How to Maintain Your Meditation Practice in the New Year

7 ways to sustain a long-term relationship with meditation.

It’s a new year and you’re ready to make some positive changes in your life. The slate is clean and you can finally start living in a way that fosters some self-respect. There are good intentions behind this idea, but if you’re like me then your goals are often a bit delusional.

Although goals surrounding diet and exercise are probably the most common, there is an increasingly popular trend of starting a meditation practice as a new years resolution. As far as I’m concerned, this is great news; I believe that a meditation practice — unlike almost anything else — has the potential to take a person underneath the workings of their mind and fundamentally change their perspective on life.

But it’s also one of the easiest resolutions to give up on. The idea of it sounds great, but the goals and benefits are slippery and elusive. I’ve personally never made it a full year in which I meditate every day, but over the years I have figured out what sustains a long term relationship with the practice. So here are seven things that should help you stick to your meditation goals this year:

Lots of definitions get thrown around in the world of meditation, and they can easily leave one with a confused sense of what meditation even is. People often think the goal is to clear their mind of thoughts, but this is unrealistic.

Unless you plan to move to an Eastern country and commit your life to the practice, you probably won’t clear your mind of thoughts or find enlightenment. But you can learn how to more wisely relate to the workings of your mind. In a way, your mind is not even yours; it’s a mysterious entity that you just happen to have access to. And yet it is the medium through which we experience everything.

The word meditation can be translated from Tibetan to mean “familiarization”. It is really as simple as that. The point is to become more familiar with your mind. There are many types of meditation, but you will most likely be studying some form of mindfulness meditation. Mindfulness is the quality of being aware of the present…

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