Meditation for people who don’t have time to meditate

These days most people have heard of meditation, which is good in so far as that barrier to entry – not knowing it exists – has been removed. But to be honest, as with anything that’s going mainstream and is therefore somewhat watered down, misunderstandings about it have also proliferated. I thought it could be helpful to address some commonly perceived obstacles to meditation in case these are stopping you from even attempting to do it.

A vital counterpoint

If we know the why of it – what we want from meditation – then we’re more motivated to start doing a couple of minutes of breathing meditation every now and then throughout the day, including when we’re not already anxious or upset.

(This continues on from some advice on anxiety that I gave someone in this recent article: How to start meditating when you think you can’t.) 

Do you ever have that feeling when you first get settled on a train and look out the window, or when you plop down on a bench in the park, “Ah, this is nice. This is restful!”? If so, we can learn quite easily to get in there before the itch to pop in the airpods or pick up the phone, and do a few minutes breathing meditation to stabilize that peace. And identify with that relatively good and free feeling, understanding it to be the kernel of a deep, lasting peace: “I am a peaceful person with boundless potential.” Get used to that sense of ourself because it serves us so much better than the anxious version.

This peace, however brief, serves as a vital counterpoint to the busyness, endless chit chat, and underlying dissatisfaction that we otherwise might wrongly assume is all we’ve got going on in our mind. To paraphrase Venerable Geshe Kelsang, when we first start meditating we could be forgiven for thinking that our mind is getting even busier than usual; but this is because we are only now seeing just how busy our mind normally is. And the problem is not just that our mind feels crammed and poky, and we feel a bit limited or trapped. The bigger problem is that these uncontrolled thoughts are entirely dominating our experiences and shaping our days and, until we understand how to meditate, there’s not a whole lot we can do about that.

Stages one and two

There are two stages of meditation – (1) settling our mind with some breathing and (2) reducing our habitual troublesome reactions to everything and increasing our peaceful states of mind. The Tibetan word for meditation is “gom”, which means familiarity, so meditation is actually about getting used to experiencing positive and wise states of mind. And we can take this as far as we want – from cultivating a more relaxed, patient, accommodating approach to day to day life all the way to mental liberation and the bliss of full enlightenment. This is something we can do while sitting alone on a train or going about our work, and everywhere else besides.

We do this not by overlaying interesting, insightful, and helpful ideas – such as love or impermanence – on top of our distracted, neurotic thoughts, but by first emptying out some space in our mind in stage one, creating a counterpoint to our normal franticness, and identifying with that little bit of peace, even thinking, “This is me.” Then we do some contemplation in that confident context, which is to say as someone who can feel greater love and peace because it’s already begun.

More on stage two another day. It won’t work without stage one. As Venerable Geshe Kelsang says:

The first stage of meditation is to stop distractions and make our mind clearer and more lucid. This can be accomplished by practicing a simple breathing meditation.

When we do this, our mind naturally becomes peaceful and spacious; and this is because our mind is naturally peaceful and spacious. It is our uncontrolled thoughts that, like bad weather in an otherwise limitless sky, obscure this all day every day. This bears repeating because when it sinks in we have found some real daily refuge.

If you want some methods to clear your mind, check out these articles on breathing meditation. Or for an alternative method of calming the mind called “turning the mind to wood”, check this out: Emergency aid for a troubled mind.

Unpacking the excuses that keep us from inner peace

Obstacle 1: “I don’t have time to meditate!”

Please give me a dollar for every time someone says, “I don’t have time to meditate!” You may be thinking:

“I’m already juggling jobs, families, school, and burnout, so meditation just seems like another item I will never get around to on an already crazy to-do list, not a solution to the stress.”

My reply is that meditation doesn’t need a huge time investment to be effective, but it may require a bit of time-prioritizing. We don’t need to go away on a mountain retreat or even have a whole hour to ourself, nice as that might be. Even two to five minutes of meditation can create some freedom and send our mind in the right direction.

Train rides, park benches, & the peace already inside you

And are we really going full tilt all day every day, or do we actually have time to pause and catch our breath?

Your phone ain’t lying when it tells you that you spent 4.5 hours on it today. We have many natural breaks in the day – we know this because it’s when our itchy fingers reach for the tech. Instead of scrolling and swiping for happiness, we can take those moments to look within our own hearts, asking, “Am I feeling peaceful and satisfied right now?” If not, we can do a few minutes breathing meditation and recenter ourselves. Then pick up the phone if we still want to. Just spending a few pleasurable moments following our breath now, we’ll find we have a lot more time and space for everything else later. Time is stretchy, after all, as I explain here: Stretchy time – Buddhist time management tips. 

Creating small habits like this builds up into something incredibly valuable. My hairdresser, aged 42, avoided the dentist for the last twenty years, pretty much his whole adult life. It is not as if all these years were pain free, he said, for every day he had some twinge or nag in his mouth, and sometimes actual pain. I tried intermittently over the years to encourage him to take the plunge, but he was always too scared what they’d find. With good reason, as it turns out, because late last year, when he finally plucked up the courage to go, it was to discover that almost every tooth in his mouth needed to be replaced.

If only he’d brushed his teeth properly and had regular check ups! – a small daily act that saves us years of tooth decay and pain. Likewise, even 5 to 10 minutes of meditation per day, and perhaps regular dentist appointments – aka some meditation classes and/or retreat – will save us those daily nags and twinges of discomfort or pain, and years, if not lifetimes, of mental decay.

For example, we can briefly pause before responding to a message, take a few breaths, and think, “How can I reply in a way that is helpful and true?” Instead of feeling rushed, we can breathe at traffic lights and wish the other harried drivers well. We can practice grace and acceptance when things don’t go our way. We can decide to be kind to ourself and others today, whatever happens.

If meditation means becoming familiar with positive or virtuous thoughts, which it does, we can get in the habit of doing this throughout the day without it taking up any extra time at all. I like to say that whoever we are, from a monastic to a total beginner, we all have the same amount of time to meditate. Which is 24 hours a day.

Also, if you feel like you’re too busy to meditate, this article might help: How to feel less busy all the time.

Obstacle 2: “Meditation is boring!”

I wasn’t sure whether to call these objections “obstacles” or “excuses”. Maybe it’s a bit of both. In any event, meditation isn’t boring. Being stressed is.

In a speedy world, a lot of people are naturally going to view meditation as slow, uneventful, tedious, or not sufficiently stimulating. People under 40, in particular, have grown up with rapid, visual, interactive content (TikTok, Snapchat, YouTube, AI), so why would you want to sit still and do “nothing” when you can scroll the world? Or even listen to a podcast and learn something!?

My first reply is that if we don’t get some downtime from the constant stimulation, we end up with brain fog, fatigue, and eventually burnout. When we’re always consuming, we lose the essential ability to think deeply, solve problems creatively, or even just be present and peaceful. Taking time out of reactivity to meditate is not boring but highly engaging.

Focus and fascination

Boredom is associated with an inability to focus or pay attention. Even if something is interesting, such as a classic novel, a two-hour movie (remember those?!), or even a Buddhist masterpiece, for some reason it is not holding our attention. We still feel restless and get up to see what’s in the fridge or once again check the phone. With meditation we increase our attention span so that we find things far richer and more absorbing both on and off our meditation cushion.

Fascination is the opposite of boredom. So to begin with we need to find the value in meditation – develop interest in it by remembering a benefit or two, “Ah I will feel so much better!”, so that we are prepared to focus on it for a bit. Over time, we won’t need to recall the benefits of meditation because we’ll be well aware of them and won’t want to stop. But at the beginning we have to remember how it will help us.

For example, let’s say we find ourself talking to a fascinating person at a party. We don’t have to be there all night, just spending five minutes with them is worthwhile. And we are not constantly looking over their shoulder for someone more interesting. If we get really drawn in, we can keep going, or else seek them out again soon at the next get-together. Meditation is like that – the focus and the fascination depend on each other.

Indifference: distanced from our own reality

Another way to understand boredom is that if we’re not indulging in cravings or avoiding aversions – two of the three so-called “root delusions” – we might well find ourselves feeling bored because boredom is related to the third root delusion, ignorance. With boredom, we feel unengaged, indifferent, or distanced from things we perceive as neutral. And it is our ignorance that holds things at a distance, as if they were really out there, nothing to do with us.

When we scroll or listen to stuff, do we feel it exists from its own side? Seeking stimulation to avoid boredom, we totally miss how we are creating our own reality. We are holding onto a fixed world outside of our mind and then asking it to “Entertain me!” Meditation on the other hand is fundamentally creative. It helps us to see for ourselves that we are creating our own reality day by day. It is the very opposite of uneventful. More about that here: How to break the cycle of boredom and restlessness.

Coffee break’s over! I’ll carry on with addressing common obstacles to meditation soon. Your questions and comments are invited, I will reply.