Tactical Mindfulness

How to design a program to train your mind

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5-7 years into my meditation practice, I felt like my progress had stalled. I would sit everyday and go on retreats a couple times per year, but it often felt like my daily practice was disconnected from the rest of my life.

Then, a few years ago, I found a framework for deepening my meditation practice that came from an unlikely place–exercise science–which makes a conceptual distinction between exercise and training.

Exercise refers to workouts that help you break a sweat, but that aren’t structured in any particular way. Training, on the other hand, is a structured approach to fitness where workouts are designed to compound progress toward a specific goal.

While exercise offers some health benefits, training allows you to make tremendous performance gains in a relatively short period of time—like going from zero to a marathon in six months.

As I learned about this framework, I realized I had been approaching meditation like exercise when, instead, I needed to treat it like training. I call this approach Tactical Mindfulness.

Tactical Mindfulness allows me to pick out attributes that I want to develop in my life—like focus, equanimity, or compassion—and intentionally build my meditation practice around them. This helps me move through my life more effectively and compound progress over time.

In this piece, we’ll explore the three key components of training used in Tactical Mindfulness (goals, progressions, and periodization), and look at how to utilize them to deepen your meditation practice.

Whether you are new to meditation or are a seasoned practitioner, I hope this piece gives you some novel ideas about how to strengthen your practice in ways that are relevant to your day-to-day life.

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