"When you start, it is much better to do just a few minutes every day than longer periods of meditation on a sporadic basis."

David Michie

I believe that constant effort, tireless effort, pursuing clear goals with sincere effort is the only way. - The Dalai Lama

1. Make it part of your daily routine

My teacher often likens meditation practice to a river flowing through our life. In the early stages, like a mountain spring, our practice is fleeting and undeveloped. There may be a fair few leaps and crashes before we settle into a more regular rhythm. Little by little our practice continues to grow and mature until eventually it becomes like a vast river, attracting everything else to it, no longer a small trickle in our life, but the most compelling force of it. The river may still encounter obstacles, but they are of little consequence. It will simply flow over or around them, having developed a smooth, calm, but unstoppable momentum.

It's a wonderful metaphor and an entirely appropriate one, judging from both my own personal experience as well as my observation of much more advanced meditators. The question is, How do we get from the Andes Mountains to the mouth of the Amazon? How do we develop our own meditation into a calm and steady flow of unstoppable power? “Through regular practice” is the simple, unspectacular answer. As much as we might wish for a short cut to the blissful state of a mind untroubled by anything it encounters, the reality is that such a mind arises only as a result of regular practice over a long period of time.

An instructive story describes how the revered Tibetan teacher Marpa, saying goodbye to his student Milarepa, whom he'd taught for many years, told him that he'd saved his most precious teaching until last. If Milarepa wished to achieve great insight, he said, he should observe carefully. Turning round, Marpa dropped his pants to show his student the calluses that had formed on his backside from all the hours he had spent meditating. With our fleece-filled meditation cushions and foam rubber mats, modern-day meditators may not need to develop butts like rhinoceroses, but the point still stands: if we want to get anything out of meditation, we need to make it a regular part of our life.

When you start, it is much better to do just a few minutes every day than longer periods of meditation on a sporadic basis. A daily ten-minute session is much better than an hour on the weekend. What we're trying to create is a constant current that will begin to counterbalance the ongoing agitation we experience.

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