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Two minutes of meditation?
Ren_in_black
Georgia Explorer
in Meditation
I type this assuming I know the answer, but would like to hear it from you lot:
Is one or two minutes of meditation, in the office or the car or the doctor's office, an actual meditation?
Or is that something we tell ourselves?
I'm sure it's beneficial either way, but would like to be straight with myself about what I'm actually doing.
Thanks!
1
Comments
Yes, I think so. Any minute you’re being mindful, you’re meditating.
I've read and heard Tich Naht Hahn's take on this, and it's exactly as @Vastmind says. Any time in which you're focusing as closely as possible on the present moment, is practice for enabling yourself to utilize the space between stimulus and response in your everyday life.
I think any amount of time can be beneficial, like Thich Nhat Hanh’s practice of having a mindfulness bell or even George Gurdjieff’s self-remembering. Whether it’s 15 seconds or an hour, it’s going to have a positive effect.
But to really call it “meditation”, for me I cross that line at about 5 minutes. Then I start losing track of time and relaxing just being in a kind of eternal meditative space. I rarely do meditation longer than twenty minutes though.
That's interesting. When you say eternal, do you mean that it's there the whole time and you return to it when you meditate?
I don't know precisely what Jeroen is talking about, but in Buddhist teaching, there is really no such thing as "eternal". One reason we suffer is because we cling to things, hoping they won't end (eternal), when, in fact, they are bound to end.
But, to speak to your question, yes, even a few minutes of meditation, mindfulness or otherwise, can be beneficial, if you think of it in those terms. I do it all the time. Longer meditation sessions - 10 minutes minimum - are optimal, however.
Because there is no other time in which meditation can be done except in this present moment, why create value systems for the co-joining of those moments into some quantitative prizes of the past or the future?
Each moment is another opportunity to either meditate or not.
Whenever you notice that you're not, simply return to it without judgment or mental contortions.
Or as Dogen used to say "like an adjusting of your pillow in the middle of the night."
No, it’s just the feeling of timelessness which comes over me.
Wonderful! Perhaps I'm a little attached to the reassurance,
but I'm grateful for all of these responses.
I'd even go as far as to say that the benefits per minute are greater with micro-meditations than longer ones. This is often true with any endeavour - the law of diminishing returns.
Yes ...as long as you don't close your eye while driving ...Thus have I heard, this can be a bit tricky
On a more serious note... From what I gather meditation practice is a 24/7/365 thing, it is not restricted to cushion time....it's good to pop back into the present moment every now and again throughout the day...
In less than one minute one can do a quick body scan which helps to bring one's wandering thoughts back from the there and then into the present, the here and now...
Most People, including me, can't meditate for even a minute, until they have unloaded. Here is some of the unloading:
Then spend a minute NOT meditating (you deserve a break from all that activity)
It's funny, I read all of these responses and it gets me excited about meditating.
Then when the moment arrives, I don't want to.
I have that sometimes.
The other day I came across a lovely short 10-minute meditation by Mooji which was about “focusing on your sense of being”. It was the first time in years that I actually enjoyed meditating.
Meditating is a witnessing of wakefulness. All expressions of existence have invitations to this party. No ID or bouncers are required.
Ah yes the two minutes of, “I don't want to be doing this”
Some people spend ages trying to work out if this is a meditation. It is.