Step Eight

Each of us needs a positive reason to carry on meditating.

It is important to ask why it might be important based on your experience of mindfulness to continue cultivating it. The aim of this is to help show you how sustaining your practice will help you to reclaim your life in a profound way rather than seeing it as yet another thing to do or get done for some negative or perspective reason. Furthermore, there will be many times in the future when your commitment to practice falls away or is thin. At such times, you can easily become angry with yourself. But when this happens, it is good to have your original motivations for why you started in the first place, readily at hand. 

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The task now is to turn the practices into a routine that is sustainable in the long term. The choice is yours and you can even change it from day to day and to match the demands being made upon you and what you want to explore through your practices. However, it is important to be realistic.

 

Most people find that it is most helpful to practice with mindfulness every day. By every day we mean you taking yourself away to be by yourself for a period no matter how short. The most difficult aspect of formal mindfulness practice is in fact getting onto your chair or stool or cushion. 

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If you find to have missed it for a while, just come and sit for one minute. Just one minute. Listen to your mind's reaction. That be no good. There's absolutely no point in doing anything unless I can do it properly. Listen to the tone of your voice that has appeared in your mind. Is it helpful?

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 Come. Carry this tone with you as you come and give yourself the rich blessing of one precious minute of sitting. One moment in which to remind your body and mind that there is a different, wiser and quieter voice to be heard. And that is enough.

 Step Eight is the rest of your life.