Have you tried some of the homework in which you tried doing a meditation on your own? And in this lesson, we're going to talk about some various things about doing meditation about how long and how often and that kind of thing. But before we have that conversation, let's start off with doing a meditation. And so what I'd like you to do here, what we're going to do is we're going to do a 10 minute meditation, you may have done this one already, again, very similar to what we've done so far. Not not wait. We're not adding any new things yet.

We're going to add some new things in the next lesson. But in this lesson, we're going to do a kind of a regular 10 minute meditation as you have been doing so far. And then when you're done with that, we're going to talk about that Some things about doing meditation sessions. So let's start with a 10 minute meditation. All right, so as you come back from your meditation, there's a few things I want to talk about, about the experience of the meditation and then also about some practical aspects. So first of all, in a previous lessons I had mentioned about the fact that often, meditation can feel uncomfortable.

So some days we might meditate and it's very comfortable and we and we feel relaxed and we're enjoying ourselves and other days we might do a meditation, and we just cannot get comfortable and or agitated, restless and bored and, you know, looking at our watch, are we done yet? And that's all perfectly normal. And if you feel agitated and restless, that does not mean that, Oh, I'm having a bad session. You know, I hear sometimes people say, Oh, I had such a good meditation session today. It was just so comfortable. And I enjoyed it so much.

And I just felt so relaxed. There is no good session or bad session. It is what it is. I mean, part of what mindfulness meditation is all about is accepting whatever is happening in the present moment. And sometimes what's happening in the present moment. It feels good.

And sometimes what was happening in the present moment doesn't feel that good. And you know what, that's all fine. That's just life. So don't feel like oh, I'm doing it wrong, or I wish I'd had a good session. There is no such thing. If you are meditating and you are experiencing whatever you are getting Balancing that is a good session.

It's really important that you start to think that way. We don't meditate in order to feel blissful in mindfulness meditation or other. So meditation where that is the goal is not in mindfulness meditation, because really what we're trying to do is learn how to be present with what ever is going on. And then observe it. observe what's going on. Let it go, and come back to the present moment.

Observe what that present moment feels like, and let it go. And that's what we're really trying to do. So it's important to not give yourself a hard time not judge the session. It is what it is. And that's all fine. So that's one thing I wanted to talk about.

Now, here's another thing I want to talk about. Sometimes people say oh, well, I when I do the meditation on my own, you know, I like to Put on music. In mindfulness meditation. We don't do that we don't put music on. You know, why is that people say why can't you know I like them the meditation, the flute music or some soft piano or something. But really all that does is distract us.

That's like a thought. It's like purposely, purposely putting in a thought, and then you get distracted by that. And again, what we're trying to do in mindfulness meditation is train our brain to just always be present, come back to the present, come back to the present. So we don't practice with music on. And sometimes people say, Well, what about yoga? Can I do mindfulness meditation while I'm doing yoga?

And you can with a few caveats. So I'm in the mindfulness meditation programs that university of massachusetts puts on, they do include doing meditation While doing yoga for, for some of the sessions, now, it's different. You're not just sitting in a chair with your eyes closed if you're doing yoga. But here's some of the differences, if you and I encourage you to give us a try, if you do yoga, what you want to do is, is put together a series of yoga postures that are fairly gentle. That that, and I say that because or at least easy for you. Because you want to focus on your breathing and being in the present moment.

And if a posture is too complicated, and instead of focusing on the moment, you're thinking, Oh, am I doing that right? Do I have my arm in the right because then you're not meditating anymore. So if you are used to doing particular yoga practice, and you know, you're very used to the postures, and you just do them without having to think about them. That's Good, then you can do your yoga while practicing your meditation. So all you do is you know, you get into a particular pose, and you breathe, and just breathe in and breathe out. You feel things in your body, you just except, you know, like maybe that's the best posture just really difficult today just feels a little uncomfortable that then you just accept that go back to the breathing, right.

So you do the same kind of thing. You just doing it while gently and slowly moving your body. So and that and that is a can be really useful. So if you are used to doing yoga and you have a routine that you don't have to think about too much so that you can stay present and stay with your breath, then I encourage you to give that a try. Now, what else did I want to talk to you about with this? Let's talk about how often one should meditate and how long one should meditate during the session.

So how often Well, once a day is great, if you especially during this time when you're learning about it, and you're wanting to train your brain, if you could meditate a little bit every day, that would be really good. Now, you can do one of these lessons every day because we meditate in every lesson. But if you're doing it on your own, you know, you may want to try meditating every day. Don't have to meditate every day. But it's like when you're trying to learn anything. I mean, if you've ever tried to learn how to play an instrument, or ride a bike or anything like that, you know that if you do it once, and then don't do it for three weeks, and then do it again.

You haven't you haven't trained your brain and and this is sometimes called muscle memory and motor memory. You haven't trained your brain how to do it. So it's almost like you're starting all over every time. If you're trying to do something like that learn instrument, ride a bicycle, if you do it every day. Day, even if just a few minutes a day, your learning will go a lot faster. And it's the same thing with mindfulness meditation and retraining, how your brain works.

If you can do a little bit every day, that's better than a lot, you know, but only once a month. And how long do you meditate? Well, you know, we're we're going to be you can tell we're gearing up, we started with like two or three minutes. So we went to five and then went to 10. So we're kind of expanding the length of time. And that's good if you can start to do that.

But there's no set rule here. If he did five minutes a day, that's better than nothing. 10 minutes a day is even better than 520 minutes, days, even better than 10. We're going to be getting into some longer section sessions and I'm going to suggest some logging sessions as we go through the rest of our course. I do not think it's necessary to do more than you know, I mean, if you said I want to do as long as Susan suggests, You know, 4045 minutes is plenty long. I don't think you need to meditate for longer than that in any one sitting.

And if you if you think oh my god, I could never do 45 minutes right now and don't worry about it, I think you'll see that you actually can get to 45 minutes without too much trouble. But if that's not where you're at right now, that's perfectly fine. So, more homework for you. I'm going to recommend again, that between now and the next lesson, you do another meditation on your own using the five or the 10, or the 15, or the 20 minute meditation recording or just doing it on your own without doing any recording at all. So we'll see you back here for the next lesson. After that