Mindfulness Meditation (For Everyday Life)

little to do with clock time. Five minutes of formal
practice can be as profound or more so than forty-five
minutes. The sincerity of your effort matters far more
than elapsed time, since we are really talking about
stepping out of minutes and hours and into moments,
which are truly dimensionless and therefore infinite.
So, if you have some motivation to practice even a
little, that is what is important. Mindfulness needs to
be kindled and nurtured, protected from the winds of
a busy life or a restless and tormented mind, just as a
small flame needs to be sheltered from strong gusts
of air.
If you can only manage five minutes, or even one
minute of mindfulness at first, that is truly wonderful.
It means you have already remembered the value of
stopping, of shifting even momentarily from doing to
being.
When we teach meditation to medical students to
help them with the stress and sometimes the trauma
of medical education in its present form, or to college
athletes who want to train their minds along with their
bodies to optimize performance, or to people in a
pulmonary rehabilitation program who need to learn a
lot of other things as well as meditate, or to
employees in a lunch-time stress reduction class, we
don't insist on forty-five minutes of practice a day.