- Why is it important to make time each day for practice?

                                      

Making time each day for practice is important, as it is time to reconnect with your true values and to build a sense of meaning in your life. It’s important to shift out of the hustle and bustle mode of ‘getting things done’ and create space in our lives to connect with our own experience and priorities. Even if we welcome our work, family and leisure activities and find them rewarding, it can be easy to drift away from our core values and again begin to move through life like we’re checking items off our list. This can create stress, exhaustion and a gradual erosion of our sense of purpose and compassion – over time, we can find ourselves grumbling, and feeling resentful of all we have to do.

When this happens, our experience is telling us that it’s time to slow down, create some space to relax and connect with our better qualities, and to re-engage with the things that give our lives a sense of purpose and meaning. We don’t have to wait until we’re feeling burned out, though. Establishing practice as a regular habit can help us avoid getting overwhelmed in the first place. Why is it important to make time each day for practice?

Whether you think of these practices as spiritual mind training or simply as taking your brain to the gym, the key is to slow down and create space in your daily life to reconnect with yourself, your values and what you ultimately want your life to be about.

  

It can be tempting to put off such practice because so many things seem to be demanding our attention. But if we don’t make working with our minds a priority, it’s unlikely we’ll create lasting change. The easiest way to establish a consistent practice routine is to allocate time to do it every day, and to make that a part of our routine. This may be a challenge to start with but it will become easier as your routine becomes established.

In doing this, it’s important to consider the obstacles that might get in the way. Ask yourself, “What could get in the way of me doing my regular practice?” For example, my routine requires that I get to bed at a reasonable hour. If I stay up too late, I’ll be exhausted when my alarm clock goes off, and I’ll be tempted to set it ahead thirty minutes and use my meditation time to get a little extra sleep. Going to bed on time sounds easy, but it requires a lot of discipline.

Another potential obstacle to practice is time. Sometimes we may think there’s just not enough time to practise. One way to tell if this is true is to get a daily planner that breaks the days into hourly units, and spend a week recording what you do each hour. When we actually record our activities in this way, we often find lots of time spent surfing the internet, watching television or texting. In this case, we can reallocate some of that time to create 20-30 minutes for practice.

Sometimes, it is true that we don’t have any free time – we’re just racing from one activity to the next from the moment we get up until we collapse into our beds. If this is indeed the case, we need to address it. We won’t be able to sustain this pace over time and also be at our best. If we want to develop qualities like compassion, we have to make it a priority. This may mean making tough choices about what we have to eliminate to make space for our practice. That said, we suspect you’ve made plenty of tough choices in your life already in order to pursue things that were important to you.

In comparison to the rest of our hectic lives, our relatively quiet practice may feel ‘unproductive’, as if nothing is getting done. This is a mistaken perception, a product of an overly busy mind – we’ve trained our minds to believe that being productive means being busy, but they are not the same thing. This busy-ness can keep us stressed out and block our compassion. 

Mind-training practices involve slowing down, and doing things such as focusing attention on our breath, creating compassionate imagery in our minds or reading materials that inspire us and deepen our understanding. This slowing down is not laziness; it is a basic building block of compassion and sanity. Becoming friends with ourselves, cultivating compassion and generating wisdom take time and dedication. Establishing a regular practice routine is the surest way to do that.