Sleep or meditation

taiyaki

I'm going to start doing an experiment. Instead of waking up at 6 am i am going to wake up at 5:30 am to meditate for a half hour. Then mid day i'll meditate for a half hour. Then prior to sleep i will meditate for a half hour.

What do you guys think? Helpful? I'll tell you how it goes.

Maybe instead of 30 minutes of meditation during mid day i can do some yoga or tai chi.

I am also curious what ypur routines are. Also do you think meditation verses a little extra sleep is worth it?

Please share.

patbb

if you are doing concentration meditation, this is a great way to get lots of momentum going.

worked very well for me at least.

certainly worth trying, nothing to lose.

please follow up and let us hear of your experience

Dandelion

Hi @taiyaki
I admire your dedication.
My routine is somewhat 'stressed', as in err... well I don't really have one; generally, not just in Buddhism. Meditation wise, I meditate in bed (I know this isn't typically recommended) as it often (but not always) helps with my insomnia. I'm better at this stage, of trying to catch myself doing mental chattering, and stopping it, than what I am at meditating. Meditating in a more formal manner seems like it is a little out of my reach at this point, but I am going to endeavour to introduce it more 'properly' soon, but only for 10 minutes at a time. I think to try for any longer would be futile for me in these early stages of Buddhism, which is where I currently am.
I think that meditation at the expense of a little less sleep may be worth it, I guess you won't know till you try. We all have different mileages for different things, at different stages in life.
Good luck! I look forward to hearing how it goes

Dandelion

if you are doing concentration meditation, this is a great way to get lots of momentum going.

worked very well for me at least.

certainly worth trying, nothing to lose.

please follow up and let us hear of your experience

Forgive my ignorance, but what is concentration meditation?

Jeffrey

Its my belief that concentration meditation is on an object. For example the breath. What I call 'formless' meditation would be to just use the breath as a support but not as an object.

Dandelion

Ahhh thanks @Jeffrey

Yes, I'm actually googling it now - how did I ever manage without google!

Jeffrey

Trungpa Rinpoche was one of the ones to teach formless meditation early on in bringing buddhism to the west. I think there are some youtubes of old videos of Trungpa teaching.

taiyaki

I have been workin on concentration meditation by focusing on space.

But most of my medtation is spontaneous. Somedays i feel detached so i strixtly do lovong kindness meditation.

Other days i am really uptight so i do relaxing meditation or allowing everything to be as it is.

Other times its just noting and mindfulness.

Or just sitting.

My goal is to make my everyday life and meditation blend so that there is no more division between practice and engagement. But first i need to sit more often. I'll tell you how it goes!

ajnast4r

...

in my experience losing a little sleep to gain a little meditation is always beneficial... as long as you are sleeping a reasonable amount of time.

Epicurus

I hate routine so I only meditate when I feel like it. But I do all kind of little things throughout the day to keep me mindful. Like brushing my teeth using my left hand instead of the right one. Etc etc

person

I find early morning meditation to be generally more productive. I try to get up early for meditation as well. I find that waking up right away instead of hitting snooze and lingering in bed helps against sleepiness.

If I don't get enough sleep though and I feel too tired my meditation turns into just an effort to keep my head up.

I do some in the morning and some before going to bed. If I have a boring day I'll sometimes work in something in the middle of the day. I find just a small amount during the day can help keep that meditative state of mind close.

Good Luck.

patbb

Its my belief that concentration meditation is on an object. For example the breath.

this.

perhaps i should have used the word samadhi, which means concentration meditation but most people are more familiar with this term i guess..

So probably this clears up the confusion but just to be thorough:

any meditation that has an object that you try to focus on, like the breath, a mental object you imagine, a particular sensation or feeling, a sound, a mantra... is concentration (samadhi) meditation.

Usually this is one of the major building block of Buddhist practice, people doing this type of meditation usually eventually attain progressively deeper altered state of consciousness called samadhi jhana's.
(google Ajahn Brahm book on the subject. it is very informative, i think it's free somewhere on the net)

This is the main tool used by theravadin Buddhism, Transcendental meditation, and a very important one for mahayana...


btw, formless is also a term to refer to the last 4 stages of jhana...

misecmisc1

i meditate during morning time only for nearly 1 hour. meditation on natural breath, trying to be mindfully aware of the proceedings in my meditation. frankly speaking i am just sitting - saying it to be a meditation is a sort of exaggeration - more about it you all know i think from my post on mind chattering, will update it with the latest status shortly.

in addition to what @patbb has already told, what i have read in Yoga literature, the stages are concentration(on a object), meditation(on the object) and samadhi(the state of deep absorption in which the essence of the object remains, devoid of even its form, so that the observer observing the observed merges into the object itself).

Floating_Abu

I'm going to start doing an experiment. Instead of waking up at 6 am i am going to wake up at 5:30 am to meditate for a half hour. Then mid day i'll meditate for a half hour. Then prior to sleep i will meditate for a half hour.

What do you guys think? Helpful? I'll tell you how it goes.

Maybe instead of 30 minutes of meditation during mid day i can do some yoga or tai chi.

I am also curious what ypur routines are. Also do you think meditation verses a little extra sleep is worth it?

Please share.

I am not very disciplined at home so I usually go to monasteries or sesshins for more intensive practice. Over the last years, I have usually been in a monastery for about 2-3 months where the schedule is 4am wake up and depending on our teacher, we can be sitting well (laughs) a lot up until 9-9:30pm. Intensive sesshins are 3am to about 9:30pm and those are solid sitting/kinhin sessions. Effects are undeniable (at least in my case)

I think your 'experiment' sounds good, @taiyaki but I think you would need to do it for a longer period of time to suss out the real benefits of such a practice. Even 2 weeks would be too little I suspect.

I salute you though.

Best wishes,
Abu