Thursday, April 26, 2012

Micro-meditation: Can you find Zen in 30 seconds or less?

From the pop article, "Micro-meditation: Can you find Zen in 30 seconds or less?" there is some speculation about very short periods of meditation sprinkled in throughout the day.

Maria Gonzalez, pictured at the top of the page, recommends pairing this practice with daily meditations of 10 minutes or more.

The idea of brief moments of resting in awareness, repeated many times, reminded me of the Dzogchen-ish practice of Candice O'Denver, whose website is Balanced View.  I suspect this type of approach is good for reaching busy, successful people.

I wonder, though, if many people will arrive at a formal practice periods of 10 minutes or more per day with this type of approach.  I think it is unfortunately more typical that someone who begins a formal daily sitting practice then ends up becoming more familiar with the mind and awareness and naturally finds themselves more interested in having more of these moments a day.  I'm not sure how well this works in the opposite direction, but in my small sample, I think of my Candice O'Denver friends as considerably less mindful on average than my formal meditator friends.  But I could be wrong.  Just to be clear, the goal is continuous mindfulness.

I mean, I know a lot of people who have read Eckhart Tolle, but how many of them practice even these little micro-meditations?  Most want to read about it, but few do anything about it.  It's a nice idea, though.  I hope it catches on.



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