I’ve been meditating nearly daily since 2013. You see in that year, I had the perfect storm of chaos hit and it sent me into what I call depression ( I was never medically diagnosed). Anyhow, I was in a dark place for 2 years. I tried a ton of things like…
- Getting outside more to get sun time for Vitamin D.
- Cutting negativity from my life and trying to move to only positive things as much as possible.
- Exercise – mostly fairly regular walking but also jumping jacks typically.
- Reading more.
- Trying to eat better and get better sleep.
Basically I was grasping at straws desperately trying anything I could. The first two things that started really changing things was reading Change Your Thoughts, Change Your Life (basically a Western translation of the Tao Te Ching) and starting meditation. Changing my thoughts was helpful and important, but meditation was the thing I that was most helpful and truly changed my life.
I started with a 7 day challenge and felt it was really helping. Then I went to seeing if I could do 30 days then I never stopped. Now I had times where i missed days or even multiple days, but I jumped back on the meditation path because I noticed a difference when I went for a while without meditating.
In 2018 I started using the Insight Timer meditation app to track my progress and I set a goal for myself. I wanted to try to hit 365 days straight of meditation because I missed a few days here and there from time to time. I think I hit 75 days and missed a day. Then I think my longest stretch was 220 days straight.
What I found was this goal took multiple years to hit because when I got out of my routine like when I was traveling, or the family had off from school/work, or the holidays or any odd life situation that threw my off of my daily routine, I’d forget.
Outside of Hellagood Life I own another business and since 1999 I’ve done a ton of personal development which included habit building so I told myself I was going to figure this out. So I got back to it.
I had about 200-300 days under my belt and a friend told me they struggled with daily practice so beyond working on my own game, I decided to start digging into what helps habits stick at about 335 days I launched my first 30-Day challenge to help others build their habits.
I went through the challenge with them in November of 2021 and the timing was if I hit 30 days with that first group, I would also hit my big goal of 365 days straight. I did that. I hit my goal.
Since then I’ve worked with multiple people going through this challenge and am still on that streak but now hitting 500 days as of 4/14/22. Multiple people going through the challenge said that they had their longest ever daily streaks of meditation by going through this challenge.
You can do it too. You just need to commit and be excited and maybe be open minded as this is part habit building tricks and part different daily meditations.
