How Long Should You Meditate For? Are you uncertain about how long you should meditate? Meditation Information for Beginners

Hello, and welcome to the Ancient wisdom modern mind blog and in this article I’m going to be answering some common questions about how much time you should spend in meditation every day and how much meditation is too much, and I’ll also indirectly address how much meditation is too little for anyone who is wondering that.

I am also going to go into the best practices for a safe and solid practice. The answer to the question of how long should you meditate is different for everyone. Though, a big factor is the amount of experience you have with meditation.

Beginners are told by some teachers that they should start out with maybe 2 minutes a day or 5 minutes a day just to build that daily habit.

After the student develops the meditation habit, they can increase the amount of time spent meditating.</p>

There are also programs like transcendental meditation that recommend that everyone, and it doesn’t matter who you are, spend 20 minutes twice per day on their practice.

In my opinion, this is all driven by the principles of compounding momentum and consistency. Therefore, how often you should meditate is proportional to your effort and intent. Five minutes is just fine as long as you practice every day. Each day builds on the previous day and each session builds on the previous session, and that momentum is important for maintaining a solid practice.

So you definitely want to skip as few days as possible, and if you can do it at the same time every day, that’s even better. And if you can slip other calming and centering activities into the downtimes of your day, then that momentum will be even better.

I like the idea of aiming for a minimum of 30 minute twice per day in a meditation practice, even for beginners. If it gets overwhelming, you can always take breaks during the meditation and do some warm up exercises in between your sessions. Warm ups can include stretching, breathing exercises, walking meditations, prayer, chant, grounding exercises or anything you find calming and centering, and this will enhance your central practice once you go back into it.

Maybe you don’t have 30 minutes to spare. Then 5 to 15 minutes is fine as long as you keep the momentum in your practice. Most teachers recommend that you meditate twice per day; once in the morning and once at night. If you spend an hour on it each day, you can break that into 2 half hour sessions.

Now we’ll address the vital question, “Can you meditate too much?”

Too much meditation is entirely possible if you want to maintain your functionality in the world. Meditation opens you to deep understanding; moment by moment. It rewires your brain. It builds grey matter and increases the number of synapses that your neurons have. This leads to greater communication between neurons and between different parts of the brain; and there can be social pitfalls in this whole process.

You can liken that to weightlifting. Weightlifters tear the muscles, especially beginners. When doing is, it creates turmoil in one’s physiological system. After some rest, the system reorganizes itself to a higher level of functioning. The weight lifter needs to get the routine right and not overdo it or it can cause muscle strain and slow down the recovery time, so giving your torn muscles time to repair themselves is essential.

When you meditate too much in the beginning, you’re not giving your ego time to reorganize itself in a coherent manner. Meditation sensitizes you and awakens deeper level of the mind; and you do not want to over whelm the mind too quickly. Just like in the case of weightlifting, you want to experience some growth. However, you can burnout or overwhelm the mind ego relationship.

Yogananda, the guy who wrote “Autobiography of a Yogi”, if I remember right, used to recommend a limit of 3 hours per day in meditation, and this seems like a good rule of thumb, though this still could be too much meditation for some people, and yet others might go way beyond that and that’s fine.

The important factor is to keep an eye on yourself. Watch for too many confusing or enigmatic sensations and eccentricities, you may be opening the mind to new levels of awareness too quickly.

It’s important that you recognize the ego as an essential guardian of your sanity, meditation will bring out the subconscious to a conscious level and this can overwhelm the conscious ego, so do be watch full if you’re jumping in at the deep end and meditating for many hours each day. You want to guard your sanity and not let the subconscious overwhelm the conscious mind.

And this is especially important if you have had a history of drug use, as the damaging effects to the subconscious and conscious barriers can linger and in this case be super carful and watchful for signs of irrationality.

You also may be allowing your system to be flooded with too much sensory and even extra sensory information in general. Unresolved emotional baggage seeks resolution, and an excess amount of emotional baggage seeking resolution, all at one time, overwhelms the body mind system beyond its capacity to resolve what is often unresolvable, and instead what is really needed is to simply let go.

Also watch for things like excess of spaciness or a sense of ungroundedness in daily life if these sensations persist for too long. These can also be signs of too much meditation too quickly.

Having any of these symptoms in small amounts is okay and even somewhat normal as long as they soon pass. However, too much may be a sign that you need to reduce the length of time that you spend in meditation every day. In some cases, it could even be an indicator that you should find a different meditation technique. Don’t cut back how often you meditate if you’re doing it once or twice per day because you want to keep that consistency, just reduce the time spent in your sessions.

However, there are some cases in which you may need to take a break from your practice and just try to keep grounded instead. Alternatively you could try a grounding mediation to balance the excess spaciness. Almost all change has some element of disruption including food, and meditation is not immune to that since it has a direct effect on the mind ego relationship.

Knowing how much to meditate and how often is not all that hard. You just want to keep an eye on yourself as I said before. Meditation is all about keeping an eye on yourself so at least you’re one step ahead of the game.

I encourage you to continue meditating daily and if you have the time when let me know in the comments about your experiences.

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References

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