Personal experience with meditation has been a long time coming. I am a child of the Sixties when it was all Peace and Love and Here/Now. Meditation was being discovered and made popular in this group of hippies who were becoming self-aware. I knew of this, but I was also involved in high-pressure business startups, so it seemed that there was never enough time to for anything so frivolous as meditation. And yet all the time I suspected that it was the right thing to do, an important thing to do. Yet it never got done.
Things have changed...
As of this writing, my iPhone's Calm app has recorded 327 consecutive days of use, indicating that I have turned on the app and experienced 10 minutes of a guided breathing meditation. For me, that is an incredible achievement, because I have been doing something I have always wanted to do, and it has taken me so long to do it. It seems there is always something more important than taking a few minutes to do the Most Important Thing.
Meditation has become a habit now, but the process of becoming a habit involved periods of doing and not-doing. Before this streak of 327 days, the previous long streak was 55 days, and of course I was bummed that I missed a day, and thought of having to go through another 55 days to get past my record. Only partly because I wanted to set a new personal best (the competitive me), and partly because I realized 55 days was not enough to establish the habit strongly enough so that I would not miss.
There are a few apps for getting into meditation including Headspace, Calm, and today a new one by startup guru Kevin Rose he calls Oak. It's unimportant which one you use, or if you use any app at all. What's important is making meditation a consistent habit in the lifestyle you are building for yourself.
On the Unbearable Irony of Meditation Apps
Alan Watts - The Art of Meditation - A How-To guide, Pure Alan Watts 90 minutes audio
Monk Gloats Over Yoga Championship - just for the fun of it, an Onion classic
