[From a Q&A session in a teaching on Secret Path to Unity taught by Bardor Tulku Rinpoche. Translated by Lama Yeshe Gyamtso.]
Q: If you’ve fallen away from practice, how do you recover the momentum?
A: The best solution to that problem is to meditate everyday for a very short period, no more than 10 or 15 minutes, in order to create the habit of daily practice.
Everything that we do that seems natural to us is, in fact, habitual. All of the things that we do that seem effortless, almost automatic, are effortless or automatic for us because we are habituated to them. We have become habituated to them throughout many lifetimes. For example, our kleshas: We don’t need to work to give rise to kleshas because we’re used to doing it. They are habitual.
The same thing has to be true of practice. We have to create a habit of practice. You’ll know that you’ve created a habit practice when because of circumstances you don’t do it on a certain day you’ll feel that something’s missing, something’s wrong.
The way to do this is by practicing everyday for a short period of time, devoting yourself to the practice for those few minutes. This is much more effective. Sometimes people feeling badly because they’ve stopped practicing try to practice for hours and hours when they get back to it. This causes them to burn out and then they won’t practice for months. That approach doesn’t work so well.