How Long Should I Meditate?

“Okay,” the early-intermediate-level meditator says. “This practice is a daily part of my life now. There’s no question about that. The question is, when I meditate, how long should I sit?”

This question was the hallmark frustration of my practice for a long time, and every teacher of whom I’ve asked it has given me a frustrating answer. But as we do in this practice, I just kept sitting with the question, and lately I’ve begun to notice it going away. I am only a little bit of a meditation teacher, but I think I finally have something helpful to say about this.

“CHOPIN BALLAD #4”
NANCY CLEARWATER HERMAN, 2019
CAPTURED BY MY PHONE AT THE WOODMERE ART MUSEUM

Retreats and other formal sessions sidestep the question because they often have you sit for 45 minutes to an hour at a time, which should be a good, solid, maybe-a-little-too-long-feeling sit for anybody for whom that isn’t merely a warm-up (like a monk or other professional or semi-pro meditator). But what are you supposed to do when you’re sitting by yourself at home? Do you really have to sit that long? (Short answer: it depends.) If you simply don’t have that much time in your schedule, does that mean you can never develop your meditation practice? (Short answer: of course not.)

The frustrating version of the answer to these questions is, It’s up to you. That’s not what you want to hear, and — don’t worry — I’m not going to leave it at that. The reason it’s so hard to tell someone else how long to sit is that it’s ultimately a personal question. But that doesn’t mean it doesn’t have a definite answer for you.

Like anything in the cosmos, a session of meditation has three phases: a beginning, a middle, and an end, duh. If you want to get much more specific than that, you’ll quickly start running into differences in vocabulary provided by the myriad traditions of meditation, and I don’t want to get into the weeds on that; I’d rather just use conventional language that we can all completely dispense with once we’re over our obstacle here. For the sake of this post, let’s say meditation’s three basic phases are a settling phase, a settled phase, and, beyond that, a pushing phase.

(If you know much about Buddhism, you probably have an inkling that there’s Something Else out there beyond the pushing. For now, let’s just say we’ll be lucky to find out about that someday.)

“WINDOW”
PATRICK MAGUIRE, 2017
CAPTURED BY MY PHONE AT THE WOODMERE ART MUSEUM

Figuring out how long to make your standard “full” meditation session is a matter of balancing these three phases. The bad news is, there’s no mathematical formula for figuring out how long each one is. The good news is, there is a way to figure that out: meditation! The only way to know how long of a sit is right for you is to sit, observe over time, and then adjust. Once you’re well established in your practice — and I’m not going to tell you how long that takes, okay; I’m just trusting you to be able to tell — you’ll get a sense of how long the first two phases typically last for you. The pushing phase doesn’t really work like that; pushing is what comes on the other side of feeling settled, when it starts to feel like you’re getting tired of this. That’s good. Sit with that.

My advice is to make the pushing phase the longest one, so that each time you meditate for a “full” amount of time, it pushes you a little beyond your comfort zone. Observe yourself over time and see how long it generally takes you to settle, and then how long you feel settled before you start to feel uncomfortable. Then keep sitting for a little longer than whichever of those phases is longest.

(I should probably say that if your settled phase never ends, or if you routinely come out the other side of pushing and end up Someplace Else, I should be the one asking you how to meditate.)

I’ve found it takes me 3–5 minutes to get settled, and I remain settled for 20–25 more minutes, very rarely longer than that when I’m not on retreat. So I’ve landed on 50 minutes as my ideal “full” sit. Obviously we can’t always sit for the full amount of time, but 50 minutes still provides the frame of reference. If I can only manage a short sit, so be it; better to reinforce the practice than not to sit at all. If I have the time, space, and inclination to go deeper than usual, I can sit for an hour. I’ll tell you right now, I’ve never sat for longer than that unless someone else was there in the front of the room making me.

“SEEING IS FORGETTING”
CLINT JUKKALA, 2018
CAPTURED BY MY PHONE AT THE WOODMERE ART MUSEUM

You may find that it only takes you a minute to get settled, and 20 minutes might be plenty long enough for your daily practice. If you think it’s shorter than that, I’d be skeptical, but who am I to tell you what being you is like?

You may find that you never feel settled in meditation. That’s a different blog post, but what I want to say to you for now is, that’s okay. Your job is not to fix meditation or fix yourself or anything like that; your job is just to observe what that’s like. What is it like to be uncomfortable? What is it like to be uncomfortable while meditating? You don’t even have to answer those questions, just observe for a while until it just kinda feels like there is an answer that can be observed. Then observe it as long as you can. I do encourage you to set a timer. Ten minutes. Fifteen minutes. Just try to do this until the timer goes off. You’ll settle in eventually, I promise.

So yes, my short answer is, It’s up to you how long to sit, but my less-short answer is, There is an answer; you just have to find it. And remember, the only way to find it is to meditate.

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Postscript

The above is a completely separate question from how many times to sit in a day. Basically, the difference between not sitting once a day and sitting once a day is everything. Sitting once a day versus sitting more than once a day is the difference between a committed practice and an intensive practice, something you’re trying to make into The Thing You Do to some extent. Once a day is a big deal. Start there.