No timer meditation challenge/experiment (30 days)

Do you know any traditional texts on meditation recommending a number of minutes for a meditation?

Do you think they even exist?

Do the monks who spend years in caves carry Insight Timer in there with them? Where would they charge the device?

Even if you don't care about how it was done traditionally, I think it's good to understand a part of meditation is our relationship to time. Outsourcing the timing function to a device makes it so you don't have to be aware of it.

To me, this is an extension of sleep hygiene. Since I can wake up in time even if there's some variation especially considering state of health/injury and the like, I don't think doing a short meditation without tracking it externally is beyond my bodys natural ability - it's just on a smaller time scale.

Here's the experiment part: I'm going to update this with data over the 30 days. I'm aiming for 10 minutes of the mirror meditation, and 15 of my mid-day open awareness meditation. I will end up averaging how close I am for both week by week and see if I get more accurate just for kicks.

In case it isn't obvious, there's the potential benefit of being more aware of time and not losing track of time being engrossed doing whatever, if it translates to when you are doing other things.

Day 0: Mirror: 14 minutes - Mid-day: At Bus Depot, uncontrolled environment with timing cues so will start counting tomorrow

D1: Mirror 12 Midday 15
D2: Mirror 10 Midday 15
D3: Mirror 13 Midday 11 (will do a timed one to make up)
D4: Mirror 20 Midday 15
D5 Mirror 18
D6 Mirror 13
D7 Mirror 6

D8 Mirror 12

D1 Midday

 

2/30, already on time...

 

3/30

 

Only the morning mirror meditation so far but interesting that I ended up spending 20 minutes... I think I needed it. I was becoming aware that I was becoming depressed and apathetic, and I have the sense that means there's a lot to feel even if it may not be intense but it's like there's a larger volume of stuff to process underneath the surface.

 

Due to the emergency I will reset the mid-day med and data for that meditation before day 6 will not be used for the stats, but I can use it for the morning mirror one - I'll just start tracking them separately so it'll be day 1 for the midday meditation today.