch up meditation techniques weekly or monthly, all you essentially need is to sit, close your eyes and focus on your breath.

Many people feel like they must constantly change methods or push themselves to memorize and perform complicated procedures, but the truth is that the more complicated you make it, the less likely it is that you will stick with it in the long run.

2.      Meditate at the same time every day

One meditation session per day is enough, but if at all possible, stick to the same or approximately the same time every day. If you have a morning routine, incorporate meditation in it. This is called habit stacking and it makes it much more likely that meditation will stick as a habit.

In my own practice, I meditate first thing in the morning, as a part of my morning routine, and then right after work, while still in my office, just before I leave. I use meditation cushions in appropriate places to serve as reminders.

3.      Create a separate meditation space

A client of mine from Argentina told me recently that she goes to a church that’s close to her house to pray, and she does so everyday on her way back from work. She didn’t strike me as a particularly devout Catholic before and she explained that this is not necessarily because she feels that being in a church offers a more conducive environment for prayer. She can pray at home or in a bus, but when she is in church, she is in a quiet space devoted to her religion.

The same principle applies to meditation. While you don’t have to find a Buddhist temple – or be Buddhist, for that matter – to meditate, it is useful to have a space in your apartment/house that will feel like a space for meditation. It doesn’t have to be a room for meditation, a corner of a room will suffice. Deliberately decorate it to have a calming, grounding effect and avoid using that space for anything except meditation.

4.      Reward yourself

This may sound like you’re training a dog and not creating a daily meditation practice, but I suppose it is a little bit like that. The truth is, in this particular regard, we’re not that different than dogs. Come up with a reward system. Reward yourself for a week of consistent meditation, then for a month. Put a calendar on your wall and mark out each day when you meditate. Just seeing that will be helpful to keep you on track.

Our brains learn more efficiently when they have a clear direction and rewards for good behavior provide that direction. This is far more efficient than getting upset with yourself when you realize that you’ve neglected meditation for a week. That way, you just feel bad and your brain doesn’t connect any dots.

5.      Stay accountable

Journaling about your meditation experiences can provide a degree of accountability as well as being an excellent way to learn more about how your mind works. If this is not enough and you need another person to keep you accountable, you can get a meditation teacher or a coach.

A more affordable option is to teach your partner or a good friend to meditate and then have your daily practice with them. Meditating with someone is also a wonderful way to add a layer of intimacy to that relationship and to build trust.

6.      Join a meditation group

Most meditation groups meet weekly, so meditating in a group is not a solution for your daily practice but becoming a part of a community can be very helpful. Connecting with other group members and checking in with them can help keep you on track with your daily practice.

A bonus is meditating with someone else. For reasons I can’t quite explain, meditating in a group can “amplify” the effect of meditation. It’s a truly special experience.

7.      Don’t be mindful only when you meditate

Ultimately, as many benefits as we can get by meditating daily, meditation is not meant to be a practice we do for a certain number of minutes daily and then forget about it. Make an effort to live more mindfully even when you’re not on the meditation cushion. Try to bring a little bit of mindfulness into everyday activities like waiting in line to get coffee, washing the dishes, walking to a meeting, etc.

Every moment is a good time to be mindful. Read this mindfully!

8.      Put meditation in your schedule

Meditation is a chore. By that, I don’t mean something boring and something you do by simply going through the motions. Meditation is something that’s done daily and in that sense it’s like brushing your teeth or taking a shower. Because hopefully all of us have been showering and brushing our teeth longer than we’ve been meditating, these are already deeply ingrained habits, and you don’t need to schedule them to remember. But meditation is a new habit so putting it in your schedule is helpful.  

9.      Meditate daily, no excuses

It’s very easy to give yourself a “break” one day and that one day can turn into three, and before you know it, months have gone by and you haven’t sat down to meditate once. Giving yourself a day off is a slippery slope and the more confident you feel it’s not – the more slippery it gets.

Life can be quite unpredictable and our schedule doesn’t always follow our wishes, but let’s be clear: if you look at how much time you spend browsing through Instagram, Facebook or TikTok, it will be clear that it’s impossible to not have time to meditate. The question is just whether you will take the time or not. Perhaps you can’t meditate 20 minutes, but you can certainly find 10 minutes twice a day.

Do I hear a “…but”? No buts.

10.  The end of the blog

At this time, I don’t have a tenth suggestion, but ten is a nice, rounded number so let’s end the blog on that note!