In What Case Do You Extend Your Current Meditation Session?

[john5170]

So lets say your standard meditation time is 20 minutes. Would you extend your session and meditate longer than your standard time (40 minutes for example) if:

A) You can focus well and stay very present for the majority of the session.

or

B) You cannot focus and keep getting distracted by your mind.

So in other word: is meditation more effective when you have a presence streak and you are very focused? or when you 'force' (or 'discipline') yourself to sit down and get the most presence (even if its 5 seconds at a time) from a distracted mind?

[Arkandeus]

I used to force myself to meditate when I started my path of spirituality and it had great effects.
I think when you're not very much in touch with your natural self and you have all this dense energy trying to get you somewhere to force yourself to face your own mind is effective. 

For me now this changed, and instead of planning my meditation I let it come to me when I feel I need it.
And I certainly stopped forcing.
If I meditate it's to ground myself, to calm down the energies, to let new energies sink in. 
Whereas before I meditated just to be able to open my third eye, just to be able to familiarize myself with my own energies, with what was going on. 

There are many kinds of meditation and some are more useful depending on where you are. 

Nowadays I practice mostly moving meditation. Awareness at most times. 
When there's no immediate need to think, I don't. 
Though I see that meditation enters your life naturally in many forms...like a trip on a bus going to someplace, a waiting line, during a walk...there's always these natural quiet moments that come and give you a chance to meditate, and they're even more intense because they're unexpected.

[Prabhaker]

6 hours ago, john5170 said:

lets say your standard meditation time is 20 minutes

In twenty-four hours…not even twenty-four minutes! You can learn meditation for twenty minutes or forty minutes – learning is one thing – but then you have to carry whatever you have learned day in, day out. You can learn meditation in a certain period of time every day to strengthen it, to make it stronger – but carry the flavor of it the whole day. 

First, while you are awake, from the moment you wake up, immediately catch hold of the thread of remaining alert and conscious, because that is the most precious moment to catch the thread of consciousness. In the day you will forget many times – but the moment you remember, immediately start being alert. Never repent, because that is a sheer wastage of time. Never repent, “My God, I forgot again!”

Catch hold again of the thread of awareness. Slowly, slowly you will be able to be alert the whole day: an undercurrent of awareness in every act, in every movement, in everything that you are doing or not doing. Something underneath will be continuously flowing. 

You can continue for twenty minutes every day to learn, to refresh, to give more energy and more roots – but don’t be satisfied that that’s enough. That’s how the whole of humanity has failed, although the whole of humanity has tried in some way or other. But so few people have been successful that by and by many people stopped even trying, because success seems to be so far away. But the reason is that just twenty minutes or ten minutes won’t do.

you will have to work, earn, do your job and a thousand and one things. Just remain alert whether meditation is still there inside or it has disappeared. This continuity then becomes a garland of twenty-four hours. Only then, will you be able to experience divine – not before it.