How to Sustain a Daily Practice

In cultivating a daily meditation practice for over 2,000 days, and a daily fitness practice going on 8 years, I’ve learned many things about how to sustain a daily practice over time.

Here’s a crucial piece of wisdom about sustainability:

What gets you started usually isn’t what keeps you going.

If you begin a meditation practice (or any daily practice) for the outcome you think it will give you, you will at some point find it hard to sustain it.

Doing something as a means to an end takes more discipline and willpower than if the process becomes the end in itself.

So many people give up because they think they’re doing it wrong or because they don’t see the results that they expected when they started.

What they’re missing is that the “results” are in the process.

The results are in subtle changes that are barely perceptible day-to-day but noticeable over the long arc of time. Usually in a way that isn’t even obvious until after the fact.

What keeps me going with my daily rituals is that I have found value in the process

This applies to everything and anything.

My daily fitness practice. My writing. The projects I work on.

Any daily practice we cultivate is a relationship. We are in a relationship to our practice. And like a relationship with another person, the value of the relationship is the relationship itself.

If you cultivate a relationship with another person to get something out of them you will quickly find that you have no relationship.

Cultivating a love of process is essential to the long-term sustainability of any practice.

You must be in it for the love of the relationship and not for what you can get out of it.