How to Use Goals to Customize Your Mindfulness Practice
A meditation goal is not an oxymoron.
Goals help you come up with targeted, sustainable plans.
However, the day-to-day emphasis needs to remain on the process.
Designing a physical fitness routine
Decide what you want to develop.
Find exercises and activities to develop them.
To build muscular strength, lift weights while focusing on each repetition and completing scheduled sets.
To improve flexibility, ease into a series of stretches while riding out the clock.
To develop endurance, get caught up in the rhythm of your swimming strokes as you tick off the laps.
Once you’ve designed your physical workout program, keep redirecting your energy back to following through with the planned workouts.
Designing an attentional fitness routine
When it comes to your mindfulness practice, identify the attentional capacities you want to strengthen and explore ways to work on them.
To improve your ability to focus, pick exercises for steering your attention back again and again to selected sensations for a predetermined duration.
To get better at relaxing, explore exercises to help detect, create, and savor restful sensations.
To become more aware of your feelings, create opportunities to briefly observe your emotional reactions to a range of pleasant and unpleasant emotional triggers.
With both physical and attentional fitness, the only way to make progress towards your goals is to keep doing the exercises you’ve decided to do.
Maybe the most beneficial meditation goal of all would be to fall in love with the process itself — to inhabit it so completely that the need to reach your specific goals quietly withers away.
