Meditation As A Habit, Or As A Spontaneous Activity?

[aclokay]

Hi guys,

After being in a Vipassana retreat for 10 days, I found the inspiration to do the recommendation of one hourly sitting in the morning and one in the evening. And I found the benefits of it. It was quite good for the first weeks. 

But soon after, I found myself skipping days and generally slacking from the practice. Cancelling some of my evening meditations for the sake of social activities or physical exercise.  And at that time, I spent binge watching a lot of YouTube videos about meditation and other of this sorts.

One notable video was of Jiddu Krishnamurti discussing What is meditation. And in that video Jiddu talks about topics which spoke to me. Stuff like: Discovering stuff for myself, seeing the promises a lot of schools of meditation offer, not joining anything and mentioning the greed of meditation for hours. He said that few minutes if enough. 

And i'd like to discuss with you people. What do you think about these points? Can meditation be something spontaneous and momentary or does is it no different then exercising for a competition with set schedules and goals ? 

[Erlend K]

To make any significan progress you need a daily practice, so I would say make it a habit. The more you practice, the faster your progress will be. 2 houres a day is good if you can maintain it, buy not nessesary. As a beginner a few min per day is enough to slowly progress. Culadasa claims a minimum of 45 min a day is required for most people to progress.

I support the idea of trying different meditation techniques. However a new practice may require 100+ houres before one notice benefits. Therefor, I don't like the idea of jumping from technique to technique. If you spend just a few houres doing a technique, you will just be scraping at the surface. I think it's better to pick a technique, give it a serious chance, and try to master it before moving on to something else.

[aclokay]

1 hour ago, Erlend K said:

To make any significan progress you need a daily practice, so I would say make it a habit. The more you practice, the faster your progress will be. 2 houres a day is good if you can maintain it, buy not nessesary. As a beginner a few min per day is enough to slowly progress. Culadasa claims a minimum of 45 min a day is required for most people to progress.

I support the idea of trying different meditation techniques. However a new practice may require 100+ houres before one notice benefits. Therefor, I don't like the idea of jumping from technique to technique. If you spend just a few houres doing a technique, you will just be scraping at the surface. I think it's better to pick a technique, give it a serious chance, and try to master it before moving on to something else.

The point is beyond that. It's about the notion that it's not about the technique. It's mere observation. One does not need a technique to hear the sounds or see the trees. If you get my point.. Maybe techniques can be helpful but are helpful as medicine. Not everyone should take medicine. 

 

Edited September 2, 2017 by aclokay

[Erlend K]

Yea, I agree. You don't need to meditate. I guess it depends on what your goal is. 

[LaucherJunge]

In my opinion everyone should start of doing it on a daily basis. Whenever you reach a certain point where you are present all the time without effort which could take months for some and many years for others you should totally start having real deep meditative moments all troughout the day for a few seconds or minutes at a time and additionally have spontaneous meditation practise for longer periods of time.
Now when it happens that one falls back into old habits just start off again with daily practise because it is very hard to actually get into a lasting presence without having the mental hygiene.