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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.

I think that it is a question that you should not really worry too much about at this point. Why do I say this? Because you can’t control your thoughts. I will repeat that again in, it is really hard to control your thoughts. Is it possible to get to a point of silence where you are experiencing just the present moment? Yes I think that is very possible to get to the point but you can’t force it. It just sort of happens, it will happen when you least expect it. When you first start to practice meditation you could go for a period of 6 months to a year where when you meditate you are not able to get to a point of silence.

The Buddists think that by just focusing on the passing of the breath this will help to hasten a state of silencing the mind. In that whenever you become aware of the fact that you are not focused your breath you should gentley bring your thoughts back to the present moment. You don’t have to force yourself back to the breath but just be aware that you are lost in a thought and that you can just ever so gently finish that thought and come back to focusing on your breath. This is one way to manuver yourself to state of silence, another way I find is that you just sit down on the couch and with your eyes closed or open and then you just deal with the thoughts as they are and after a period of time you may or may not reach a state of silence.

If your goal is to quiet the mind than you need to just keep at it and maybe you might one day quiet the mind but don’t beat yourself. Just remember that the goal of meditation is a gradual quieting of the mind.

You have that terrible thought that is hammering away in your mind. Here is what you may want to try doing. Have a good thought that you switch too, just something that makes you feel happy. And when ever that bad thought just starts to creep back into mind then all you need to do is to just switch to that positive thought. And when the bad thought comes back than just gently switch back to the much more positve frame of mind than you were before. Maybe this might work.

Well I am not sure about what you mean by does meditation really work? What are you trying to do. Again there are alot of youtube videos that like to claim that meditation is going make you more money, make you healthier, make you sexier and give you a better sex life. Again most of these claims are just antedotal without much evidence. There are alot of meditation studies, and they like the claim the great benefits of meditation, and yet not much is said about the control groups ie non meditators. Was there any difference at all between the two groups? I would like to know. But most of the time belief is really the most important thing. If you believe that it is going to work it probably might work, where if you believe that it is not going to work than it is probably not going to work.

There is a point to this in that Physicsts when they are think light is wave than they start to see that light behaves like a wave. When physicsts believe that light behaves like a particle than light starts to display proporties of a particle. Which is the laymans idea of quantum physics, which kind of leads one to believe that you maybe creating your own reality. I know that is alot to take in. Again What is meditation suppose to do for you? That is an amazing question. Meditation in a way is like a wine. Wine works in that the first glass or two can make you very merry indeed, and just oh so happy to be alive and well for the people to see. But yet at the same time wine can drain you and really just crash your life if you are too dependent on it .

I think that meditation could be the same way, I don’t think that it is going to lead to negative qualities of addiction like wine, but it can be over inflated in that you believe that the act of meditation is going to releave you of all of your missery and pain for one reason or another. But like wine, where you are enjoying that nice sip of the vine and enjoying it go down your mouth in such a smooth matter of fact kind of way meditation can have the same sort of feel in that you just focus on each breath that you take in. Taking in that breath, and feeling exhaling it all the way out.

Just feeling it leave you and then fill you back up is just so incredible. But yet at other moments you just feel like you are going through the motions. You may not know that meditation is working for you until someone you know says yeah I can see a change in you such as you are not as agressive as you once where, things just don’t get you as all bent out of proportion as you once would have been. That being said if you do get bent and lose your cool than someone might say hey is that meditation thing working for you? Which is a fair criticism to say the least.

Does meditation really work?

Again that is just all up to you to determine that no one is going to know but you. At the end of the day it comes down to you. I will say this that you should not be putting too much expectations on yourself, in that you should not make the goal the thing of something so far off. Make the goal the doing of the habit. Such as if you want to lose weight than make the goal going for a walk and watching what you eat, not shedding of the pounds. You have control over whether you worked out or not. You have control over whether you stop off at wendys for a mouth watering burger or you stop by Whole Foods for a healthy meal. Whereas with meditation you have control of whether you meditate or not

Again does meditation work?

Somedays I think that meditation is working and other days I am not sure, maybe there are days that I think I should not have meditated but I still meditate anyway. So just see for yourself if it works or not you don’t need a guru to tell you that. Be gentle with yourself, life can be tough enough just be kind to yourself and you may see that you are feeling just all that much better than you may have thought possible. Somedays that one piece of music really hit the spot and at other times that same piece of music just doens’t do it for you in some other moment.

1.) The best place to meditate is your own dwelling

2.) In a quiet place

3.) In nature can be wonderful place to connect with yourself

4.) In a Airplane, after all you are stuck there with no where to go

5.) In your car, just turn down the radio

6.) At work, just be on your break lol

7.) Really just about anyplace can be a great place to meditate as long as you think that it is going to suffice.

If you are just getting into a meditation practice, this one of things that is often touted about why you should be doing a meditation practice is that you are going to be a far more happier person than a person who doesn’t engage in the practice of meditation. I think that meditiation will not change your thoughts, it may make you less reactive to the bad things that happen out there in the world around you. Happiness is such a suggestive thing to start with. I am sure that if you were to survey seasoned meditators we would get a variety of responses. One thing we should be aware of is the placebo effect which could be at play. People who meditate everyday or frequently at least may subconsicously think that meditating makes you more at ease with the things around you. We may howeveer, see similar results of the general population, but my point is that it always suggestive. You will have your own reasons for wanting to meditate.

The best thing that you can do with regards to meditation is to not expect too much from a daily meditation habit. Just instead be pleasantly supprised about how things start to change in your life. One thing with meditation is that we are just begining to study meditation in any sort of serious way so who knows what we are going to find out about this one simple habit.

You may not feel very happy the first time you meditate.

You may be looking forward to start meditating as soon as you can. Your thoughts will be man this was suppose to bring some peace but by sitting down and meditating I am for some reason feeling less peace than before. But just hang in there these are just the uppers and downers.

In short after much rambling, I would say just beware of people telling you about the benefits of meditation, when the evidence is coming from their own personal story, we don’t really have the clinical trials to say for sure. The best I can say is just see if you like it or not. Don’t be afraid of failure!

The best time to Meditate is Right away in the morning. Get it done! Chances are that you have a busy life with places to be and obligations of various kinds and the last thing that you want to do is to put off meditation because if you do then it probably will not get done. If you leave it untill the evening then you are are going to feel so tired that you are not going to have time for it.

Meditate in the morning? But I am not a moring person?

Yes, nobody really likes to get out of bed, but once you do it is awesome. Besides Meditation or prayer or maybe both in the same session if you like are really powerfull especially in the morning. If people who don’t like the mornings are not convinced then I will make this case for you for why you should be meditating once you are up out of bed.

Meditating right away is a great way to transistion yourself into your day. When you first wake up in the morning then you are essentially going from a state of rest to a state of movement, where maybe you walk down and make coffee or get dressed, most often you are in a morning fog, drosieness from the sleep. If you were to transition to say sitting on the floor or your couch in the morning then you would be in a better transition period, your body would be gradually coming to its full alertness. I prefer to sit on my couch in the morning for a period 30 minutes and within in that time I find that I am finally coming to an awaken state from a state of slumber and then I make way for exercises. Meditation is a transitional state from that of sleep state to being fully cogniscant of the world around you.

In the morning time I prefer the couch to sitting on the floor, I find that the couch is much more relaxing for just getting into the grove of this world and trying to make sense of its many faults, quirks and good things.

I have been meditating when I can in the morning for the past 16 months straight, and it really has alowed me a nice transition to an awaken state, some might say why not turn on the TV? Well, I guess you could do that too. But I find that why do I want to be programmed by information right away in the morning? Instead, I just want to be with myself and focus on my breath and say to God what it is I am thankful for and or communicate to God a concern or two that I may have, that being said meditation is a really great transitioning period to wonderful world.

Can I walk and meditate at the same time? I think that you can, it is what can be called just getting into the zone. Many walking meditations just focus on you being aware of steps, and keeping track of your steps taking one step forward to the next step forward. It is just that simple, put one foot infront of the next foot, and try not to get side tracked with other thoughts.

Can a walking meditation suffice for a seated meditation?

I would think that it is no subsitute for just sitting with yourself, but going for a walk does help to ease things from getting out of control. Walks help to regulate the out of controll mind that all so often gets caught out unaware of itself.

Often a walking meditation is used in concert with a regular seated meditation. Seated meditations are preferrable to walking but again nonetheless they indeed can be helpfull. I guess you could say that a good walk can in of itself satistfy the requirements for a walking meditation. I mean you are out there walking in the fresh air and enjoying the sights and the feel of nature on all of its many different levels.

In the meditation school known as Zen one often engages in periods of prolonged sitting periods with interludes of walking meditations where the the practicioner is often walking around in circles and trying to stay focused on the breath. In any bet just getting out for a good ole walk is often one of the best things that you can do for your mind and body.

Have a great walk!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!1

Thoughts and meditation are things that may or may not go together well. It is okay to have thought filled meditations, don’t loose site of the idea that Meditation is not about having a quiet mind, but the goal of meditation is about a gradual quieting of the mind acccording to Depac Chopra. So just keep at it and don’t stop.

Is having a thought filled meditation really meditation?

Yes i know what you are thinking you are thinking that okay I sat down to meditate and to try to clear my mind and instead of clearing my mind I was having thoughts. And you are all mad at yourself that you were not able to just once quiet your mind. You could not do it. And your answer to yourself is that I didn’t meditate because when I sat down to meditate I couldn’t keep myself from thinking. And yes you did meditate. The important thing to understand is that you cannot control your thougths. Yes you cannot control your thoughts and you probably never will be able to control your thoughts. I have been meditating for a while and I still see that with meditating that I am not able to control thougths running through my head.

How do I handle all of these thougths that are running in my head?

This is a great question because it then starts to address the topic of how to do you reach a point where you can bring a state of silence to mind? It brings up a very short history of meditation and of course the many divergent schools of thought that arise to answer this one question. The history of meditation that we know of starts off in India with the Vedas. The Vedas produced the first texts on meditation, yoga and other topics. Alot of Vedic meditation is about using a mantra called a mind vehicle that you repeat to yourself over and over again with your eyes closed and that can bring you to a sense of quiet. Then came the buddhists that were not about using mantras but where all about focusing on ones breath in order to achive that state of absolute freedom from suffering.

So just deal with thoughts as they come and then just let them go as they once came in, but refraim from beating yourself up if you have have the inevitable thought because that is just going to happen. In short try to treat your thougths like the passing of the clouds.