I forgot to meditate yesterday. Thats fine if it’s just once and I get back to a routine, if I started a nice long streak today. But that’s my 7th time in a month I forgot, which would normally be how many I miss in 4-6 months. This suggests to me that the habit I had is no longer a habit.

A lesson that I used to follow from Atomic Habits was habit stacking. I used to write this post, then immediately meditate, then immediately do my cardio exercise. I actually started the stack with meditation, but I had to switch because I found that if I hadn’t written first, I spent my meditation actually thinking about writing rather than focusing on meditation.

Recently I’ve been writing at different times of the day, like just before bed. And I’ve been waking up later than planned, or spending an hour of my morning shovelling the driveway… My habit stack, my pattern of accomplishing 3 daily healthy living goals in a row, has been broken.

I’m reminded of this motivational quote, though a quick search didn’t lead to an author to give credit to:

“If it is important, you will find a way. If not, you will find excuses.”

I explained the reason(s) I have been missing my meditation a lot, but ultimately those reasons are just excuses. If this goal of meditating every day truly is something I want to do, if it’s really important to me, I will find a way.

If I break my stack, if I don’t meditate as part of my morning routine, I will immediately set an alarm on my phone to remind me to meditate at night. But the best thing I can do is my morning habit stack, and on that note, I’m off to meditate. Because the best day to start a new streak is today!

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Related: I just remembered that I shared that quote before on my post: Leading Change – 3 Images, which is a concept that I’ve used in presentations, and have thought a fair bit about since writing it back in 2014. I’m going to use the first image to go with this post, (which email subscribers to my blog won’t see unless they go to my blog).