The idea of meditation is great – it helps you become more relaxed and more focussed.
But how can you fit it into your already busy day?
After all, almost everyone seems to be time poor nowadays.
Which means that spending months or years learning how to meditate and then spending long periods of time on the meditation itself is a nice idea but not one that is necessarily going to happen as often as you’d like.
One way is to use a walking meditation.
It’s simple enough.
And most of us walk a bit during the day.
At its most basic (always a good place to start), a walking meditation is just a walk where you concentrate on noticing what’s happening.
That makes a change from checking your phone, replying to messages or wandering through life with headphones on.
So it could be a bit of a culture shock at first. And it could mean that you notice things that you’ve walked past on numerous occasions but never really noticed.
Which is the whole idea.
Notice what’s going on around you for a change.
The buildings and trees. The noises and smells and colours.
How your feet react to the ground beneath your feet and the changes in surface that happen.
Notice how your body reacts to the differences in air temperature and speed that happen all the time.
Almost anyone can fit a walking meditation into their daily routine and there’s probably nothing too important that you’re currently doing while you’re walking that couldn’t usefully be replaced by meditating whilst you walk.
Set aside 12 minutes “me” time
That’s all the time it takes to listen to a pre-recorded audio track from this high tech meditation system.
Years ago, when high tech meditation methods first came on the scene, you’d need to spend an hour a day listening to the tracks.
If you’ve got the time, that works nicely.
But that’s a big “if”.
Almost everyone I know hasn’t got 60 minutes to spare each and every day.
And those who do have an hour where they’re at a loose end often find that the hour isn’t actually 60 minutes end to end.
It’s a few minutes here, a few minutes there, with maybe a really long 15 or 20 minute gap every now and then.
Which isn’t enough time by any stretch of the imagination to listen to a whole 60 minute (or even one of the more recent 30 minute) tracks.
Life just gets in the way.
But does it work?
12 minutes barely sounds long enough to brew and drink a cup of coffee.
You may even have queued longer than that when the coffee shop has been really busy.
But because these tracks are high tech and have been designed by super-geeky scientists, they work in just 12 minutes.
It’s as though the older hour-long tracks have been compressed.
Which fortunately doesn’t mean you’re listening to something that sounds like it’s been recorded by The Chipmunks.
It just means that instead of a long electronic equivalent of a pre-amble, the meditation track gets straight down to the business of putting your brain into a deep meditative state without anything more complicated from you than selecting the track and pressing “play”.
So you don’t have to spend years doing all the kind of practice that Zen monks do, near enough to the exclusion of anything else in their life.
You get all the benefits of meditating without the hard work of learning how to do it.
Sure, if you decide it’s for you, then you can always attend a class locally and do some more traditional meditation. But that comes back down to there never being enough hours in the day to do everything that needs to be done. So in practice, that might happen “tomorrow” or more likely a lot later in life. Always assuming it happens at all.
