The standard advice is to sit every day, and it is nearly right. The trouble with every shows up on the first day you miss. An unbroken record has one state change available to it, and once it is spent the plan is in ruins with nothing obvious to do next.
Most days has no such cliff. A missed Tuesday is a Tuesday.
Attaching it to something
The commonest account of how a practice becomes regular has nothing to do with willpower. The sitting got attached to something that was already reliably happening.
After the kettle goes on. Before the first email. When the front door closes behind you. After the children have gone. The specific hook matters much less than that it happens without you deciding it should, so the sitting inherits its reliability instead of generating its own.
The corollary: "sometime today" is the weakest possible arrangement. A sitting with no attachment point competes with everything else all day and usually loses by evening.
Not always alone
Solo practice is the default and the newer arrangement. Sitting groups meet in person and, these days, over video with the cameras on and nobody speaking, which sounds odd and evidently works for the people who do it. Some people find the room helps, since nobody else is going to stand up. Longer retreats exist across most traditions and expect beginners.
None of it is required. A practice that is only ever ten minutes alone in a kitchen is a practice.
The missed day
Nothing happens. That needs saying outright, because the felt experience is that something has.
A practice is not a structure that collapses when one element is removed. Sitting yesterday was useful yesterday, and not sitting today does not retroactively undo it. The day after a missed day is exactly as available as any other.
The failure mode is the story about the missed day. The one that says you have proved something about yourself and may as well stop. It is very convincing and almost entirely fictional.
Streaks come and go. Begin again whenever you like.
A record, not a score
Most apps that count anything eventually start using the count as leverage. Badges, levels, notifications that imply disappointment.
That is a design choice, and it works against the thing it counts. A practice pursued to protect a number has quietly become about the number, and on the day the number breaks, which it will, the reason to sit goes with it.
The alternative is to keep the record and refuse the pressure. A count of days is interesting to look back on. It should not be allowed to ask anything of you. Nanea's Journey is built that way on purpose: minutes, sittings and a calendar of the days you sat, with no points, no levels and no scolding. When a streak ends, the app says Beginning again.
Beginning again
Most people's practice is not a line. Stretches of sitting, gaps of weeks or months, and returns.
The returns are the part nobody photographs and the part that constitutes a practice. Not sitting for six weeks and then sitting on a Tuesday is the normal shape of the thing. The six weeks deleted nothing.
However many days you missed, you came back. That is the practice.
