Recommended length of session(s)

[Fran65]

I work fulltime in a job that I find very tiring at times (teaching) and have a serious health condition that means that I must get enough rest and be careful with activity levels. I have been practicing watching the breath meditation for only six weeks and my sessions last around 30 minutes. I do two sessions a day, the morning session is sometimes shorter depending upon demands on my time. In addition, I have 16 weeks of vacation a year. I would like advice regarding how long I 'should' aim for on a normal working day (I leave the house at 7.30am and return at 4.45pm) and how long I could reasonably practice daily during vacations for most benefit in my circumstances as a lay person.
I have also read that a 'day off' is advisable, but am unsure whether it is beneficial.
Thank you for your time and help.
Namaste
Karen

[yuttadhammo]

Dear Karen,

Even five minutes is a wholesome act. I would recommend taking a different look at things. Every moment you are awake is a moment when you might develop wholesomeness. Be charitable, moral and mindful as often as possible, and you will surely progress in the buddha's teaching.

Best Wishes,

Yuttadhammo

[Bhikkhu Ananda]

I work fulltime in a job that I find very tiring at times (teaching) and have a serious health condition that means that I must get enough rest and be careful with activity levels. I have been practicing watching the breath meditation for only six weeks and my sessions last around 30 minutes. I do two sessions a day, the morning session is sometimes shorter depending upon demands on my time. In addition, I have 16 weeks of vacation a year. I would like advice regarding how long I 'should' aim for on a normal working day (I leave the house at 7.30am and return at 4.45pm) and how long I could reasonably practice daily during vacations for most benefit in my circumstances as a lay person.
I have also read that a 'day off' is advisable, but am unsure whether it is beneficial.
Thank you for your time and help.
Namaste
Karen

In general the more good meditation you can maintain with enough comfort, the better. Since you mention a serious health condition if you can do some more and still be reasonably comfortable with your health condition, some more is recommended. While the sitting position for meditation is recommended let us also rememeber that it is possible to do meditation in the lying down posture as Samma Sambuddha Gotama did in Long Discourse #16. Here is the link http://www.accesstoinsight.org/tipitaka/dn/dn.16.1-6.vaji.html Then scroll down quite a ways through this very long and interesting discourse to Part 5 around 1-6 for where the Blessed One lies down and scroll to Part 6 around 1-11 where the Blessed One attains the 9 successive attainments in forward order, in reverse order, and then the second, third, and fourth jhana.

I remember sometime doing normally two 1 hour sittings a day. But sometimes I would get up early enough make the first sitting a 2 hour sitting plus the 1 hour sitting later in the day.

Then sometimes I would sit six 1 hour sittings a day with walking meditation in between some of the sittings.

If sometimes something comes up of an urgent and important nature perhaps one does not formally meditate on that particular day. But let us still rememeber to practice clear awareness in our day to day life whether we did formal sitting meditation or not. But I would not urge people to go out of their way to "take a vacation" from meditation. I would not urge someone not to meditate. Rather I would encourage people to practice good meditation.

Long Discourse #22 is a very popular discourse for meditation and it also has an in depth exposition of the Noble Truth of the Way of practice leading to the cessation of suffering. It is available free online and here is the link http://www.accesstoinsight.org/tipitaka/dn/dn.22.0.than.html

Sincerely,



Bhikkhu Ananda

[jonecox]

Using a custom session save handler won't solve the problem because the access to the session data will still be locked by php until the current script is finished accessing the session data. The simple solution is to use session_write_close() to save the session data and close the session as soon as you are done reading or setting the session data in a script.