Meditation - Ideal Frequency, Intensity, Duration?

[Kisame]

I've watched Leo's video logs of both his Arizona and Hawaii retreats, and one thing he mentioned which caught my attention was the possibility that doing long, multiple-day retreats several times a year could be much more beneficial than daily meditations of much shorter duration. E.g. 4 retreats each year, 10 days each, 10 hours a day would be 400 hours, but these 400 hours would be more productive than meditating 1.1 hours a day for a year, which is also 400 hours.

In one of the Hawaii videos he did say though, that it's hard to build up momentum in the early days of such an intensive retreat. So my feeling is that you don't want to drop the daily habit completely--at the very least, meditate weekly, so you still have the "groove" of falling easily into meditation, and don't have to waste time getting into the flow of things during the early days of a long retreat.

That being said, I've always considered the parallels between physical exercise and meditation, and 4 retreats a year of 2 weeks or less, with minimal maintenance in between strikes me as not ideal, intuitively. That's like working out super intensely for 10 days only 4 times a year, which is inefficient because the multiple-month breaks in between are too long. You lose both muscle mass as well as the neuromuscular adaptations to specific exercise movements, if you don't work out for months at a time. 

In the realm of cardio exercise, there's a lot of research on the benefits of HIIT training (high intensity interval training), which consists of doing things like sprinting for 20 seconds, jogging for a minute, sprinting for 20 seconds, etc., for a predetermined number of sets. You can vary the ratio of high to low intensity intervals, but the point is that research suggests that weekly HIIT workouts are equivalent and often even superior to daily LISS workouts (low intensity steady state) like jogging on the treadmill for 45 minutes.

I think the optimal balance for meditation may be similar. Maximum spacing between sessions probably shouldn't be much longer than a week or 2 weeks at most. So like, it'd be better to do a single day with 7-hours of meditation one day of the week, than to do 7 daily one-hour meditations throughout the week. And on that single day, there should be at least one strong determination sit that pushes the limits of your personal endurance, with the remainder broken into more manageable chunks. 

Personally, I can definitely say that days with multiple meditation sessions, or single long sessions, tend to feel like "more than the sum of their parts." I did a 3-hour strong determination session a while ago that felt like it almost broke my soul, but it was without a question 1000% more productive than any 3 one-hour sessions spread over 3 days have ever been. (Note: I did those three hours in standing meditation, or Zhan Zhuang, which is much easier for me than sitting meditation. Also I used the method of focusing on the breath, which is also much easier for me than "open monitoring" type methods such as labeling or mindfulness in general. Even stacking everything in my favor though, it was still hard as fuck.)

Thoughts? What sort of meditation schedule do you keep? 

Edited March 15, 2018 by Kisame

[student]

You measure meditation quality by time. You can meditate mindlessly and raise your consciousmess, because it will naturally be raised nevertheless, but you will be doing everything negligently, senselessly. What you will gain will be lies about your level of consciousness and how fast or slow it is raised. Everything you want to do can be correct. Every individual has its own way of doing things, of organizing himself/herself. But if you want on the whole achievements, gains, you will just force yourself to do something you don't actually want and just be neurotic, prolonging actual "progress", actual realization of yourself.

[Kisame]

5 hours ago, student said:

You measure meditation quality by time. You can meditate mindlessly and raise your consciousmess, because it will naturally be raised nevertheless, but you will be doing everything negligently, senselessly. What you will gain will be lies about your level of consciousness and how fast or slow it is raised. Everything you want to do can be correct. Every individual has its own way of doing things, of organizing himself/herself. But if you want on the whole achievements, gains, you will just force yourself to do something you don't actually want and just be neurotic, prolonging actual "progress", actual realization of yourself.

Naturally, effective practice is better than mindless practice, and everyone possesses a different degree of initial endowment that will impact how quickly they progress. That being said, total lifetime hours spent in meditation obviously correlates strongly with levels of attainment. The book Altered Traits by Goleman and Davidson has a good summary of this, with the most accomplished yogis averaging 9,000 to 27,000 lifetime hours. There are very obvious neurological differences between even an experienced meditator (1,000 to 10,000 hours) and someone like Mingyur Rinpoche (62,000 hours under his belt). Not everyone can be as lucky as Eckhart Tolle. 

There are a lot of teachers who tell people that they can awaken at any moment simply through self enquiry or looking within or opening themselves up to the present moment, but I'm always leery of such claims as representing anything like a reliable method. There's something to be said about sheer hard work. I mean, even Adyashanti tells people they can wake up at any time, but he himself spent 15 years meditating like a demon for 2 to 4 hours a day, before he had his moment.

A lot of this talk about "everyone goes at their own pace" and advice to not push yourself or be "neurotic" about meditation is just people making excuses for not putting in the work.

[Saumaya]

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[Saumaya]

Mugen Tsukuyomi

[robdl]

It's worth mentioning that Ramana Maharshi described formal seated meditation as for the most "novice" seekers, and advised to integrate self-inquiry into routine daily life --- any point throughout the day where you have idle time and the mind is not required to function - it could be sitting on a bus, in a waiting room, etc.  Most people do though require at least an initial stage of formal seated meditation to get a feel for it before the practice is integrated into general daily life, I suspect.

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[Kisame]

@brovakhiin @robdl Yeah, I definitely dig how being able to integrate meditation into daily life would be much more effective. I like the way Shinzen Young puts it, that at some point there's a figure-ground reversal in which meditation is no longer an activity that happens in your life, but rather life is what occurs within your meditation. Unfortunately, I'm still too much of a noob to implement this effectively. Even when I tell myself to be more mindful in daily life, what happens is that I "wake up" 6 hours later and realize I haven't been mindful at all, as opposed to during my formal meditation, when I only drift off for a minute or so, max.

1 hour ago, brovakhiin said:

But when I do sit down, oh man. I tap into effortless surrender, and genuine curiosity for truth - which leads to much deeper and effective inquiries - and I enjoy it all the more, as opposed to mechanical, inauthentic self-inquiry which probably won't get you far.

One thing I've been doing is self enquiry right before I fall asleep. I'm hoping the message will permeate down into the dream layers and the subconscious, Inception-style, and one day when I wake up, I'll Wake Up. That'd be neat. 

[Aimblack]

2 minutes ago, Kisame said:

@brovakhiin @robdl Yeah, I definitely dig how being able to integrate meditation into daily life would be much more effective. I like the way Shinzen Young puts it, that at some point there's a figure-ground reversal in which meditation is no longer an activity that happens in your life, but rather life is what occurs within your meditation. Unfortunately, I'm still too much of a noob to implement this effectively. Even when I tell myself to be more mindful in daily life, what happens is that I "wake up" 6 hours later and realize I haven't been mindful at all, as opposed to during my formal meditation, when I only drift off for a minute or so, max.

One thing I've been doing is self enquiry right before I fall asleep. I'm hoping the message will permeate down into the dream layers and the subconscious, Inception-style, and one day when I wake up, I'll Wake Up. That'd be neat. 

 Shinzen has specific techniques to deal with that, in fact his entire method is based around that, when you listen to music, use the hear-out method,when you are watching a movie use that to do trigger practice, when you are talking to a loved one use one of the nurture positive techniques and whenever you feel bored use feel in to really experience the boredom. The trick is more to make meditating a habit rather than an action.

 

And it genuinely works I can't listen to music any other way now and whenever I sit in the bus or train I automatically start meditating as soon as I get bored.

[Joseph Maynor]

An hour is a nice long meditation.

I usually meditate for 30 mins.

20 mins is the shortest amount of time I like to meditate.

I try to meditate every morning.  

[Dan Arnautu]

@Kisame I see that you thought this through. I'm gonna tell you something you might have not considered though.

If you meditate every single day, you build momentum. If you only do a hardcore session a week, your procastination/resistance will be through the roof, firstly because you will have lost the momentum from not meditating the days before and because the meditation session is 7 hours long, which is a daunting task.

Plus, the 7h meditation is more prone to being affected by an emergency than 7 20min-1h meditations. 1 thing can ruin you whole day meditation. If you spread that out though, not only can you move the meditation accordingly to another part of the day, but it will also be less prone to emergencies.

[student]

On 15.03.2018 at 5:56 PM, Kisame said:

Naturally, effective practice is better than mindless practice, and everyone possesses a different degree of initial endowment that will impact how quickly they progress. That being said, total lifetime hours spent in meditation obviously correlates strongly with levels of attainment. The book Altered Traits by Goleman and Davidson has a good summary of this, with the most accomplished yogis averaging 9,000 to 27,000 lifetime hours. There are very obvious neurological differences between even an experienced meditator (1,000 to 10,000 hours) and someone like Mingyur Rinpoche (62,000 hours under his belt). Not everyone can be as lucky as Eckhart Tolle. 

There are a lot of teachers who tell people that they can awaken at any moment simply through self enquiry or looking within or opening themselves up to the present moment, but I'm always leery of such claims as representing anything like a reliable method. There's something to be said about sheer hard work. I mean, even Adyashanti tells people they can wake up at any time, but he himself spent 15 years meditating like a demon for 2 to 4 hours a day, before he had his moment.

A lot of this talk about "everyone goes at their own pace" and advice to not push yourself or be "neurotic" about meditation is just people making excuses for not putting in the work.

@Kisame  Like I said, "you can meditate mindlessly and raise your consciousmess, because it will naturally be raised nevertheless". But there is a difference between real desire and knowing what you do, and just doing it for the sake of an egoic desire, and immediately act neurotically. I didn't say anything about not doing 10 hours a day of meditation, I just emphasized the difference of something done forcefully and something done with desire and love, because this "little" detail will make a difference in your meditation. I am talking from my own experience, if you don't like my advice it is fine.