Making Time for Meditation

Meditation resembles sex in a number of ways, and this is one of them: You may prefer it short and quick or long and slow. But whatever your predilections, you would no doubt agree that some sexual contact with your beloved is better than no sex at all.

Well, apply this dictum to meditation, and you'll get the drift. If you can't schedule a half hour, then meditate for a few minutes. It's much better to sit for five or ten minutes every day than for an hour once a week - though you may want to do both. As with all the guidelines in this book, experiment with the different options until you find the one that suits you best.

Digital alarm watches provide an accurate and inexpensive way to time your meditations precisely without watching the clock. Also, you might like to signal the beginning and end of your meditation with the sound of a small bell, as is done in many traditional cultures.

Five minutes: If you're a beginner, a few minutes can seem like an eternity, so start off slow and increase the length of your sittings as your interest and enjoyment dictate. You may find that by the time you settle your body and start to focus on your breath, your time is up. If the session seems too short, you can always sit a little longer next time. As your practice develops, you'll find that even five minutes can be immeasurably refreshing.

Ten to 15 minutes: If you're like most people, you need several minutes at the start of meditation to get settled, a few more to become engaged in the process, and several at the end to reorient - which means that 10 or 15 minutes leaves you a little in the middle to deepen your concentration or expand your awareness. Once you've made it this far, try leveling off at 15 minutes a day for several weeks and watch how your powers of concentration build.

Twenty minutes to an hour: The longer you sit, the more time you'll have between preliminaries and endings to settle into a focused and relaxed state of mind. If you have the motivation and can carve out the time, by all means devote 40 minutes or 1 hour to meditation each day. You'll notice the difference - and you'll understand why most meditation teachers recommend sitting this long at a stretch. Perhaps it's the human attention span - look at the proverbial 50-minute hour of psychotherapy or the optimal length for most TV shows.

But remember: It's better to keep your practice steady and regular than to splurge one day and abstain for the rest of the week.

How to Sit Still For Mediation

When talking about the practice of sitting still, one of the great meditation teachers, the Zen master Shunryu Suzuki, used to say that the best way to show a snake its true nature is to put it in a hollow stick of bamboo. Take a moment and give this unusual metaphor some thought. What could he have possibly meant by it?

Well, imagine that you're a snake in bamboo. What does it feel like? Every time you try to slither, which is after all what snakes like to do, you bump against the walls of your straight as-an-arrow home. If you pay attention, you start to notice how slippery you actually are.
In the same way, sitting in a certain posture and keeping your body relatively still provides a stick of bamboo that mirrors back to you every impulse and distraction. You get to see how fidgety your body can be - and how hyperactive your mind, which is actually the source of your body's restlessness. "Maybe I should scratch that itch or answer that phone or run that errand." For every plan or intention, there's a corresponding impulse in your muscles and skin. But you'll never notice all this activity unless you sit still.

The funny thing is, you can sit in the same position for hours without noticing it when you're happily engrossed in some favorite activity like watching a movie or surfing the Net or working on a hobby. But try to do something you find boring or unpleasant - especially an activity as strange and unfamiliar as turning your attention back on yourself and following your own breath or paying attention to your own sensations - and suddenly every minute can seem like an hour, every ache can seem like an ailment of life threatening proportions, and every item on your to-do list can take on irresistible urgency.

When you're constantly acting and reacting in response to thoughts and outside stimulation, you don't have a chance to get to know how your mind works. By sitting still like the snake in bamboo, you have a mirror that shows you just how slippery and elusive your mind can be.

Keeping still also gives you a tremendous edge when you're working on developing your concentration. Imagine a heart surgeon or a concert pianist who can't quiet her body while plying her craft. The fewer physical distractions you have, the easier it becomes to follow your breath, practice your mantra — or whatever your meditation happens to be.

The Increasing Popularity of Meditation

Over the past twenty years or so, meditation has gained an increasing acceptance and practice in the Western world. While still far from being an important part of Western society, the practice of meditation has made significant inroads in the therapeutic and medical community and is winning increasingly broad support in business, educational, and political arenas.

In the United States, meditation has survived its infancy and is well on its way through childhood. The reason for this increasing acceptance is that meditation has proven to be both a practical and effective tool for increasing health as well as happiness. The past twenty years have provided consistent clinical and scientific experience that allows us to draw some strong conclusions about the practice of meditation. In general, we can state with great confidence, based on evidence that the consistent practice of meditation leads to a healthier and more effective human being.

More specifically, those who practice some form of meditation have one or more of the following characteristics: they have lower triglyceride levels; achieve a lower, more stable heart rate; they have lower blood pressure; they have a slower and more stable respiratory rate; they have a more stable galvanic skin response; report fewer psychosomatic symptoms such as headaches, colds, gastric disturbances; take fewer prescription and nonprescription drugs; report lower levels of anxiety and fear; score higher on self-actualization inventories; and have increased capacity for loving relationships.

These are only a few of the many benefits of meditation. In short, when compared to others who do not practice meditation, or to their state before they began to meditate, those who consistently practice meditation are healthier, happier, and more effective human beings.

Clinical experience, scientific research, and the experience of an average person all point to one and the same conclusion: the consistent practice of meditation is probably the most important and effective self-help tool available today for personal health and effectiveness. It is also clear that under the guidance of a competent instructor, meditation can be safely and successfully practiced by almost anyone without any fear of harmful side-effects.

The real question is not whether meditation is helpful, but rather how and why it works. What is it that happens during and as a result of meditation that produces such specific physical and mental benefits and leads to improvement in many aspects of one's life? The key to answering these questions lies in understanding the relationship between meditation and the emotions. The physiological, psychological, and behavioral changes listed above all reflect a more balanced and harmonious emotional state.

The Benefits of Meditation

You do not have to be an expert or skilled in meditation to enjoy its benefits. You just need to practice regularly without trying to get anywhere or achieve anything in particular. And just like interest in a bank account, the benefits just accrue by themselves. The following are some wonderful rewards one can acquire through meditation:

Being awake at the present time. When you rush breathlessly from one moment to the next while anticipating another problem or yearning for another pleasure, you miss the beauty and closeness of the present, which is constantly unfolding before your eyes. Meditation teaches you to slow down and take each moment as it comes; the sounds of traffic, the smell of roses, the laughter of children, the beauty of the ocean, the coming and going of your breath. In fact, as the meditative traditions remind us, only the present moment exists anyway. The past is just a memory and the future a fantasy, projected on the movie screen of the brain right now.

Being friends with oneself. When you are constantly struggling to live up to expectations, whether your own or someone else's, or racing to reinvent inner self to survive in a competitive environment, you rarely have the opportunity or the motivation to get to know yourself just the way you are. Self-doubt and self-hatred may appear to fuel the fires of self-improvement, but they are painful and they contribute to other negative mind-states like fear, anger, depression, and alienation. They also prevent you from living up to your full potential. When you meditate, you learn to welcome every experience and aspect of your being without any judgment or denial. In the process, you begin to treat yourself as you would a close friend, accepting and loving the whole package, the apparent weaknesses and shortcomings as well as the positive qualities and strengths.

Creating a deep connection with others: As you wake up to the present time and open your heart and mind to your own experience, you naturally extend this quality of awareness and presence to your relationships with family and friends. If you are like most people, you tend to project your own desires and expectations to those who are close to you, which act as a barrier to real communication. But when you start to accept others the way they are, a skill you can develop through the practice of meditation, you open up the channels for a deeper love and intimacy to flow.

Relaxing your body and calming your consciousness. Your mind and body are inseparable, so an agitated mind inevitably produces a stressed out body. As your mind settles, relaxes, and opens during meditation, so does the body. The longer you spend meditating, the more this tranquility and relaxation ripples out to every area of your life, including your health.

Meditation for You

Lighten up! Perhaps you have noticed that non stop thinking and worrying generate a kind of inner fears feed on one another, problems get magnified exponentially, and the next thing you know, you are feeling overwhelmed and panicked.

Meditation encourages an inner mental spaciousness in which difficulties and concerns no longer seem so threatening. It seems like constructive solutions can naturally arise as well as a certain detachment that allows for greater objectivity, perspective, and humor. That mysterious word enlightenment actually refers to the supreme "lightening up"!

Here are some other benefits you can experience from practicing meditation:

• Experiencing focus and flow - When you are so fully involved in an activity that all sense of self-consciousness, separation, and distraction dissolves. For human beings, this total immersion constitutes the ultimate enjoyment and provides the ultimate antidote to alienation of post modern life. There is no doubt you have experienced moments like these; reading, playing a sport, creating a work of art, working in the garden, making love. Athletes refer to this as "the zone." Through meditation, you can discover how to give the same focused attention to and derive the same enjoyment from every activity.
• Feeling more centered, grounded, and balanced - To counter the growing insecurity of life in rapidly changing times, meditation offers an inner grounded ness and balance that external situations cannot interfere. When you practice coming home over and over to your body, your breath, your sensations, your feelings, you eventually grow to realize that you are always home, no matter where you go. And when you make friends with yourself, embracing the dark and the light, the weak and the strong, you no longer get thrown off-center by the "slings and arrows" of life.
• Enhancing performance at work and play - Researches have shown that basic meditation practice alone can enhance clarity, creativity, self-actualization, and many of the other factors that contribute to superior performance. In addition, specific meditations have been devised to enhance performance in a variety of activities, from sports to schoolwork.
• Increasing appreciation, gratitude, and love - As you begin to open to your experience without judgment or hatred, your heart gradually opens as well, to yourself and others. You can practice specific types of meditations for cultivating appreciation, gratitude, and love or you may find, as so many meditators have before you, that these qualities take place naturally when you can gaze at the world with fresh eyes, free from the usual projections and expectations.