20 Minutes in the Morning Can Make a Huge Difference

It’s often difficult to decide how we should schedule our time in our oh-so-busy lives. One of the things I think is essential is that we have an interior practice—daily—hopefully in the morning before you jump into your day.

The question comes up: Should I meditate for an hour? Or for how long?

I have often promoted meditating for an hour with iAwake Technologies, which is highly recommended if you can. However, many of us cannot.

What I would like to suggest is taking the time, first thing in the morning, to meditate for 20 minutes. This is based on my experience in working with Centering Prayer and Centering Meditation, which is a Christian practice that focuses the mind on the heart. When the mind wanders, you come back to the heart.

I’m not suggesting you must do this practice, but it’s a good one.

Pick a track that works for you; oftentimes our individual practice will begin to inform us how we should practice. To make my rather long story a bit longer, I think if you can meditate for 20 minutes, with or without iAwake (but I think with iAwake it will be much more effective), you will find that this relatively short time interval can become very productive. 

As therapists have found, in the traditional 50-minute hour that they use as their time container, it works better than say an hour and a half session. Because if we have an hour and a half session, we often don’t get rolling until the end of the hour and a half. But if we only have 50 minutes, we get more focused because of the time limit.

Do your practice every day with due diligence, and try the 20-minute time interval. See how that works for you. If you do it on a daily basis, I can guarantee it will make a difference.

One last thing, and this is the cherry on top: if you have time in the evening, after you finish your work day, meditate for another 20 minutes. This is also recommended in the practice of Centering Meditation as a time to reconnect with source and let go of and process all the things that came into your life that day. It relaxes you and ensures better dreams, as you are giving your subconscious a bit of help. 

Give it a shot. But if you can only do 20 minutes in the morning, that would be very good.

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