The importance of tracking your meditation practice.
As humans, we are surprisingly simple in how we discover and respond to motivation. Our goals are all different, but the basic mechanics of getting excited, doing the work, and then reaping the rewards are generally consistent across individuals and cultures.
I’m not a psychologist, nor am I by any stretch of the word an expert on motivation. But I am human, and I have put thought and effort into how I respond to motivation. I also studied yoga (authentic yoga as taught by the gurus from the Himalayas), and one of the tradition’s central tenets is how to harness motivation.
In yoga, the key word here is tapas, and it means “inner heat,” “fire,” or “tenacity.” I like to think of tapas as the warmth of excitement, a personal confidence in an ability to transform, and the ferocity of a warrior who knows the cause for which they fight.
Like fire, motivation begins with a spark of inspiration. It could be the wish to address a health problem, to realize a deep-seated ambition, to better support loved ones, or an intention to simply live a more harmonious life. Motivation always begins with a spark.
And just like fire, motivation needs to be kindled to be truly effective. This looks like forming commitments, adhering to those commitments, and building a sense of personal confidence and capability to perform. If granted space to breathe and protection from doubt, motivation can steadily grow into a raging fire.
The premise behind Timeless | Meditation’s progress tracker is to help people kindle their motivation: feeding their inner fire with the heat of confidence and a sense of accomplishment.
In truth, the metrics don’t really matter. What’s important is being introspective and acknowledging cause and effect.
Timeless’s Progress tab displays a few simple data points. Perhaps the most powerful is the “current practice streak,” which displays how many days in a row you’ve meditated. The current streak is a great representation of how motivation gains momentum: once you have a streak going, you feel like you can easily keep it up and expand it. Even if the streak gets broken, it’s easy to look back and know that what was once possible is always available to us again.
Another effective tool in Timeless’s progress tracker is a visual display of minutes meditated, looking back over the last week, the last month, the last season, or the past year. The clearly-readable charts make it easy to correlate periods of success with events in our lives. For example, I noticed my practice dropping off when I started drinking coffee, and then pick back up again when I began attending a local yoga studio.
These visual representations of progress are small but add up to something powerful. They serve as a reminder that we are capable, and that our behaviors do gather to form a lifestyle, and from there, bear fruit.
I love reading emails from meditation practitioners who share that Timeless’s progress tracker helped them go deep and turn a desire to meditate into an everyday routine — It works.
Beyond the progress tracker built into Timeless, I recommend looking back just before bedtime and observing how a morning meditation impacted the day’s events. When observing the day, I realize that meditating helps me be generous to the people I interact with, efficient at transitioning from one task to the next, and emotionally receptive to the day’s inevitable highs and lows. I’m reminded of why I meditate, and it helps me keep that original spark of motivation alive as I awaken the next day.
One of the strengths of keeping a journal is this continual feedback cycle. It doesn’t have to be a comprehensive write-up — just a sentence or two can beautifully capture the theme of a day or a poignant moment, and tie these moments into a self-awareness that strengthens our best motivation. Honestly, it doesn’t even need to be written down — just that moment of introspection can kindle inspiration and enthusiasm.
As modern humans, we lead increasingly individualistic lives. We’ve lost many of our cultural mechanisms of habit enforcement and motivation strengthening, and replaced them with abundant space to linger. This spaciousness is great in many ways, for it has freed us up to explore and invent. However, it can also result in boredom, disinterest, and a sense of purposelessness. At this stage in our culture, now is the perfect moment to be thoughtful and deliberate in how we discover inspiration, craft goals, and kindle the motivation that makes the original spark a reality.
I don’t believe that we need to be as aggressive as the Himalayan yogis when they cultivate tapas, but we can do some simple things to strengthen our inner heat, starting with tracking our meditation practice, keeping a succinct journal, or simply being reflective.
Arthur Van Siclen is a meditator, rock climber, and designer based in the Teton Valley, Idaho and Boulder, Colorado. He builds Timeless | Meditation, Sencha | Tea, and Minimal | Notes.
