Five Effective Ways to Build a Consistent Home Practice

To fully benefit from meditation, or yoga, practicing once a week in the class is not enough. Practicing on your own daily at home is essential to benefiting from your practice. And, home practice has some advantages too - you can follow your own pace, you practice at the most comfortable place, and you can do yoga-meditation combination or any other repertoire that best fits your needs.

To beginners, however, maintaining a consistent home practice is not easy. Here are some tips that may help you build a long-term, rewarding home practice:

1. Create a suitable environment: A quiet surrounding tends to be a natural reminder for home practice. Stay away from TV sometimes. If you live with roommates or family members who watch TV normally at the same time as your scheduled practice, try to move your practice to a different time with less distractions.

2. Practice at same time, same place: The idea is simple. Same time - just like you never forget to watch your favorite TV shows. And same place - combined with same time usually gives a even stronger reminder.

3. Tune your body into the mode (and your mind into the mood): If you maintain a calm and peaceful mindset, you will be less likely to miss the practice. And if you have a more refreshing and rejuvenated body (like after a shower), you will also be more ready for the practice. You are in the home practice mode, so to speak.

4. Prioritize things: Too busy, having works to do, having calls to make, etc. are all common excuses. But it all comes down to prioritizing things and time management. If you place your precious home practice in high priority, you will realize that making a call 20 minutes later will not hurt anybody.

5. Determination (or overcoming laziness): Now you are not committed to other tasks, and you are not forgetting your practice, but you are simply too lazy to do it. Or maybe you got turned off by the thought of leg pain and back pain. Then set a realistic goal - if you can do 20 minutes, don't set a goal of one hour. And remember, "No pains no gains." Maintaining a consistent home practice is by itself a practice - a practice of determination.