Meditation doesn’t mean only what you do at the times of meditation. It is not just a technique. It is not an isolated lifestyle practice. It is something that eventually integrally embraces the whole of one’s life. It is one’s life. ‘Praise God in all things,’ St Paul says; ‘Pray at all times.’ (1 Thess 5:17, 18). Thirty minutes is an average amount of time in many traditions because it’s about that amount of time that we need both to get into the practice, and we may find that we are really in a pure state of attention for maybe a short part of that half hour and to extend it too much we just can’t do it, just can’t keep it up at that same level, that same degree. That’s just our human nature; it’s just the way our minds are.
( Finding Oneself 1 Laurence Freeman )
