have i meditated enough?

In my meditation practice, I love playing with effort. It’s funny, mindfulness asks us to accept the present moment as it is, yet at the same time we need to work hard, build skills, and get somewhere. The sweet spot between these extremes is different every day. It changes with the ebb and flow of life. Somehow, staying connected to the search keeps my practice vibrant and alive. I want to share a tool that helps me.

This is my habit tracker. I never used to track anything, and I was able to maintain a decent exercise routine. After I became a daddy, it got way harder to find the time, so I began to set goals and track them.

I slowly rebuilt my routine, starting with a weekly run and adding from there. In the 2022 data below, and you can see how habit tracking has helped me establish consistent running, yoga, strength training, and more.

I’m proud to share this with you. Physical exercise is an area where it feels like a healthy dose of pride keeps me going. Seeing the numbers go up and feeling good about myself for hitting my goals helps me get off the couch.

As it turns out, meditation works a bit differently. This kind of grind is not quite as helpful with mindfulness. I want to share a bit about why the fourth category on my habit tracker is called ‘enough meditation’ and how it came to be different from the others.

When I first became a parent in 2019, I lost my habit of regular seated meditation. At first, I rode pure momentum, but after a few months I was seriously losing track of awareness. Normally I’d go on a silent retreat to rekindle the flame, but that wasn’t possible with a baby.

I eventually found two footholds:

1. I found a time window to dedicate to meditation. The moment when my wife was nursing our baby at bedtime was perfect. I was not needed, things were calm, and I was face-to-face with miraculous love.

2. I found freedom in effortless techniques. At this phase of my life, I was usually exhausted and sleep-deprived, so effort was very difficult to muster. Dropping all effort was incredibly healing and became my main approach.

I was glad to be back on the cushion, but I was still unsatisfied meditating only a few minutes a day. Amidst the baby crying and constant uncertainty, I longed for a silent retreat. This was around the same time I used the habit tracker to run more, so I added a category to track minutes of meditation.

This destroyed my practice.

I went from a few minutes of effortless loving awareness in tender moments to banging my head against the wall. I’d set a modest goal, and even though it didn’t seem too ambitious on paper, I was always behind. Meditation became effortful and stressful. I felt like I was never doing enough. The guilt made it easy to give up.

Worst of all, when I actually sat in meditation, I was less aware, less playful, and less calm. Something about measuring time knocked me completely off balance. I was just sitting there to get my minutes in, and I found my practice became less responsive.

A-ha! So the grind mentality that helps me exercise is detrimental to the gentle self-compassion that feeds my awareness. Good insight there. Counting how many minutes I meditate per week helps me get the numbers up, but it drastically reduces the quality of my practice.

When I removed the meditation category from my habit tracker, you can imagine what happened next. I mostly fell off the wagon, meditating only in those moments when I could find surplus energy. This happened in 2020, so those moments were pretty rare, you know, with the whole global pandemic and all.

So with an onslaught of constant responsibility, nothing to keep me accountable, and unprecedented fear and uncertainty, my practice was hanging by a thread. Too much grind threw the whole frame, but without structure, I wasn’t practicing at all.

On September 9th, 2020, I had a conversation with Shinzen Young on his Life Practice Program and he provided a key insight that inspired me to let go of the striving while maintaining a gentle strategy. In his own words from that call:

“You’re going through a challenging time, but there’s also like, freaking bad times, where everything’s going to shit, and you start actually thinking ‘god, I’d like to be dead’. I’ve been there more than once, and still kept up the practice. And in retrospect, damnit, very important growth was taking place. I just did not sense it at the time.”

When I set my mind to rebuild my practice again, I reflected on Shinzen’s insight. I knew I needed to trust that whatever I could muster was contributing to important growth, and let go of the rest. Easier said than done, but based on the lessons learned from this whole habit tracker fiasco, I created the category you see today: a simple weekly binary called ‘enough meditation’.

Now whenever I pull up my habit tracker, I ask myself a simple question: “Have I meditated enough?” Every week, the answer is either 0 or 1. The question asks me to gently consider my state of being. It evokes a raw honesty out of me, tempered with the warm light of self-compassion.

Sometimes the answer is obviously a 1: I’ve done lots of practice and feel present. Other times it’s obviously a 0, where I’m totally off my practice for no good reason. And sometimes my mind is too scattered to even confront the question. Maybe I’ve been off my game for a while, or maybe life’s been a little heavy, or maybe I accidentally ate too much dairy and I’ve been lying in bed all weekend.

This is where the magic happens.

In these moments, if I have some free energy to catch up, I set an intention to meditate at least once before ticking the box. If not, I use the moment to take care of myself in a radical way: I generously tick the box anyway, even if I haven’t meditated at all. It’s my little way of taking the pressure off, and it feels amazing. With this loving act, I tell myself that I am enough, even without the practice.

The ‘enough meditation’ category is not quite a habit tracker, but it is a useful structure. It kinda reminds me of watching my Mom cook Indian food. When I asked her for recipes a few years ago, I was surprised to learn she doesn’t have any. She knows ingredients and sequences, and she simply tastes the food as she cooks, deciding what’s needed in the moment.

To achieve the same incredible flavour on two different instances of the same dish, she might use radically different quantities of spice. The same spice can taste very different on different days depending on age, moisture, batch, etc. So instead of measuring quantity with tablespoons, she tastes and tweaks, tastes and tweaks, tastes and tweaks…

In that same way, simply asking myself if I’ve meditated enough gives me a taste of where I’m at. It empowers me to decide what’s needed in the moment. Sometimes I need to be strict with myself. Other times, self-compassion is the missing ingredient. In either case, there’s enough between that 0 and 1 to guide me to the sweet spot between grinding and giving up.