I Meditated Twice A Day For 90 Days. Here’s What Happened

I just finished a three-month streak of meditating twice a day, every day, 90 days in a row.

My very first experimentation with a meditation practice of my own was about a year and a half ago, aided by Headspace and Andy Puddicombe. I had made it to a run streak of almost 300 days, and I grew to really love my practice, but it was often at inconsistent times, sometimes frantically squeezed in a few minutes before midnight, and it felt very haphazard. Then, while I was on a vacation in Europe, I missed a day of my practice. I was super hard on myself when I realized the next morning at a beautiful hotel in Barcelona that my run streak had reset to one day, I was irrationally upset, and then I just…never got back into it. I kept kicking myself, knowing that the run streak wasn’t what was really important—I was chasing a lifestyle and not a number!—but still, I had missed a day, and I fell out of practice for several months after that.

I felt out of practice, I had left off in the middle of a series that I remembered nothing about [a pack on Focus, ironically], and I was actually a little nervous. Ten minutes felt like a long time. I had just woken up, I wanted to be curled back in bed with my pup and my fiancé, and I figured that I would just fall asleep again during my practice. I almost talked myself out of it before I even started, but I knew that if I didn’t do it then, 90 days ago, I would just keep putting it off until the next day. And the next day. And the next day. You know how it goes.

So I did my meditation practice that morning, for the first time in months. My mind felt busy, my body felt tired—I had plenty of excuses!—but I did it, and even though it wasn’t a perfect practice (not all of them will be), it was a practice nonetheless. That is what counted. And after that, I was able to keep going. Getting back on track that one day three months ago started the ball rolling again. It felt so good that I meditated later that evening, then the next morning, and suddenly, my practice was back, and it was on its way to being a nonnegotiable part of my self-care routine.

Light Watkins recommends a shawl to keep warm, a bottle of water nearby, and a clock to keep time. I personally enjoy holding a crystal [typically my Brandberg amethyst or my smoky celestial quartz with lithium] to help keep me grounded and promote good energy, but that’s a little woo-woo for some people. Either way, all you really need is somewhere quiet to sit by yourself. Everything else is extra.

My relationship with my practice has changed a bit. I am incredibly proud, of course, of sitting down 180 times over the past 90 days (that's almost 2,000 minutes!) for uninterrupted meditative silence. I am proud of myself for prioritizing the time to meditate and reflect, and sure, I enjoy seeing my run streak increase on the Headspace app, but I know that life will always happen around me, and there very well may be days when I don’t make room to meditate once, let alone twice. That’s OK. Like I mentioned earlier, it’s a lifestyle change that I want, not just a number of days, which is part of why my original experimentation with meditation was flawed: I was so focused on the run streak that I wasn’t able to enjoy the full benefits of actually sitting down to meditate.

Consider this an invitation. I knew, for years, that I wanted to try meditation, but I allowed myself on more than one occasion to put it off, even when I had seen the positive effects firsthand. If you’ve wanted to try meditating before but have never taken that step, this is your time, and mindbodygreen’s challenge with Light Watkins is a great place to start. But whether you use Headspace, another app or program, or nothing at all, resting in silence, eyes closed, just allowing your body to sit in stillness will always be rewarding, and you will walk away with even a tiny bit more presence of mind.