My meditation is not exactly vipassana but is very very close to it. I have been meditating daily for over thirteen years and did it sporadically for fifteen years or so prior to that. My menu of tried protocols is wide: vipassana, zen, transcendental, Gurdjieff self-remembering, Jung active-imagination, Ericson self-hypnosis, Loyola spiritual exercises, and probably a couple others I have totally forgotten about.
Current routine is sit perfectly still and follow a hundred breaths. If I am feeling strict I will stop at the first motion of any type—a hiccup, a sneeze, drool running down my chin, right butt cheek gets sore and I cannot control the urge to shift weight to left butt cheek—but usually I am not so strict with myself. I am strict in this regard if I decide to go for a longer meditation. 200 breaths once a week or so. 300 breaths once a month or so. 400 breaths once a year or so. 400 breaths is the longest I have ever gone. I just did a long meditation and got to 183 when I stopped because it was no longer comfortable to sit perfectly still. That took 77 minutes.
The discussion of goals is ill-posed in my opinion. If there is any goal to my own meditation, it is to sit perfectly still and follow my breath as closely as possible. That is all. Secondary gains of stress-relief, concentration, peace-of-mind, &c are meager in comparison to the momentary feeling of being one-link-pow with the universe. That this universe is wonderful and marvelous is a prerequisite to getting into this state of Being. I would never recommend meditation for depressed people. It might be therapeutic for anxious people. A few weeks ago I was at a Psychology and Religion conference and one of the doctors works at Menninger (they mostly do drug rehab), and he said they do only evidence-based medicine and their evidence is unambiguous that the patients who attend the daily meditation have better outcomes than the patients who do not attend the daily (voluntary) meditation.
If you are looking for stress-relief, concentration, peace-of-mind, and all those other secondary gains described in this thread, there are many surer and quicker routes to these goals than embarking on years of daily meditation practice. Trying to slow the breath is not a meditation technique. Your breathing may slow but you are following the breath, not leading it.
Each breath is not timed. I note the time I start and the time I finish and the number of breaths. If I am being strict, I stop meditating if I move. If not, a movement has nothing to do with the counting of breaths. Sometimes I will lose count. Say for example I am on 38 and I lose touch with consciousness enough that I forget I am exactly on number 38. When that happens I estimate what the exact number is supposed to be—I will know it isn’t 5 and it isn’t 70; my estimate will be pretty close to 38--and I carry on with a little error in my number.
Another anecdotal data point-
My meditation is not exactly vipassana but is very very close to it. I have been meditating daily for over thirteen years and did it sporadically for fifteen years or so prior to that. My menu of tried protocols is wide: vipassana, zen, transcendental, Gurdjieff self-remembering, Jung active-imagination, Ericson self-hypnosis, Loyola spiritual exercises, and probably a couple others I have totally forgotten about.
Current routine is sit perfectly still and follow a hundred breaths. If I am feeling strict I will stop at the first motion of any type—a hiccup, a sneeze, drool running down my chin, right butt cheek gets sore and I cannot control the urge to shift weight to left butt cheek—but usually I am not so strict with myself. I am strict in this regard if I decide to go for a longer meditation. 200 breaths once a week or so. 300 breaths once a month or so. 400 breaths once a year or so. 400 breaths is the longest I have ever gone. I just did a long meditation and got to 183 when I stopped because it was no longer comfortable to sit perfectly still. That took 77 minutes.
The discussion of goals is ill-posed in my opinion. If there is any goal to my own meditation, it is to sit perfectly still and follow my breath as closely as possible. That is all. Secondary gains of stress-relief, concentration, peace-of-mind, &c are meager in comparison to the momentary feeling of being one-link-pow with the universe. That this universe is wonderful and marvelous is a prerequisite to getting into this state of Being. I would never recommend meditation for depressed people. It might be therapeutic for anxious people. A few weeks ago I was at a Psychology and Religion conference and one of the doctors works at Menninger (they mostly do drug rehab), and he said they do only evidence-based medicine and their evidence is unambiguous that the patients who attend the daily meditation have better outcomes than the patients who do not attend the daily (voluntary) meditation.
If you are looking for stress-relief, concentration, peace-of-mind, and all those other secondary gains described in this thread, there are many surer and quicker routes to these goals than embarking on years of daily meditation practice. Trying to slow the breath is not a meditation technique. Your breathing may slow but you are following the breath, not leading it.
Do you breathe once every 30 seconds, or restart the count when you move?
Each breath is not timed. I note the time I start and the time I finish and the number of breaths. If I am being strict, I stop meditating if I move. If not, a movement has nothing to do with the counting of breaths. Sometimes I will lose count. Say for example I am on 38 and I lose touch with consciousness enough that I forget I am exactly on number 38. When that happens I estimate what the exact number is supposed to be—I will know it isn’t 5 and it isn’t 70; my estimate will be pretty close to 38--and I carry on with a little error in my number.