Even when we have the best intentions, starting something new is a challenge. You have to move through the routines of your life as they are currently fixed, often letting something go to find room for the new. I’ve started and stopped a lot of things in my life; I have wanted to be the person who gets up every morning and does whatever it is, who drinks the whatever amount of water everyday, walks the right number of steps. And more often than not I have initially failed. Maybe you have too. Failure in building the habits that are supposed to help us seems to have greater success than success in actually doing the thing.

Usually I would be writing about this at the beginning of the calendar year when we are all busy working on implementing the resolutions we made but I’ve been thinking that maybe all that pressure at one time of the year can hinder more than help. There is no perfect time to change. I personally like to box things into seasons as a defined way of engaging a new practice, but we can start or stop with every dawn and every sunset. There is always an opportunity to try again.

The real challenge is always the actual starting and stopping, the how of doing it, the why of your motivation, and then finding the structure that works best for you. Often discovering this involves trying and failing and then trying again. I have done this a lot, it’s okay, it is the process of sustainable growth.

There are many experts on habit formation, there are more coaches than you can count to help you build a new practice, there are apps and gurus, smart devices and tracking tools up the wazoo. And yet we still struggle to start or to stop or to keep it up. I call this the ‘return to the habituated mean.’ We do a new thing for a while and we end up back where we were little changed. Then we are reluctant to try again because we ‘did that,’ or we berate ourselves for what seems like failure.

This is the hard, dispiriting stuff that I want to get out of the way. It is true, it is real, and it also doesn’t have to be what defines the possibility of doing something new or different. For many years I wanted to start a meditation practice and all the teachers I learned from were very positive but spoke of meditation as a sacred thing that required proper set up, space, and thirty minutes to an hour daily (or more). I was sure that would have a very positive impact on my life, but at the time that wasn’t realistic, and so I did nothing. I should drink sixty ounces of water a day but I don’t; my failure to reach the ideal does not mean I should give up completely and drink no water. I added a glass in the morning and a glass mid-day. Better than nothing. And then I have found the more I do the easier it gets and the more I am able to do.

That’s what I am offering here, the ‘better than nothing’ approach for meditation or prayer. Let’s start with the basic idea that prayer is talking to and meditation is listening. Pick one, plan for the next forty days to spend one minute talking to, or one minute listening every day – that’s it, one minute. Pick your time of day, then pick a back up time, then pick a just in case time if you miss the first two. Forgive yourself in advance for not being perfect immediately.

You can use any number of tech tools but I want to make this accessible for everyone so for this we use only our fingers: sit or stand, close your eyes if you can, bring your index finger and thumb together on your right hand, leave your left hand open. If you are meditating on the in-breath say to yourself, “I am breathing in,” move your thumb to your middle finger, on the out-breath, “I am breathing out.” If you are praying we will borrow from Anne Lamont and breathing in and out repeat one of these options: ‘hello God, wow,’ ‘hello God, help,’ or ‘hello God, thanks.’ Move your thumb to the next finger. When you reach your pinky finger move back to the index but go to the middle joint, when you reach your pinky again go back to the index, bottom joint. When you reach the end it has been one minute. You can do this anywhere. You can do one minute a day.

If you miss a day that’s okay, just start again. If you hate it and think it’s dumb but you know you want to build this practice keep at it, the resistance will soften. Start now, give yourself a stopping point so you know what you are working toward and when is a good time to assess the work, forty days is good, or one celestial point to another like a moon cycle or a season. We don’t start as gurus or saints, we do one little thing each day as we can, if we can, and we trust it is changing us which is what ultimately changes the world. You can do this.

If you want help or you want to talk about your practice drop me a line. I might be the only coach you meet who says ‘good enough is,’ at least for now.