How long should I sit in meditation?
How long should I sit for starting out?
Depends on where you’re at and what you want. If you’re happy to take your time and slowly reign in your mind, 30 minutes a day is a good starting point. If you’re dead-set on enlightenment, 10+ hours a day.
10 hours a day!?
If you want to be a top UFC fighter, you don’t get there by putting in an hour of training a day. The best are at the top because of talent, good coaching, and hard work, but not everyone wants to be a world-class fighter. Some want to fight amateur tournaments, stay fit, and have fun. In that case, an hour a day at the gym plus two longer sessions on the weekends would do. Throw in some tournaments and watching the big fights and you’ve got yourself a solid, well-rounded fighter. However, you’ll never have world champion belt hung from your waist.
If you don’t have lofty aspirations as a fighter, you can clock in about 3-4 hours a week, watch some fights, and do some sparring sessions every once in a while. You’ll improve and keep that momentum going. The rookies who just come in on the weekends for an hour or two usually don’t make it. Every time they come in, they spend most of their time just trying to catch up to where they were. They feel like they’re not going anywhere and eventually quit.
So if I’m going to do this, I need to spend 4 hours a week meditating?
You don’t need to do anything. These are just general rules. But if you want to make some real inroads, that’s a solid number to shoot for. Faith is the source of will. You build faith by seeing tangible improvements over weeks and months, by really feeling like, “Yea, I can do this. I got this.” If you’re just clocking in a five minutes of formal meditation a day, you probably won’t see results, lose momentum, and do something else. As a start-up goal, 5 minutes is fine, but not long-term. Long-term, 5 or 10 minuters end-up lost in the noise of life. Crunched by deadlines. The highs of new love. The lows of seeing money drain out of their bank account. I suggest making a modest commitment up front because, counter intuitively, it helps it stick.
It’s also ok to clock in just 10 minutes or skip a day altogether. Sometimes that’s all that you have time for and you must respect that. Years back, I was very attached to my meditation times. Anything short of my daily target and I’d be telling myself off - “you lazy, worthless pice of shit,” “you’re not as good as Hakuin,” or “you’re so full of shit - you can’t even stick to this modest schedule.”
Ooof man, that’s rough.
Tell me about it. Few are as obsessive and abusive as I was.
Honestly, I’d just shrug and get on with my day.
Maybe you’d do that now, but in a year or five, you might be as cruel as I was. The future is uncertain. So too is who we will become.
10 years back, I was a meditation fanatic. While on a trip to see my brother, we ended up hanging out with our mutual friend, a girl more pixie than human. Dinner turned into “we’ll just pop our heads in” at a bar turned into getting back at 3am not knowing our own names. Instead of passing out without a care in the world, I set my alarm for an hour later, got a wink of sleep, dragged myself up, and started meditating on a stool in the middle of her kitchen.
Don’t look at me like that. It was a townhouse in downtown Chicago. That was literally the only chair I could find without opening closed doors or walking up stairwells.
What our pixie didn’t mention was that her mom was also living there. When she came down for her morning cup of coffee, she screamed when she saw this lanky white boy sat upright in front of the oven. It didn’t help that I initially refused to stop meditating. For a minute, I told myself, “Ignore it. Come back to the sensations in the body.” But the tension grew unbearable and I opened my eyes and offered a half-hearted, “Hi.” My brother turned over, shook himself awake, and shot, “Stop being such a fucking weirdo for Christ’s sake. Just sleep like a normal person. Jesus.” Her mom was relieved to see his familiar face and scorn. It confirmed that I didn’t just sneak in through the window for an early meditation sesh. I slunked off onto the couch and tried to meditate while laying down but in no time I was snoozing.
Meditation shouldn’t be something that you flagellate yourself with. All the parts of the path: morality, concentration, and wisdom, should be fueled by love and enjoyment, not self-hatred and greed. And all three parts have to fit realistically into your life as it is now.
So how long’s a good start time?
Throw away the timer and the inner stop watch that most of us have running nearly 24/7. Approach meditation like going out for coffee with a friend. You should look forward to it, or at the very least don’t dread it. Don’t be rude and keep looking at your clock. When you start feeling like the joy’s withering up, politely call it quits, then repeat - a hundred-thousand times.
Some people have busy days and appointments. Using a timer’s ok. But I’d advise against it unless you have to. Instead of letting some random number dictate your life, tune in to where you are and how you feel now. When you’re enjoying it, you might go for an hour or more, even as a beginner. If it’s a struggle, just a few minutes is realistic.
I’m afraid that if I don’t have the timer, though, I’m going to get up really quickly and not push through it.
Do you think you can’t push through things without a timer?
No, but I’m more likely to believe my lame excuses. The timer gives me an objective reference.
Try it out, see what works, stick with it, then adapt as life changes. In my experience, clock time is counter-productive because you end up relying on the clock rather than your own feeling and discernment. Saying, “I’m going to meditate for 15 minutes” doesn’t require you to be aware with how you are now, how you’re days been, what you’re trying to accomplish. All of that nuance is replaced with this simple metric that’s often divorced from your reality. Meditation isn’t about racking up hours on the cushion, but igniting awareness and wisdom. Meditating without the timer develops the latter.
But it’s also the 21st century. Smart watches gather statistics to see how long you’re sitting every day and track stress levels. Tight schedules. Long commutes. This is the our historical moment and our zeitgeist. As much as possible, though, go against the stream here. Let awareness and discernment guide your life, not the schedule.
How does this square with the 10+ hours per day and the 3-4 hours per week that you mentioned earlier?
There’s no contradiction. A marathoner doesn’t start his training with a 42km run on day one. He paces himself to avoid injury and burnout. The end-goal is 42km, but to reach that he must gradually increase the distance. Meditation’s the same. Your end-goal for your weekly routine might be a 40 minute a day and a 3-day retreat twice a year, but it’s often better to start with 10 or 20 minutes and gradually increase it rather than jumping into 40 minutes.
Isn’t the more time the better?
No. The equation is roughly: Time×Quality÷Interval=Skill Improvement.
Every week, I meet zealous beginners who dive in and shoot for an hour of meditation a day confident that enlightenment is just around the corner. They can force themselves to do it, but they end-up despising it or cling too tight in the meditation, hoping for banging results. Many give up after a few months. Some stick it out but jump between meditation styles or teachers and get nowhere. 1 in a 1,000 will thrive. It’s not worth it.
Enjoy your meditation, look forward to it most days, and come at it with a fresh, positive, can-do attitude and you’ll make quicker progress. Despise it with a “why me!?” and “it’s impossible, I’m getting nowhere” attitude and you’ll drag your feet in the sand.
Now, now, now, don’t let your dreams get ahead of you. Quicker doesn’t mean quick. We all have our own paces that we need to respect. You might go at a snail’s pace. That’s fine. A snail’s a snail. Wanting to be a cheetah or an orangutan will just waste time and energy on wishful thinking. If you’re a snail, own it and do the best you can.
How does all of this square with what you said when we first started talking: that this is it; there’s nothing to do, nothing to develop, nothing to get rid of?
To quote Benjamin Franklin, “I am a strong believer in luck and I find the harder I work the more I have of it.” That’s the paradox of practice: grace and hard work. These direct pointers to truth open us up to the grace of insight and the harder we work on ourselves, the more likely grace will arise. Hui-neng, an uneducated woodcutter, was enlightened immediately after hearing one verse of scripture. A friend of mine woke-up after just a few months of practice at a monastery. Others spend years practicing before grace visits them.
What’s grace? I thought there’s no God in Zen.
Grace is an inexplicable gift of the universe. You might stumble across a teacher who you instantly click with while on a grocery run. You might gaze at a leaf, feel something click, and never be the same again. You might come across a book at the library that you’ve been waiting your whole life for.
Whilst grace is ever-welcome, it also has it’s less-talked about opposite: misfortune, the inexplicable wickedness that destroys years of hard work in an afternoon. Instead of meeting an amazing teacher, you meet a narcissistic cult-leader posing as a sage and devote 10 years of your life to him before waking-up to his nonsense. You have a schizophrenic break-down while on retreat and never recover. You slip in the kitchen, crack your head open, and are left severely brain-damaged for the rest of your life. Shit happens. Good shit happens. Bad shit happens. Enlightening shit happens. Stupifying shit happens.
The good news: the harder you work, the more likely good shit happens and less likely bad shit happens. The bad news: there are no guarantees, only gambles.
Grace is also one reason why I say joy, awareness, and discernment should lead, not your schedule or a timer. It seems bad-ass to make big vows to meditate until your flesh shrivels away or grit your teeth and exert mastery over yourself - “40 minutes every day no matter what!”, but it’s an unsustainable, sadistic, dull way to live. Not only that, but that attitude also closes you off to grace.
How does that close me off from grace? Isn’t it completely random?
It’s not completely random. Go back to the example of meeting the teacher on your grocery run. If you went into the supermarket with a narrow, rigid attitude - “I’m just gonna buy me some potatoes and get outta here!” - you might’ve ignored the woman who you felt inexplicably drawn towards as you walked past each other. Rather than stopping to say “hi” and meet your teacher for the next 10 years who’ll change your life, you look down at the floor and push onwards. Instead of noticing how that leaf holds the light, you look past it, too pre-occuppied with being mindful to stumble upon the gift before your very eyes.
The other side of things is work. Let’s go back to the equation from a moment ago: Quality×Time÷Interval=Skill Improvement.
Quality means the Five Factors. When those Five Factors are strong and consistently developed, quality is there. The other two factors are time-based. The first, Time, is simply how much time you spend practicing. Interval is the time between sessions. Meditating for 4 hours on Sunday and not a second every other day of the week is far less effective than meditating 30 minutes a day every day of the week. In the former case, you’re going to have way too much time between sessions to retain and apply those qualities to your daily life. It’s also going to be difficult to develop a solid understanding of how to meditate because much of what you’ve learned both intellectually and intuitively will be forgotten. Generally, the less interval between sessions, the better.
From a time perspective, here’s a layout of differing levels of commitment:
The hardcore category might seem over-the-top, but this is standard for meditation monks, especially those under 10 years. There are some laypeople who also practice that heavily, although they’re usually retired or living simply in the stix. It’s next-to-impossible to manage with a career, although I did manage 5-6 hours a day while working full time for a few years and know many others who’ve done the same.
Being a hardcore meditator doesn’t mean that you get some super-secret VIP card where there are all of these cool abilities that normies don’t have, it just means you progress faster, as with every other skill. But just like with playing guitar, painting, or jiu jitsu, there are hard limits to mastery and diminishing returns after a certain point.
The next chart is the average time line for someone practicing 45 minutes a day and doing 10-days of retreat a year.
The beginner stage is when you’re still getting the feel for meditation, how to let thoughts go, how to return the mind to the object, how to relax into it. The mind is still a mess but it’s slowly settling down.
In the intermediate stage, your mind is still chaotic, but you begin to enjoy meditation more. You know how to let thoughts be, how to bring your mind back to the object, how to let meditation happen naturally. Although the mind isn’t quiet, you usually feel present and relaxed.
In the advanced intermediate stage, the inner chaos often quiets down once you settle into meditation. It’s easier to stay with the object and you begin to enjoy long periods of inner silence. You begin to feel like you’ve finally got it.
I can’t tell you how much you should meditate. The answer to that question depends on what you want. If you want enlightenment right now, shave your head and become a monk. It’s not absolutely necessary, but it’s helpful. If you just want a little bit more peace of mind, then 20 minutes a day’s fine too. Only you can decide, but I hope these figures will give you more realistic expectations regarding what you’re doing versus what you want.
Many teachers don’t lay the timeline out clearly and it leads to a lot of frustration, disappointment, and resentment. I won’t name-names, but many do the opposite: they put testimonials on their website about students who, with no prior background, went on one weekend retreat and had a profound breakthrough that changed their life forever. In their book, they tell stories of an engineer who came to fix a burst pipe and left awakened. Those are likely true stories, but they’re outliers. Most practitioners work slowly at it for years.
This style of advertising and teaching is wrong. Humans love to indulge in wishful thinking and suffer from main character syndrome. These stories prey on ignorance and desperation. Those really down-and-out will imagine, “I’m gonna be that one! I’m special - my mom always told me so!” And sign-up for the course expecting miracles. 99.99% will be reminded that they’re mere mortals.
Instead of harboring secret wishes to hit the jackpot, look at it like any other skill-set. Start small, be patient, listen, enjoy, and use your head. If you can do these things, you’ll thrive. If you sit around hoping for a miracle, good luck.