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I meditate, but only for 2 to 5 minutes at a time. When I do it much longer than that, vaguely-bad things happen. (It would take a long time to explain. Suffice to say that I am chronically ill, and if I were healthier, I could probably meditate longer without these vague negative consequences.) Usually I set a timer (about which more below) for 2 minutes, then right after that, 2 minutes more. If I ever "flunk" a meditation session, I take that as a strong sign that my mind is not working as well as it should be, and I try to fix that. It is also a sign that more meditation is needed on that day. "Flunking" a meditation session means I got distracted and forgot that I was supposed to be meditating. For example, recently, some of my neighbors were having an animated conversation in the courtyard of my apartment building, and I was feeling lonely, so I went out there to participate. When I returned to my computer (I meditate in front of my computer) there was a some text on my screen put there by my meditation timer (which I wrote, in Emacs Lisp) which is how I became aware that I had flunked a meditation session. More detail: at the scheduled end of a meditation session, an Emacs timer inserts "Timer finished: meditation " into an Emacs buffer visiting a file that serves as a record of my meditation sessions. (Emacs also automatically inserts the time and duration of every session into this file.) Since at the end of a meditation session, I am in the habit of adding the letter "s" (for "success") to the text, the presence of an instance of "Timer finished: meditation " not followed by "s" was a sure sign that I had flunked the session. I've been doing these short meditation sessions with my "timer" written in Emacs Lisp since Jan 2008. I do not do them regularly -- only when I remember to do so, which (a quick look at my files reveals) was on 7 of the last 30 days. I do not have unequivocal evidence that meditation does me any good. The main reasons I keep at it is that so many other people report good effects and the my understanding of some studies on "mindfulness-based stress reduction" (which BTW found effects from very short meditation sessions). |