Meditations per Hour (MPH) or Meditation ROI?
If you apply to many meditation programs, you’re asked about the length or your meditation experience. This is a kind of a Meditations Per Hour. I understand what they’re after when they ask this. Perhaps there’s no other way to get at what they want. But, what the credible programs really want is this: what difference does your meditation experience make (or Meditation Return on Investment: M-ROI)? 😉
The purported benefits of mindfulness are non-existent - in terms of the time spent - if meditation offers little return on investment.
Like most worthy pursuits, the frequency of weekly mindfulness meditations (MPH) isn’t the same as actually using meditation (M-ROI). I meditate nearly every day. But my use of meditation occupies a tiny fraction of my week and even my life.
No matter how much time you spend in meditation, the real value of mindfulness (and mindfulness meditation, or for that matter any form of meditation) is how much of your life is touched by it.
How do you know that your mindfulness meditation impacts your life? Here are some areas that demonstrate the tangible presence of mindfulness in our lives:
- Noticing your triggers closer in time to when you actually experience them. Examples: I just had a wave of sadness; I feel anger rising; I want to do X to salve my Y. All these are small examples of real-time awareness that comes with the actual practice (not the time spent) listening to meditation/s.
- Hearing the voice of the body, emotions, the experiences of others, and connection to sustaining the world is a vital source of daily experiencing. How does is my experience actually experienced?
- Deriving from the Buddhist tradition, leaning on the spirit of the Beginners Mind occupies a rich and fulfilling part of our lives. This should be true whatever your tradition and values. Socrates also emphasized this concept in his own way as well as other traditions in their emphasis on humility.
- Reactivity is tempered by compassion and kindness to ourselves and to others in their reactivity.
No matter how much I meditate, my meditative training will always be evolving. The presence of hours on a meditation clock has little to do with its actual value. The goal isn’t meditation time. It’s cultivating these qualities. You can’t have the qualities without time, but time on the meditation clock does not indicate your qualities. If there is any real objective to your meditation, make sure the focus is M-ROI over MPH.
In fact, no one has all these qualities. We are all beginning every day, every hour.