Short Bouts of Presence

Hi, and welcome back to your Daily Mindfulness. In today's session we're going to talk about how long you should meditate. Now a common question I get from people is how long should I meditate? Is it one minute, five minutes, 15 minutes, 30 minutes, an hour? And a lot of people assume that, you know, the more, the better. But that's not necessarily the case because there's another variable that needs to be taken into consideration. And this is the quality of awareness within our meditation practice.

You could sit and meditate for a full hour, but if your mind is all over the place and you're not bringing any awareness to the experience, well, you might be better off with three minutes of really conscious attention and focus and attunement to your moment to moment experience. Now, this is not to dismiss the role of longer periods of time, where we do nothing and we let the mind wander. There can actually be something very settling to the nervous system to just be still and to let the mind go off and not actually have to try to be aware. So there is some value to that. But when it comes to meditation itself and developing a certain quality of presence and focus and attunement, that is more about quality than it is quantity.

And so how do you take this into how you're engaging with the Mindfulness.com app? Cause we do have different lengths of time. We have five minutes. We have 10 minutes. We have 20 minutes. We have 30 minutes.

Well, I would assess which one do you feel interested in? Which ones have you been practicing? But then ask yourself, what is your quality of awareness during those sessions? Are you trying the 20 and 30 minute sessions, but you notice that your mind sort of spends a lot of time elsewhere? You might try doing the five minute session, but really giving it your full focus, your full attention, your full presence. If you've been doing the five minute session and you feel like you're really there for the full duration of that moment by moment by moment, see if you could take that same quality of presence and focus and attunement and then stretch it to the 10 minute meditation or even the 20 or the 30. So the big takeaway here is that longer is not necessarily better. Start with the time that you feel like you could bring a high quality of presence into and then expand from there. Thank you for your practice and let's settle in for today's meditation.