Busy? Grab Five Minutes of Meditation or Contemplation and You Can Have Peace
Keep wanting to meditate but can't find the time? This works
I don’t have the privilege of knowing your journeys, dear friends,
But here’s what mine is like:
my sketchy but real schedule blows like Krakatoa on the regular, and yikes — once again there’s no time to meditate / contemplate / stare at clouds.
Honestly, even when my schedule is just fine, I struggle to wedge spiritual practice into the cracks between work, legal issues, financial issues, parenting, I-still-love-you time with the spouse, caring for elders, housework, volunteering, exercise (which is another topic), and the pile of reading required to know what the heck I’m writing about.
Casting glances around at social media, it looks like most are in the same boat. Or out of the boat, waving desperately, head just barely above water.
Even Facebook’s Christian Mysticism groups look less like Hildegard of Bingen cultivating herbs and more like a sweaty cage fight
That, too, is another post, but for now we all need to calm the fuck down. For that, we need grounding, and for grounding, we need quiet. How, though, when every moment of the day has a soundtrack — no, a high BPM dance track?
Eventually, all the noise moves inside our heads.
Yes, folks, the call is coming from inside the house. We know we need to get our heads clear, STAT.
Yet life intervenes.
We make hourly promises to ourselves. I’ll do it later, we think. I just have to finish this first….
When we reach the end of the day, we promise, I’ll meditate tomorrow.
Or we try to meditate after lights out, but it’s been a long day and pretty soon we’re asleep, drooling down the front of our pajamas.
How long has it been that you took a waking hour—or a day—to just be?
Let us not forget the proverb, “You should meditate one hour each day, unless you don’t have time, in which case you should meditate for two.”
The jackass who tossed that hickory nut into circulation probably lives in a monastery
I hope they have an angry abbot who reminds them to meditate by use of a swift bamboo stick to the backside. (BTW, I did not make this up. Zen use of bamboo sticks to sleepy monk’s backs is a thing. Wouldn’t that be helpful?)
But I digress.
The rest of us, we’re screwed.
Unless we take part in the time-tested method taught to me by my greatest spiritual instructor, Gary.
Was he a Zen monk, a Trappist monk, a hesachist, a wizened shaman of the steppes?
Hell no. He was a tie-chewing, coffee-stained data wonk who drove me so nuts I had to meditate at my desk or explode into a million angry bits. Rather than plot how to poison his daily dog-food-meat frozen burrito, I started taking five minutes for myself every time he stepped out of the office “for a butt,” i.e., took a smoke break.
Lightning struck! (Or rather, insert a peaceful, deer-and-bunnies metaphor of your choice here.)
Bottom line—thanks to pure antagonism, I calmed down, got more groovy, and learned to love the bomb.
I mean Gary.
After leaving that job, I ditched the five-minute breaks. Working at home surely meant I could meditate whenever I wanted. Soon I’d ascend to spiritual diva and goddess of the world!
Wrong. Work hours lead to unpaid overtime, hurriedly constructed meals, and managing the household at a constant sprint after the family returned home each evening.
I realized I still needed to give myself permission to take time—otherwise this task leads to that meeting, and the train of the day just rolls down the track.
I also realized that in order for me to knuckle under and actually do it, the meditation needed to be quick. I could convince myself to take five minutes — the same time it might take to make a cup of caffeine or throw some laundry in the wash. More than that, and the “you don’t have time for this!” alarms would start sounding.
I can always shoe-horn five minutes in somewhere—often several times during the day. On days in which a free hour, or even 20 consecutive minutes, isn’t happening, I can easily meditate multiple times for five minutes each, and achieve the same ahhhhhh! results.
Five minutes seems to be the magic interval. The fateful year of 2020 introduced me to Tai Chi 5 Minutes a Day, which I’ve practiced ever since. Rachel Cohen explains why five minutes is crucial in her series’ first video, and my experience has proven her right. Most nights I do more like 30 minutes of Tai Chi, but that’s because I have given myself permission to stop at only five.
I’m also a Duolingo fan, as you may have heard. By keeping my expectations to five minutes, I find I can often study my Esperanto, French, and Norwegian more than that, but because the bar is so low, I rarely—and I mean extremely rarely—miss a day.
You can’t keep going if you never start
The takeaway is that setting your goal at five minutes we make it easy for us to begin. Once we’ve begun, we have the option to push past the five-minute point if we want—an option we would never have if we didn’t at first begin. Holding the time down to a coffee-break also makes it easy to show up every day, even when five minutes is all the time we have. The basis of any practice is to keep showing up, every day. You will feel better about the world, your fellow humans, and yourself. It’s good for them, it’s good for you. It’s good for the world.
Five minutes will get you there, I promise.
If you’d enjoy a free five-minute mediation, with a brief reading and a chat, please drop in on my weekly podcast, 5 Minutes of Peace. You’ll be more grounded, calm, cheerful, and back to to your daily schedule in the time it takes to get a cup of coffee.
Speaking of which — if you’re feeling flush, please consider tossing a coin into the tip jar. Many thanks, my friend!