Fascinating! Really cool stuff! Thanks for sharing. Okay, I concede! Amassing many hours of just meditation on and off retreats over many years is definitely not “useless”. Some effects definitely persist! That is actually also my experience with 5000+ hours of meditation and many retreats. I guess my key point is that those changes are overrated—especially given how much effort they take, and that in general there are far more effective ways to reach very similar goals! But there are some important exceptions to this. If you for example do manage to get enlightened and stabilize that state, that’s just absolutely amazing, and no amount of ordinary therapeutic progress will ever get you the kind of beauty and certain mental superpowers that come with that.
But the question remains: Did these new traits persist even years after these people have stopped meditating or reduced their meditation to less than 30 minutes a day?
That’s a fair question, I would guess that most of the people responding to those studies would still be in the habit of meditation.
On the other hand, I think that once people start hitting that intermediate range, they get to the point where meditative practices become automatic enough to happen in the middle of daily life. I myself only do a pretty limited amount of formally sitting down for a dedicated meditation session—my meditation app reports an average of 15 minutes per day over the last year—but I do feel like I do quite a bit of it at the same time as doing other things like walking or cooking, and that helps maintain some of the benefits as well (even if not as effectively as a more dedicated formal practice might). A lot of the time it’s also so automatic as to be effortless.
So eventually it becomes possible to maintain more of it with less of an explicit time investment, IME.
Yes. I agree. Yet, there is this: I’ve spent the last 3 years averaging around 3 hours of meditation a day. I’ve had many months with 6+ hours meditation a day. I had times when the boundary between formal practice in daily life was indeed very thin—in other words, it was relatively easy/automatic to be mindful more or less 24⁄7. Yet, in these rare times when I did not meditate at all for, say, 2 weeks (mostly because of health issues), I very quickly lose that ability to automatically be mindful throughout the day. I would guess that if I stopped meditating for a year and would not bother trying to be mindful throughout the day, my “mindfulness throughout the day” level would go back to basically zero.
Fascinating! Really cool stuff! Thanks for sharing.
Okay, I concede! Amassing many hours of just meditation on and off retreats over many years is definitely not “useless”. Some effects definitely persist! That is actually also my experience with 5000+ hours of meditation and many retreats. I guess my key point is that those changes are overrated—especially given how much effort they take, and that in general there are far more effective ways to reach very similar goals! But there are some important exceptions to this. If you for example do manage to get enlightened and stabilize that state, that’s just absolutely amazing, and no amount of ordinary therapeutic progress will ever get you the kind of beauty and certain mental superpowers that come with that.
But the question remains: Did these new traits persist even years after these people have stopped meditating or reduced their meditation to less than 30 minutes a day?
That’s a fair question, I would guess that most of the people responding to those studies would still be in the habit of meditation.
On the other hand, I think that once people start hitting that intermediate range, they get to the point where meditative practices become automatic enough to happen in the middle of daily life. I myself only do a pretty limited amount of formally sitting down for a dedicated meditation session—my meditation app reports an average of 15 minutes per day over the last year—but I do feel like I do quite a bit of it at the same time as doing other things like walking or cooking, and that helps maintain some of the benefits as well (even if not as effectively as a more dedicated formal practice might). A lot of the time it’s also so automatic as to be effortless.
So eventually it becomes possible to maintain more of it with less of an explicit time investment, IME.
Yes. I agree. Yet, there is this:
I’ve spent the last 3 years averaging around 3 hours of meditation a day. I’ve had many months with 6+ hours meditation a day. I had times when the boundary between formal practice in daily life was indeed very thin—in other words, it was relatively easy/automatic to be mindful more or less 24⁄7.
Yet, in these rare times when I did not meditate at all for, say, 2 weeks (mostly because of health issues), I very quickly lose that ability to automatically be mindful throughout the day. I would guess that if I stopped meditating for a year and would not bother trying to be mindful throughout the day, my “mindfulness throughout the day” level would go back to basically zero.