Meditation and family life

Upvote:1

Try to mediate 2 session of 1 hour in the morning and 1 hour in the evening / night. Also you can try shorter session but perhaps adding up to about 2+ hours a day.

If the session is too short you will not get result. It is like rubbing 2 fire wood sticks. To get fire you have to rub them enough to ignite. If you practice too short sessions and not seeing the benefit of meditation soon enough might perhaps may lead you to give up.

If they are too long it might interfere with your day to day activities and you might give up meditation as it becomes a burden.

Also if the session are too far apart then the results from the previous session may wear off and you might be starting the session from a lower progress point. Again you might not see much benefit as progress might seam slow if the sessions are far apart.

You just have to balance these concerns and make a decision.

Upvote:2

Be mindful of everything you do. That is meditation. Distractions are meditation objects. Not showstoppers. Showstoppers are mostly your strong wrong views like God, soul or nihilism.

Upvote:2

You said that you meditated for about an hour daily. Now that you are busy, why not ten minutes per day of formal meditation?

If there is no time for formal meditation, you can still be mindful all the time:

Other people say they don't have the chance to meditate because they're too busy. Sometimes schoolteachers come to see me. They say they have many responsibilities so there's no time to meditate. I ask them, 'When you're teaching do you have time to breathe?’ They answer, 'Yes.' 'So how can you have time to breathe if the work is so hectic and confusing? Here you are far from Dhamma.'

Actually this practice is just about the mind and its feelings. It's not something that you have to run after or struggle for. Breathing continues while working. Nature takes care of the natural processes – all we have to do is try to be aware. Just to keep trying, going inwards to see clearly. Meditation is like this.

If we have that presence of mind then whatever work we do will be the very tool which enables us to know right and wrong continually. There's plenty of time to meditate; we just don't fully understand the practice, that's all. While sleeping we breathe, while eating we breathe, don't we? Why don't we have time to meditate? Wherever we are we breathe. If we think like this then our life has as much value as our breath; wherever we are we have time.

β€”Ajahn Chah, "The Peace Beyond"

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