Carving out time to meditate in this busy world of ours is never easy. Our students often ask us whether multiple shorter or fewer longer meditations are better. Our short answer usually is: “While you are working on establishing a meditation practice, you will receive more benefits by doing shorter meditations daily than one or two longer ones a week.” The full answer is more complicated. It is not just the length of a meditation that influences its effectiveness, your capacity to focus during that time plays a role, as does the fact that meditating and living mindfully take place in different spheres of practice: formal and informal.
At Imagine, we define mindfulness as intentional, nonjudgmental, awareness through attention, right here, right now, with curiosity and compassion. The practice of mindfulness asks you to observe your wandering thoughts as they drift into your consciousness. You are to simply be aware of them, not judge or get involved with them. Mindfulness is about awareness without goals. Thoughts will come your way, whether you are sitting for a meditation or engaged in a mindful activity. We stress the importance of both of these practices, formal and informal, but two years of answering questions and supporting our students has taught us that formal practice provides the solid basis for informal practice.
Mindfulness meditation is an approach to training the mind, similar to the way physical exercise trains the body. A successful workout means pushing your current physiology to a limit, creating microfractures in your muscle tissue. During rest, the body repairs itself, helping the wounded muscle grow in size and strength. In the same way, gently "pushing the limit" teaches the mind a new way to operate. The more focus or meditative consciousness you bring to the moment, the more mindful you learn to be. Shorter sessions offer you the opportunity to drop into this meditative consciousness more often, as do informal practice activities (such as brushing-my-teeth-meditation or drinking-a-cup-of-tea-meditation). Establishing the new connections in your brain which will make it possible to quiet your mind requires longer meditation session, however. It takes around 10 minutes of focusing until your thoughts settle down and everything within you can become still.
Sitting for longer meditations is something that requires practice. We recommend you (re) start your meditation practice with shorter meditations and slowly add more time. Imagine’s students and alumni also have access to guided meditations of different lengths. On these recordings, the instructors’ voices will continuously bring your focus back. Once again a comparison to physical training is apt: working with a trainer allows you to learn to exercise your muscles more effectively. To increase your sitting time, we propose you work with two kinds of meditations. Body Scan Meditations are powerful because they guide you through different parts of the body, allowing you to come back to your body again and again. Our Sitting Meditations incorporate 5 short meditations into one and bring you the opportunity to get back to a meditative consciousness with each new section.
Only sporadically sitting for longer periods heightens your risk of struggling with resistance. When that happens, you feel tightness and maybe even tension in your body or mind. You are trying to “hold still”, making it hard to commit to the practice. As you slowly increase regular shorter sitting times and learn to sit for longer periods, you allow yourself to “settle into stillness”, creating openness and ease. The chaos of your ordinary thoughts and emotions settles down and your mind becomes still. Visually, you could imagine putting down a jar of agitated, murky water and watching the impurities sink; the water becomes clear as the contents slowly settle. Longer meditations can be amazingly powerful because of this settling and clarifying effect. Your developing formal practice will form the basis for your informal practice: you will slowly start living your daily life more mindfully, more at peace, happier, and healthier. Every moment will become a meditation.
We are here to support you in your journey. Always feel free to reach out to us!
Summer Meyer
CEO Imagine Mindfulness
