You’re committed to building a正念的习惯, and you already have some idea of when you’ll practice and for how long.
The one issue you keep running into, though, is whether you should usemindfulness questionsor prompts to get you started.
Should you be asking questions about mindfulness or mindful questions about yourself?
What are the right questions to ask?
And what do you gain by asking them?
Do you want to become aregular meditatorbut don’t know the ideal time of day for your practice?
As long as you can spare a few minutes a day, you can maintain a daily meditation habit.
You’ll need to attach your practice to a daily trigger to cue you to meditate.
A trigger is an established habitlike brushing your teeth in the morning or changing clothes at the end of the workday.
But how do you decide on a good time to meditate that fits with your trigger and your current routines?
Meditation during different times of the day have different benefits.
Let’s take a look so you can discover what works best for you.
Whatever your background,mindfulness meditationis accessible to everyone.
But have you ever kept aguided meditationjournal — or any kind of meditation journal?
What does writing have to do with meditation, anyway?
Doesn’t writing have to do with thinking?
And aren’t you supposed to have aquiet mindtoreap the benefitsof meditation?
As you’ll see further on with our meditation journaling examples, writing and meditation are more alike than you might think.
Often when people considermeditation, they have a vague sense it’s something theyshouldbe doing, but they aren’t exactly sure why.
And the“should” partmakes it just another self-improvement obligation, like eating more vegetables.
Sitting on the floor thinking about nothing seems like a big fat waste of time, especially if you’ve tried it once or twice and figured out how difficult it is to quiet your mind.
When was the last time you looked back on your nearly-spent day and thought, “How did it get to be night, already?”
You got up before the sun did, and you got things done.
You checked off everything (or most things) on your to-do list.
But now you’re thinking that if this disappearing day were your last, you could have made it more memorable — and more meaningful — if you’d focused onliving in the momentandbeing presentfor at least five minutes of it.
As it happens, you vaguely remember eating something while trying to get all your work done.
And after calling your children’s names in a panic, you realize youdidremember to pick everyone up from school, work, etc. and get them home.
But the day was a blur, much like the one before it.
One blurry day follows another because this has become your normal.
You have distant memories of savoring delicious food, one mouthful at a time and taking long, slow walks to enjoy and be restored by nature.
You want to get back to that.
You want to enjoy life and to stop worrying about the future and ruminating on the past.
The solution: live in the moment. But what does that even mean?