time_to_meditate_for

The speaker discusses the amount of time one should set aside for meditation. They mention that even just one minute of focused breathing and mindfulness can be beneficial, although it is not considered true meditation. They also suggest a five-minute meditation practice with different techniques or focuses. The speaker personally finds that 30 minutes works for them, but emphasizes that regularity is more important than the specific amount of time. They compare starting a meditation practice to starting a running routine, highlighting the importance of gradually building up the practice. Lastly, they recommend joining a group or finding a way to be led by more experienced individuals when starting meditation. Hi everyone, I thought I'd talk today about the amount of time you should set aside for meditation. The least amount of time that I've done is a minute and this was with a lead meditation and when I was on there was a service that was offering different teachers were teaching different systems and I used to follow a lot of the one minute meditations and I found them very useful and they were usually just a question of taking a breath and then another breath breathing in and out and then just a reminder of awareness or releasing tension and just releasing tension, all the things that we've discussed already over a minute and it's very good, very useful, but that really isn't meditation, that's really the sort of leading in to meditation. When you're more used to meditation, a minute of just remembering to breathe and to be conscious and to be mindful is very useful. So then the other thing that I've learned is five minutes meditation split into one minute different techniques, so you may have a concentration, you may have a mantra, whatever works for you, a breathing, a lead meditation, each meditation is five minutes, so you do five different meditations or five different focuses, maybe points, chakras on the body, however you like to do it, so that's the five minute meditation split into one minute blocks and then you'll find that before you know it you're doing eight minutes, now I did read somewhere that technically eight minutes is a good amount of time to get some effect over a long period if you do it regularly and regularly is one of the things that works very well. So for example, personally I find about 30 minutes works for me, I like to do 30 minutes, it starts to creep upwards through no fault of mine, it just does, that just happens, and then I have to find a different form of meditation to get it back to half an hour. Some people do half an hour twice a day, some people manage to do, this is quite disciplined and actually I've never really done this, I tend to, if I was doing half an hour meditation I would do it two or three times a day and even longer than that in more extreme practices, for example if you're doing zen meditation or if you're doing any form of retreat, it's quite likely that you will have set periods and they can be quite long, the sangha have a habit of doing longer meditation because that's part of their, in most sangha that is part of their remit, so they tend to meditate for much longer. So yes, so the regularity is more important than the amount of time, it is a question of getting started, keep doing it, you will get all the things that you would expect, my god isn't it boring, I can't, I'm salivating, I'm doing this and that, my mind wanders off here, there and everywhere, the thing to do when you start is realise that this is something that you have to practice, you have to do in order to get the results and you've got to start slow, you know a few years ago I took up running and it was the couch to thirty minutes or couch to five kilometres running I think it was, and when we started and it was difficult, personally I found it difficult all the way through, you start off and you do, I think it's five minutes of walking just to warm up, then you do a minute of running, then you have a break for five minutes and it builds up from there, so you're actually only running for a minute or it could have even been thirty seconds, I mean it depends how fit you were, and gradually, gradually you reverse that process, so you're doing more running and less breaks in between until finally you're running continually for thirty minutes or five kilometres if you're running fast enough, I don't think I was running fast enough even at the end, but you do, it becomes easier and luckily I was doing it with someone else, it's always easier to do things in a group, so if you're starting off with meditation, do look at ways of being led by more experienced people, we've done some of these led meditations already, and I'm going to keep coughing, so I'm going to end there, and what I would say is find some way of joining a group with Zoom or whatever and good luck, okay that's all from me for today, bye now.