| Shinzen Young made some interesting comments about how to make faster progress in his YT videos, and one of them was that its important to regularly push your sitting duration, to increase the length of your sits. Something like twice a month to try sitting for longer than usual. I guess partially its because we can become accustomed to being able to sit a certain duration, so pushing that boundary furthers our determination and patience skills.
Personally I find that longer sits are necessary to go deeper. And they can increase your confidence too, when you realise you can sit longer than you feel you can, way past the aversion. Particularly if you sit through some strong pain which then disappears - often in my sits it seems that intense pain won't go away until the end of a sit, so being able to sit with it until it vanishes is a good benefit too that is more likely to occur on long sits.
I find long sits beneficial too because towards the end of a sit, the aversion and mind-spinning can start to rev up, impatient to leave the sit. If the sit is planned to be longer than usual, you definitely don't want to spend another thirty minutes or more spinning around in that, and so there can be a sense of "necessity" in feeling your way into having that aversion die down, or developing an equanimity with that aversion, to get you through the rest of the sit - and finding out how to do that / that one is able to do that is a beneficial thing.
Something a friend pointed out to me is that he has never regretted doing a meditation session, even if it was a painful or drudgey session. I think the same is true for long sits - I ALWAYS feel like I've accomplished something worthwhile, and feel as if the day had something good about it, if I've done a difficult or long sit. Its one of those few things that is guaranteed to be non-regrettable regardless of the outcome, which I don't think can be said about anything else in life at all.
And yes I think they're especially powerful in daily life... the days where I do a full hour both morning and evening inevitably have a higher level of mindfuless and fulfillment to them. For me there is a standard of mental clarity that requires a daily minimum sitting time to attain to. |