How I Meditate Twice a Day With a Full-Time Job
By: Casimir Mura
Tags: Spirituality, Lifestyle, Mindfulness, Meditation, Self

How I Meditate Twice a Day With a Full-Time Job

It’s not actually that hard.

Photo by Fabrizio Verrecchia on Unsplash

Even though meditation is all about decreasing your stress, making you more content with the little things, and increasing your general awareness, it can also make you stubborn and upset when you realize that you’ve fallen out of your habit. Like any other habit, meditating on a daily basis can seem difficult at first. However, I’ve discovered a few things along the way that have helped me meditate more often.

When I first started meditating, I didn’t really know what I was doing. I didn’t have a cushion. I didn’t have a teacher (I still don’t.) And, I definitely didn’t know how to keep my thoughts in order. I had read enough books about mindfulness and listened to enough lectures from Alan Watts to enlighten an intelligent capuchin monkey. But, there was something missing. I wanted the real deal. I wanted to experience the benefits of the so-called ‘mediative practice’ for myself.

While I was taking about fifteen credit hours in my Sophmore year of college, I started meditating when I had a free afternoon. On weekdays, I didn’t have to get up until 10:00 am because my first class didn’t start until 11:00. So, I had plenty of time and a single room to use as my own private meditation space. Despite all that, I would maybe meditate once a week if not less than that. Just because I had more time, that didn’t mean that I was using it wisely.

You Have Time to Meditate

The first thing to realize about meditation is that you always have some time in the day to meditate. You might think that you don’t have time, but I guarantee you that you can cut out some time for meditation. I recently read Haruki Murakami’s What I Talk About When I Talk About Running, and a particular quote comes to my mind from the book in relation to this. Murakami is talking about making time for running in his life as a busy novelist.

Running every day is a kind of lifeline for me, so I’m not going to lay off or quit just because I’m busy. If I used being busy as an excuse not to run, I’d never run again. I have only a few reasons to keep on running, and a truckload of them to quit. All I can do is keep those few reasons nicely polished. (Murakami 35)

If you look for an excuse, you will be sure to find it. It’s very easy to simply say you don’t have time for something. In the same way, it’s easy to say that you don’t have time to meal prep, to exercise, to work on that skill, or the hundreds of other things that you’re putting off in order to spend more of your time on your phone.

At least, that always seemed to be the case for me. If I had plans to meditate, I would often skip them at the whim of the slightest inconvenience. Later, I would think to myself that I simply didn’t have time to meditate. However, I knew that wasn’t the actual truth. The truth was that I put meditating off in order to do something else that was instantly gratifying.

Although it is still hard sometimes to begin a meditation session, I never regret meditating or anything like that. And over time, I’ve realized that making time for it is not a big deal.

Something is Better Than Nothing

Realizing that I had time to meditate was just the first part of the battle. Once I came to terms with that, I had to adjust how I approached each session. This was all about attitude. For beginners especially, it can be hard to keep an open mind to your practice.

Depending on what specific discipline or method of meditation you’re studying, you can make the argument that meditation is about improving your concentration. In a way, it a sort of is. It can take a lot of concentration to pay close attention to your breath for forty-five minutes. It can actually be pretty difficult to even do it for five minutes.

At some point in my meditation ‘journey’, I noticed that I could sit for about forty-five minutes. Wow. I must have thought that was really something. Despite the short-lived high of breaking my sitting ‘record’, I found it difficult to accomplish the same thing the following day. By setting the bar so high, I went into the next day with the expectation that I would have to reach that standard again.

That made meditating really hard. Instead of just going into the session with the idea of meditating, I was now going into it with this unnatural force and expectation that I had to sit for a certain amount of time. It also broke one of the most important unwritten rules of meditation. That rule is that you shouldn’t expect or hope to gain anything from practicing. If you get too caught up in the idea that you need to achieve something in a session, you’re already lost.

That isn’t to say that there aren’t benefits to sitting for extended periods of time. There definitely are. But, in the context of developing the habit in the first place, it makes a lot more sense to walk before you run. By adjusting your expectations of how long you’ll sit for and what will come out of the session, you can make your practice more consistent.

By realizing I have time for my practice and not placing unrealistic standards on myself, I’ve been doing pretty well. I meditate for about thirty minutes in the morning and thirty minutes in the evening. This is just before work and before I get ready for bed. I don’t put up a fuss about other things I could be doing. I just meditate and get on with the rest of the day or evening.