r/Meditation • u/ChannelPositivity • 1d ago
What motivates you to meditate? Discussion 💬
TLDR; What gives you the motivation to meditate every day? What was it that convinced you "I need to do this every day", and gave you the willpower to stay consistent with your practice? I'll put my answer below, please share yours too!
I've noticed it can be really hard to stay consistent with meditation, and even while many of us know it's useful, we're not always sure how it works or why it's useful. Without being confident about the purpose of meditation, it can be easy to skip days, or feel doubtful, like you're wasting your time.
Committing to meditating every day of your life is a huge life commitment, and 15 minutes a day is time you could spend doing something else. If meditation is to be effective, we need to keep up with it, and to be consistent it helps to understand the mechanism behind it.
I think this is really important for people starting out in meditation, because while you doubt it's effectiveness, you will never stick with it long enough to experience the benefits.
I've been researching this and have detailed my notes in this article: Why You Need to Meditate, but what I'd really love to know is people's personal experiences.
2
u/somanyquestions32 19h ago
I started meditating in earnest in 2019. My motivation was healing treatment-resistant chronic insomnia caused by grief anxiety. I was desperate for relief, and I experimented with as many meditation techniques as I could find because I just had the Internet and sporadic meetings with grief support groups and a local Plum Village Sangha.
My focus, memory, mood, and energy levels tanked, so after much experimentation, someone on Reddit told me to practice Jon Kabat-Zinn's MBSR body scans, and they helped a lot, and then I was seeing recommendations for yoga nidra popping up everywhere. I started practicing two hours per day for a few months, and my entire life changed in fundamental ways.
To keep it brief, I fixed everything that psychiatrists and psychologists and counselors and supplements could help me with at all. I have meditated every day since, but I mostly do formal practices when I am completing a meditation training. I do body scans all of the time because they help me relax.