Meditation brings it with enormous benefits for your mind, body and soul. Many beginners to meditation are eager to enjoy these benefits as soon as possible. Therefore it is natural to want to increase your meditative session. Below you can learn how to increase the time you meditate comfortably and with the best chance of sustained success.
How To Do Vipassana Meditation Technique: A Step by Step Look At The Instructions
The Dangers Of Meditating Too Long Too Soon
The key to enjoying the benefits that meditation has to offer is consistency. Practice meditation on a daily basis for shorter periods of time will allow you to enjoy better results that a single lengthy meditation session practiced once a week. While there is no right way to meditate, if you are beginner it is usually better to start with shorter meditation sessions and build up to longer periods over time. If you try to meditate for too long too soon there is a danger that it will endanger your practice. As a beginner you may find meditating for this length of period of time feels uncomfortable, makes it difficult to focus or that it is too much of a disruption to your schedule.
Starting With Twenty Minute Sessions
A good first goal with meditation is to work towards meditating for twenty minutes twice a day. If you meditate twice a day, once in the morning and once in the evening, for a period of a month you will see significant differences to your life. You should feel more focused, less stressed and with a greater clarity on your life. Twenty minutes a day twice a day is enough to hook most people on the meditate habit. Making this a daily practice is a great way to have a base on which to build up to longer meditative periods.
Adding Five Minutes To Your Meditation Session
If you want to double your meditation period in the next month first work on building up to twenty minutes a day. Once you are comfortable with a twice daily schedule of twenty minutes you can then work on extending your meditation period. To do this each week add 5 minutes to your meditation period. After a month you will have doubled the amount of time that you are meditating. And after two months you will be able to meditate for a full hour. 5 minutes is a good goal as you will stretch yourself but not beyond a level which will cause you to give up. If you are struggling to add 5 minutes every week then give yourself more time. Add 5 minutes a month rather than every week. It will take you longer for your to extend the meditative sessions but the important thing with meditation is the journey not the goal.
Stay With It For A Month
The general consensus is that for any habit to stick we need to stick with it for a period of thirty days. For the first thirty days applying a new habit requires discipline and focus. But after those thirty days it becomes natural. It’s like brushing your teeth. You brush your teeth daily without it requiring any conscious effort on your part. That’s because it is an engrained habit. To make longer meditation sessions a habit you need to commit to sticking with for at least a month.
Change Your Schedule
If you are planning to extend the period that you are meditating for you need to make sure that your schedule will accommodate the changes. Most people can easily fit in a 20 minute session before heading out to work by simply waking a little bit earlier. Fitting in longer 40 – 60 minute meditation sessions requires a more significant commitment of time. This will mean prioritizing your meditation sessions and potentially having to make changes to your schedule. Planning for the longer meditation sessions is important for most people because it is easy to abandon the session all together because “something came up”.
Taking Your Time
If you are meditating twice a day for twenty minutes then you will already be receiving a huge amount of value from your practice. Extending to a longer meditation session is a good natural progression and a valuable goal. However you need to allow yourself to reach that goal according to your own timetable. Try to make small, incremental improvements each week and you will find that over time they can compound to life changing results.