Issue #86: The shoulds that became daily habits

Yoga, meditation and digital boundaries: practices I spent years *thinking* about starting – now I can't live without them.

I meditate almost every single morning. For ten minutes, it’s just me, eyes closed, either sitting on a sofa cushion on my living room floor, left there for that purpose; or else with my AirPods in on the Tube to work. Sometimes I let Tamara Levitt, CALM app’s resident meditation teacher, take the lead with her daily guided meditation; other times I just set a countdown timer on my FitBit and crack on with it.

This ritual has been more or less the same for the past three years.

This isn’t a humble brag. I haven’t reached a state of enlightenment; in fact, it feels more like the opposite. The longer I keep this habit up, the more reliant I feel upon it. On the rare days I do miss meditation (for instance, if I’ve had to wake up super early for a flight), I feel the consequences by mid-morning. My thoughts feel frenetic, my old friend anxiety starts sniffing around. I’m humbled by how sensitive I am, these days, to not meditating. How much of my ostensible sanity is built upon this practice.

Long before meditation was a need, it was a should. A decade ago, when I started working at a now-defunct health magazine, meditation was everywhere. Headspace, the meditation app founded by Andy Puddicombe in 2010, was cited by everyone from Silicon Valley CEOs to the glossy-haired influencers I followed for sweet potato brownie recipes. It was something constantly marketed to me, or monologued to me by those who really did want to humble brag about their silent retreat in Bali.

It was only when I integrated it, quietly, into my life, and did it my own small, versatile way (rather than worrying if I was doing it ‘right’ according to a certain aesthetic), that it began to stick. I no longer meditate because I feel like I should do it. I meditate because I have to. Because I’m a mess without it.

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It was the same with yoga. It had also been a should for over a decade. I remember a schoolfriend telling me about her first yoga session in her local town hall, which she described as ‘the world’s best stretch’. It felt so impossibly sophisticated. Yoga was something for lithe, tall women, spiritual of mind, who filled out the whole length of Lululemon leggings (God bless the 7/8 length, the love of petite women everywhere). I had an on-off relationship with yoga – mostly off – dipping into it on the occasional ClassPass but never truly committing.