Back in the 1980s, I tried really hard to learn how to meditate. I’d sit diligently, following my breath, focusing on the flame of a candle, trying to quiet my busy mind. I even tried Transcendental Meditation for a while. I really wanted it to work. The trouble was, I expected something pretty remarkable to happen. Some big shift in how I felt, how I thought, or how I experienced the world. When that didn’t happen, my enthusiasm petered away. I figured maybe meditation just wasn’t for me. Sound familiar? Maybe you found a teacher who inspired you. You read the books, went to workshops, even attended a retreat and came home feeling wonderful and determined to make mindfulness part of your everyday life. The shock of reentering the real world after a 1 week retreat is all over the place. It’s HARD. Daily life is busy. You missed a morning meditation, then a few more. Eventually that lovely practice you’d started slowly faded away. When we don’t keep up a practice, it’s easy to feel like we’ve failed. Especially when we haven’t experienced the big payoff we were hoping for. We don’t see it right then, but we’re likely looking for the wrong kind of payoff? What I didn’t notice at the timeEven after I’d quit practicing regularly I was still studying. I’m fascinated with learning how our minds work, why we do the things we do, (or not) and how we can make life a little easier for ourselves and the people around us. Little by little, I absorbed what worked for me in my everyday life. I noticed when I was reacting out of habit. Seeing when my thoughts were distracting me from what was actually happening. I was more aware of how I listened to people and could sit with them without thinking about how to fix everything before they asked. There was no grand awakening, but small changes in how I experienced my life. Over the last ten years, I’ve continued collecting those little discoveries, learning from some wonderful teachers, and how to make what I’ve learned useful in my own life. Eventually, I started sharing those practices in workshops and with clients, helping people find what works for them rather than asking them to fit themselves into a particular method. Surprise! That was what I’d been missing all those years ago. I thought mindfulness was something I had to do. Something I needed to make time for, be consistent with, and eventually get good at. It took a while to realize that mindfulness is about how we meet the life we’re already living. A little goes a long way There’s plenty of research showing that mindfulness and meditation practices can make a real difference. Programs like Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction have helped people manage stress and anxiety, and researchers have studied how regular meditation affects the brain. I find the research fascinating, particularly the work of neuroscientist Richard Davidson, who has studied the brains of highly experienced meditators, including one of my favorite teachers, Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche. The findings are remarkable, absolutely, and they’re also a little daunting. Mingyur Rinpoche has devoted an enormous part of his life to meditation. I’m not going to become him, and neither are most of us. We have jobs, families, responsibilities, and lives that need our attention. Most of us aren’t going to spend months on a meditation retreat. In many of his teachings he emphasizes “Short times, many times.” I love that. Here’s someone who’s spent thousands upon thousands of hours practicing meditation, reminding us that we can begin with just a few moments of awareness. His meditation community has a lovely article about bringing meditation into everyday life, including the value of both formal practice and those brief moments of awareness throughout the day. We can learn from his experience without expecting to duplicate it. We don’t have to eat the whole enchilada to enjoy a good meal, right? Drop by dropHere’s how you can work with this. A moment of awareness can interrupt an old habit. It can give us a chance to pause before saying something we’ll regret, recognize that we’re worrying about something we can’t actually control. We can realize we’ve been so busy thinking about tomorrow that we’re missing what’s happening today. Without those moments, we tend to run on autopilot, repeating familiar patterns without remembering that we have agency, choice. Of course, I love meditation now, and I know the value of a regular practice. But I also know mindfulness doesn’t have to be an all-or-nothing proposition. Plenty of people live with a great deal of awareness without making mindfulness the focus of everything they do. Maybe you’re one of them. That’s really how I came to practice mindfulness in tiny doses. One little drop of awareness can create a ripple. Another drop creates another. Over time, those ripples can influence how we respond to life, how we relate to other people, and how we see ourselves. * A tiny moment of kindness creates opportunities for others to pass kindness to others. * Sitting with a friend and listening with full attention encourages them to do the same for someone else. * Authentic gratitude works the same way. It’s why I created Microdosed Mindfulness®, to make it easier to bring a little more awareness into our everyday lives, without feeling we have to commit huge amounts of time, or find another hour in an already busy day. Not to replace meditation or the deeper practices that have so much to offer, but to give people a way to begin. Or begin again. So if you’ve tried mindfulness before and it didn’t stick, perhaps you haven’t failed at anything. Maybe you’ve already picked up more than you realize. No catching up to do. No mindfulness police checking your attendance. Just one small moment of awareness. Then another, whenever you remember. Get full access to Microdosed Mindfulness at www.microdosedmindfulness.com/subscribe