A regular meditator like myself,
I wake up early and sometimes if I don’t wake up early then what happens?
I have to rush my meditation, and then by rushing for meditation, I just don’t enjoy it anymore.
so
I learned it is
best to make time, plan ahead. Plan yourself in such a way that you have enough time to meditate.
When you are content with your heart that, “ Yes, I have done enough”,
and you arrive at a certain state of mind at which you are really happy, you are content with it
It's like how do you decide when to stop eating.
Hand doesn’t decide that.
When you are full, ”okay now it’s enough”.
Even though it may taste very good and you feel like going on hogging, yet
you will say,” now it’s enough”.
Same thing with meditation.
When you arrive at a certain level of consciousness,
you will feel,” okay, this is enough now”
And that’s when we terminate and we never meditate more than an hour
Never.
If you ever feel like doing more meditation,
stop meditation after one hour and relax for about 10-15 minutes
and then resume it. But always give yourself a break.
If you can arrive at such a satisfactory and contentful heart
with which you are happy that, “Yes I have attained some level of consciousness with which I am happy”
it can also happen in 5 minutes, it can happen in 10 minutes. In some cases, half an hour.
So it has to be your individual thing.
Sometimes when I meditate, even one hour is not enough but I stop it.
Sometimes, I arrive at those sublime states within 5 minutes. So, I end it in 5 minutes
So my best meditations are when I don't put a time limit on it.
But often what happens during our busy days? I have seen my life also. I did my business
and sometimes you are forced to go very early to your work
and the early morning traffic is just horrendous, especially in New York. So what do you do?
A regular meditator like myself,
I wake up early and sometimes if I don’t wake up early then what happens?
I have to rush my meditation, and then by rushing for meditation, I just don’t enjoy it anymore.
so
I learned it is
best to make time, plan ahead. Plan yourself in such a way that you have enough time to meditate.
and then move on.
Then I learned it is okay to be late.
I can phone my people in the office and say, “I am coming late.” 5-minutes late,
10-minutes late, it's not going to end the world.
This is a new thing I learned later on, “okay, call them ahead of time I am getting late,
but don't spoil your meditation.”
This is what I had learnt. Because when I learn how to calm myself properly,
and more than calmness, centre myself properly.
Then what happens is that a lot of things that I have to do during the entire day flash through my mind.
That I have to do all these 10-15 different things today. These are important things
but then priorities will strike my mind. This is more important, this is not so important, this is very important
this I can let go.
So you are able to extract more time out of the whole thing and whatever we do,
it becomes highly efficient.
Because you have already concluded more or less during those few minutes of meditations.
Later on, the meetings are just formalities.