Over a week ago, I was meditating ten hours a day at my Vipassana course. This week, I’ve been sitting for about an hour to an hour and a half each day (continuously).
The course recommends two hours daily, one in the morning and one in the evening. I’m not hitting that. Vipassana is a roughly 2,500-year-old practice, taught in an intentionally stripped-down way. Each sit starts with Anapana: focusing on the breath at the nostrils. That’s it. No visualization. No verbalization. Just noticing the breath come in and go out.
It’s genuinely the most boring-sounding skill. “Focus on your breath.” Cool, thanks. But it’s hard. Our minds are like wild animals trying to grab branches of thoughts. Plan the day. Replay yesterday’s conversation. Anything but to stay with the breath. And we live in a world designed to fragment attention. Social media, notifications, infinite scrolls. All pulling the mind in ten directions at once.
Anapana is the mental gym where you practice bringing that attention back, over and over again. The thing that can settle our agitated mind. The ten-day course was the intensive. The daily sits are the maintenance reps. And maintenance is where the real work lives. I want to protect my hour (or 2) of meditation a day. Not because it’s what the course prescribes, but because it’s the thing that keeps my mind from scattering into a thousand browser tabs (which, let’s be honest, is its natural state).