Month: May 2020

I think at least 20 minutes a day you should be meditation for. You are just going to be missing so much of things when you don’t meditate. So just meditate! Clear the mind from all the crap that just clams up our thoughts and keeps us stuck. Start out with 20 minutes and then take it from there. Just have a practice, and you will start to have clarity that you never ever had before.

Some say that 15 minutes is okay. I would say that 15 minutes is the bare mininum. Any less than 15 minutes is just not enough time for the mind to settle down and relax. Five minutes is definetly not enough time.

Part of the reason that you are asking this question: How long should I Meditate for is you might be trying to find a shortcut. You realise that I have so many things to do and that I just don’t have the time to sit down and just be with myself in thoughts or prayer, but the truth is that you will end up getting all that much more accomplished. Sometimes after I meditate I find that I have a boost of energy to get a few more things accomplished in my working day, whereas had I not meditated because I felt that I just didn’t have the time then I verywell might not practice meditation.

I strongly feel that mediating for a half hour, two times a day brings a sense of balance to my life in that I am able to deal with the world around me. Why I like a half hour is that I get a chance to first deal with any pressing thougths and then at the very end I feel that I am able to reach a place of centered calm. If all I did was to spend just five minutes or ten minutes then that might not be a enough time to let the pressing matter settle down and then enter into a period of relaxation.

You will learn the difference between being critical of yourself and just being really mean and terrrible to yourself. The difference is that with being self critical you will look for ways that you could improve situations in your life, you will look for ways you could improve and then make ends towards fulfilling that grand goal of self improvement, sort of like a coach is constantly looking at the reels and seeing where he can improve and how far he can go to achieving that sense of fulfillment. Whereas someone who is really harsh and horrible on themselves is just saying things like “I suck”, “I am a loser”, “I am stupid”, you just say this crap over and over again and again in your mind.

The one thing I have learned from meditation is to love myself. In the bible Jesus says that the second commandment is to love your neighbor as you love yourself. Most people get hung up on the concept of loving their neighbor, but forget the idea that Jesus also commanded us to love ourselves. How many people out there are just saying really horrible things to themselves for no reason. Many people are saying things like just shot me.

Look at how many people won’t go to the gym when they could go because they just don’t see any point. How many people are stuck in really horrible relationships where they think they have to settle for a really terrible person because they are not worthy of something just that much better? I don’t have a quantifiable number but I am sure that it is really high. And there are just that many more examples where people are just really nasty to themselves and others around them. With practice of consistent meditation I have learned to yes be critical of the missteps I have done, to constantly be self evaluating myself, reallising that I do indeed have all of the power to transform my life for the better. About 11 months into meditation I had the strangest realisation that I don’t beat myself up anymore, I don’t talk badly to myself, I don’t say that I am stupid. I still like to find ways to improve my life, but in a far less unloving manner towards myself than I have before.

Of course the natural thing you are going to ask is how did you just stop all the negative selftalk? Answer is just to continue the practice of meditation. For starters you are going to just realise that most of your thoughts are just horrible. 70 percent of a person’s thoughts are really terrible, they tend to be focused on what is wrong in their life. What is wrong with their job, what is wrong with their boss, coworkers, company, weight and not what it is that is right. It is important to realize what is wrong but nonetheless it is equally important. Here is a real world application which may be a reasont that meditation could assist you. Your boss yelled at you, I mean nobody wants to have a situation at work where their boss yelled at them.

Here is what meditation will do in some of those really harsh situations, you will sit down to meditate and at first your mind will be full of just dred that your boss come Monday is going to fire you, your thoughts will be racing Oh my god I am going to be Fired! You will repeat that horrible thought over and over again. You will also replay the situation where your boss yelled at you. You will just get that loop stuck in your head and you will just cycle through it. Yes it is good to acknowledge your part to play in that scene that was but is no more, you could see if there was something that you could have performed differently.

And then your thoughts will drift away you will be less consumed with that horror and senario of your present doom. You will start to leave the ball on the court at the end of the day and just go out and enjoy the rest of your day. When you come to a sense of acceptance you can move on and make things just that much better. It is like that negative thought just moved on like a dark cloud, before you start a practice of meditation it is just a lot harder to get unstuck from the negative stories that we have which are just spinning around in our heads in some sort of uncontrollable way. But this just takes time and lots of mistakes. The only mistake is not to show up. The only bad meditation is the one where you don’t sit down to meditate.