Is 30-40 Minutes Too Ambitious For Beginner's Meditation?

I have a colleague who has done meditation for 45 years,

But in a different tradition from Jeongto.

He is surprised that a beginner like me is meditating for 30 to 40 minutes at a time.

He thinks a beginner should not meditate for more than 10 minutes.

Am I being too ambitious?

No,

That's not so.

The methodology,

I guess it changes depending on who the teacher is.

And it's different because it's different due to the different objectives you might have for your meditation.

So the meditation that Buddha taught was for the specific objective of attaining nirvana,

Enlightenment.

So to get there,

To the ultimate goal,

You have other methods that you can choose besides meditation.

First you need to follow the ethical precepts.

Basically,

Kind of constrain your desires and limit your desires.

And we often argue with others based on our values.

And if you look at the root of our values and our argumentative nature,

There is the assumption that we are right and the other is wrong.

However,

This occurs because we are all different in values,

Belief,

Faith and whatnot.

However,

We tend to look at the situation from a self-centered perspective leading to this conflict.

So therefore,

We need to gain the wisdom by which we can see the truth as truth.

However,

Just because we constrain our behavior,

Desires,

And have this ability,

The insight to look at a situation and know,

And shift between facts and non-facts,

Doesn't mean our problems are solved.

In our consciousness,

There is consciousness that we are aware of.

However,

There is self-consciousness that we don't control.

So in the consciousness that we are consciously aware of,

It's important to do right by that.

However,

You can't be aware of the subconscious because by its very nature,

It's below your consciousness,

Awareness.

So there are cognitive habits,

Behaviors that are habituated in your subconscious that's very hard to control.

So consciously,

You try to do the right thing all the time.

However,

Your subconsciousness drives certain behaviors that you might not otherwise want.

And how do you solve this?

That's why you need this kind of insight.

So therefore,

Meditation has become an everyday terminology,

A vernacular to describe many different things.

But in Buddhist tradition,

It is something for you to arrive at a state of elevated consciousness.

Specifically,

The objective is for you to delve deep into your subconscious and surface the habits and cognitive behaviors and become aware and try to fix them.

In everyday life,

We tend to use our consciousness to suppress or repress the desires and habits within our subconscious.

That's why we are under constant chronic stress because of the conflict between the two.

Therefore,

In order to arrive at the elevated state of Samadhi,

You need to relax and lose all the tensions in your body.

You've got to be in a total state of relaxation without any tension whatsoever.

Not any intent,

Without any effort to achieve that intent.

The basic foundation,

The starting point is to start from that state of total lack of tension,

Total idleness.

If you do this,

There are two side effects that you might encounter in this path.

One,

You'll feel sleepy.

But after two days or so,

You'll be able to overcome that drowsiness and really obtain a clear-headedness.

When I say two days here,

I mean two days straight of constant meditation.

For example,

40-minute meditation with a 10-minute break.

But go right back into meditation.

The second side effect that you will experience is that you'll have a lot of distracting thoughts.

You'll have a lot of thoughts from the past.

And you'll have a lot of thoughts in your head from the future.

Thoughts of the past usually come from a source of regret,

From a trauma,

From a hurt that you experienced.

So thoughts from the future are from your sense of obligation or need to do something in the future.

And there's anxiety and nervousness and concern over whether you'll do a good job or not.

And so you have to arrive at a state in which you have no thoughts from the past or from the future.

But if you are in a relaxed state and you close your eyes,

These thoughts tend to attack you in a very difficult and distracted way.

Therefore,

You have to practice not imbuing these thoughts with any meaning.

These thoughts,

You have to regard them as mere float stems of thoughts from the past or the future,

Like pieces of dreams.

What I'm saying is that while they exist,

You cannot imbue them with any meaning and chase after them.

That's why the best way to do that is focus on the here and now,

Specifically the breathing in the here and now.

But you can't go about doing this by exerting an effort to focus on your breath.

It's a matter of just shifting your attention to your breath,

Which automatically gives you an awareness of the breath.

So basically,

You're taking the attention and focusing on the breath,

Not anything else that's distracting and that's going on inside your head.

But if you try to do this yourself,

You'll notice that your attention will wander and attach themselves to these distracting thoughts.

However,

You've got to practice bringing your attention back and refocusing on the breath.

And if you repeatedly practice this,

You'll eventually get to a state in which you can achieve and sustain that focus or attention on the breath.

And the power of these thoughts,

Distracting thoughts,

That distract you to take your attention away from breath is very strong.

And it becomes even stronger once the subconscious of the thoughts and the emotions of the subconscious start rising and start asking for your attention.

But if you're able to train yourself and reach a state in which you're not distracted by these thoughts,

But can sustain your attention on your breath,

This will bring about substantial changes to your everyday life.

You will develop this capacity to be mindful of your own emotions as you encounter others,

Converse with others,

And get subject yourself to different sensory inputs so you develop an ability to become aware and control your emotions.

So karma is a term that we use to describe really an ingrained set of emotional states.

So there are times that you're actually able to change and dissipate this karma layer.

Or there are times that you can practice enough so that you can become mindful of the reactions of your karma,

Be able to control and shape them.

And then what you're doing in effect is gaining freedom.

Freedom from your own karma.

So therefore in order to practice this and train yourself,

You need a session that's at least 30 to 40 minutes of focus in order to experience the subconscious.

And you need to really sustain your practice over 10 days at least in order to experience and break through the resistance.

So it's not a 30 to 40 minutes every day.

It's 30 to 40 minutes constant throughout the day with short breaks in between,

Over 10 days in order for you to really start to know yourself and bring about,

Lay down the foundation to bring about your own freedom.

And you really need to sustain this practice from 30 days to at least 100 days in order to start gaining that freedom for yourself.

So therefore doing it 40 minutes a day will not bring about huge change.

However,

If you have gone through a dedicated practice of meditation time for about a week or few days,

And then meditate about 40 minutes a day,

That can serve as a way to kind of cement what you learned in the longer time period.

So from my thinking,

Doing it for 10 minutes at a time may have the therapeutic effect of calming yourself and bringing down your emotions.

But it really doesn't serve a purpose for you to gain that insight on your path to nirvana,

Which is the objective of Buddhist meditation.