Meditation: The Best Time
Meditationtime Forum Post
Date: Posted 6 years before Feb 22, 2017
MiBeloved 6 years ago
Someone called yesterday about the best time to do meditation practice. The thing about this is that everybody has his or her own idea. My proposal is simple. Try doing meditation at different times and then find out for yourself which time is best for you. And of course your lifestyle and employment schedule has to play into your use of the daily 24 hours.
Be reasonable with yourself. For me the best meditation is between midnight and 6 a.m. getting up early for meditation works nice if you can take rest early in consideration of the body and mind getting enough rest and relaxation. If you have to stay up later for this or that reason, then getting up early for meditation is not practical because the mind and life force will be reluctant to encourage you and you will have to struggle through mental and emotional negativity while you practice.
Usually in ashrams, one has to rise early so that one can meditate around 5 am. Usually one has to do exercises in a group session and then one has to sit to meditate or lay on the back to meditate.
In advanced ashram environment, each student rises and then practices with or without supervision and then must meditate in isolation. The reason for this is that each student has to work on his or her individual psyche.
Doing practice under the supervision of a teacher is a pain in the arse, in the sense that one has to do what the teacher says regardless of what one desires to do, and so I try not to stand over students, even though I do agree to check students practice periodically.
If I am teaching a student then I lose track of my own practice and that is not good for me.
The point is that when you become a teacher, you lose your grip on your own studentship under the more advanced teacher, and therefore I am never eager to be a teacher.
Still, teaching duties are there and they must be administered no matter what but the students too has to submit for instruction.
One person was telling me the other day that my teachers are not present physically. But there is no difference between an astral teacher and a physical one. In fact the astral one is more of a nuisance because he or she is more subtle and more direct. There is a tighter discipline which is required when one is dealing with astral yogis but somehow people are thinking that I can do what I like and I do not have to listen to any teacher.
This is all imaginary bunkum. If you want to find out if someone is under the control of a great yogi, just check to see if that person is making advancement. Yogic advancement does not come from laying around and doing what one wants to do, doing what is convenient, doing what one feels will please one’s lower mind. It comes from application of very tight psychological disciplines on the components of consciousness.
Advanced yogis do not put up with crap from disciples. It is not that they stand over the disciple with a stick, like some teachers in a Zen monastery, but rather the advanced yogis simply disappear and that is the end of the instruction. They do not have time to spend with cry-baby disciples or with disciples who are just into mental fantasies and laziness due to being stuck in lower emotions.
When should you rise to do practice?
Well ask yourself this question: How important is yoga to you? What do you hope to get from it?
People are making sacrifices, but for what?
People will go out of their way to get certain things and will even go against people who really have their interest at heart, but why?
So underneath everything is motivation.
We are nothing when compared to what motivates us. Whatever motivates, that is in control of us and that will dictate what urges us and how hard we work for what we think we must have.
