Duration : 30 minutes at bedtime
The suspended breath happened. The stamina to remain with the suspended breath is yet to build. At 30 minutes, I felt like I couldnāt sustain this depth of calm. I stopped. There were still 15 minutes remaining before my 45 minutes reminder bell would ring.
Anyway, I am glad that I am not shutting shop at 18 minutes anymore. Itās to do with those pushes that I give myself to carry on. It helps with increasing oneās duration when a certain level of depth is taken care of. So, I reach a certain depth of mind. Then another part of the mind says āEnough !ā Then I tell myself to carry on for a little while more. This increases meditation duration like nothing else.
New depths require meditation-muscle growth to sustain it. Takes patient practice to arrive at a new level, strengthen the new level and then outgrow it. Only after this can one enter a level deeper than the one prior.
At last, I seem to have put that into words. Meditative growth is like this. New level, levelling up, outgrowing the level. Sometimes all three things can happen in a given session. The most fruitless thing to do is to settle down with a level and to refuse to grow any depth.
There is God to be found through meditation. Them saints say that He is infinite ā¾. Then, it doesnāt make sense to say that this meditative plateau is good enough. Dig some more, please. Them saints say that God is better than all the gold in the world. Dig deep. Dig.