The are many ways to practice meditation. Over time we discover which method works best for us. Here I want to offer a couple of things I have learned in the course of meditating for about 50 years.

Here is the first thing: I have learned that having a daily practice is more important than doing the occasional long meditation. I think if you do just 5 minutes every day you will derive more benefit than from doing one 35 minute meditation per week. I myself sit for half an hour twice a day and consider it the time most well spent. It is luxury, it’s necessity, it’s wonderful, sometimes difficult, sometimes glorious, it’s everything.

Here is another thing: the instructions for Zen meditation are very simple: sit and count your breath. I have long wondered whether something was lost in translation though. I mean count your breath can have two different meanings:

1. count the occurrence of each breath
2. count the length of each breath

Ah, this is very different isn’t it. Counting the number of breaths is merely something to occupy the mind but counting the length of the breath is actually very useful. Let me explain. Buddhism collided with Taoism and other philosophies in China and the result was Chan, which over time became Zen in Japan. The Taoists were really into controlling their breath and knew that breathing slowly calms the nervous system. That is something modern science has proved to be correct. Take a deep breath is very good advice whenever you feel stressed.

I imagine that the original meaning of count your breath could have been to breathe slowly while counting the length of one’s inhalations and exhalations. Most people will find a length of around 5 seconds to be a good duration for each in or out breath. That’s 6 breaths per minute. I discovered that for me 6 seconds is a more natural duration and so I take 5 breaths per minute.

There are a whole bunch of posts regarding meditation on this blog. These are tagged Meditation and these are tagged Zazen. If you want to read more about Zazen, this is a very good essay.