time for meditation

In earlier episodes, in this series on Mindfulness, I've talked about some of the benefits of being mindful, some of the obstacles to being mindful, and we've looked at a few examples of normal life situations where we can practise being mindful. However, if we want to really deepen our mindfulness, it can be useful to have a more formal daily practice. So in this and the following episodes, I'm going to talk about meditation as a way of deepening our mindfulness. If you try meditation and feel it's helping you, you might want to attend a meditation programme with a teacher where you can ask questions and get support. But these little talks recorded here should be enough to get you started at least.

We use meditation to improve our mindfulness. In the following episodes, I will give some instructions on the meditation. Here I want to talk about setting aside time for the meditation.

It really helps to have a daily practice, a regular time each day when you sit down and meditate. This takes some discipline. It's no good just thinking about it. That's like signing up for a gym membership, but never actually going to the gym. And like with the gym membership, the mind will come up with many reasons to try and distract you from your meditation. Oh, I'll go tomorrow to the gym. It's the same with meditation. Oh, I'll sit in meditation tomorrow. 

The mind, the ego mind, is quite cunning and has many distractions to take us away from such practice. And to help defend against this, it can be useful to contemplate the benefits that mindfulness will bring to your life. Not only to your life: if you are mindful, it will also help other people around you. So it's good to really bring some awareness to these benefits in order to really motivate yourself.

And then choose a time of day which you think might work for you. Many people find first thing in the morning, when they wake up, is a very good time to meditate. The mind can be naturally a little more silent at that time of day. When I was doing office work, I found that a good time for me to meditate was when I arrived home after the office. The meditation helped me let go of all the busy thoughts relating to work, and allowed me to enjoy the evening more, in a more relaxed state.

Some people prefer to meditate later on in the evening. Just be wary of being too tired. It's not going to help much if you fall asleep the moment you close your eyes to meditate. Perhaps lunchtime is a good time for you. Try and find a time that you're going to be able to stick to quite regularly.

And how long should we meditate for? One rule of thumb is that for each year of your life, you should meditate for a minute. So, for example, if you are forty years old, your daily meditation should last forty minutes. It's quite a good, rough guide to the sort of length of time you should aim to meditate for.

However, if you are new to meditation, it will be too challenging to sit down for forty minutes straight away. Start with five minutes and slowly build up. For example, the second day you make meditate, you might add another minute, six minutes, and the next day, seven minutes, and so on, until you reach the forty minutes, or whatever length of time is appropriate for you.

And that would be a very good meditation practice, if you can manage to keep it up regularly, every day. It will very quickly deepen your concentration, your ability to be mindful throughout the rest of the day.

Meditation can be used more intensively than that, but that's more appropriate if you really want to make it a spiritual discipline, and explore the depths of consciousness that meditation can take you to. For these more intensive purposes, two hours of practice a day is ideal. But certainly don't aim for that straightaway. And as I say, it's only needed if you really want to use meditation as a spiritual practice.

Sticking to mindfulness, mindfulness training, thirty, forty, maybe fifty minutes a day, is really plenty. You might like to set an alarm or a timer of some sort, so that you know when to finish your meditation. Otherwise, you can have a clock in the room, but it rather disturbs the meditation to keep opening one's eyes and checking the time.

That's enough on the time for meditation. In the following episodes, I'll talk about setting up a place for meditation and give some instructions on how actually to meditate. Enough for now.