Your Whole Day Is the Meditation
You do not build a meditation practice to fix your lifestyle; you build a lifestyle that supports the practice, which means spending the whole day concentrating on whatever is in front of you.
Dandapani meditated an hour a day in the monastery and spent the rest of the day preparing for it. He explains why concentration precedes meditation in Hindu philosophy, why five minutes in the morning cannot carry the other twenty-three hours, and what simplifying your life has to do with it.
What this talk covers
- Meditation in the monastery was an hour a day, and quality matters more than quantity, so three hours is not automatically better than twenty minutes.
- In Hindu philosophy concentration comes before meditation, and you cannot meditate if you cannot concentrate.
- The whole day was concentration practice: undivided attention to another monk, to the laptop, to sweeping the sidewalk, so that the sitting could be dynamic.
- A sprinter structures his entire day around a race that lasts under ten seconds, and it does not work the other way around, so meditating five minutes and living the other twenty-three hours and fifty-five minutes chaotically will not carry you.
- To make a supportive lifestyle, simplify: your energy stays the same each year while the number of people and things in your life grows, so concentrate that finite energy on who and what truly matters.
It's like eating a carrot in the morning and then eating hamburgers and fries all day and hoping to have a healthy diet.Dandapani
Questions
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Length is not the measure. In the monastery it was an hour a day, with quality valued over quantity, and the rest of the day spent preparing for it.
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Most likely because concentration has not been built first. Meditation is born out of a prolonged state of concentration, so practice giving undivided attention to whatever you are doing during the day.
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It is a good start, but he asks what you are doing with the remaining twenty-three hours and fifty-five minutes. Your lifestyle supports the practice first, and only later does the practice support your lifestyle.
Transcript
828 words · 3:56
The meditation was an hour a day, which most people thought you might be meditating 12 hours a day. But you said before that you were preparing for that meditation the entire day. Exactly. Can you explain that?
Yeah, and this is the concept people don't get, right? People think that the more you meditate, the better it is. So 20 minutes of meditation is not as great as three hours of meditation. And it's actually not how we work.
For us, we believe in quality as opposed to quantity. We spent the whole day preparing to meditate. So in Hindu philosophy, what comes before meditation? Concentration. Concentration comes before meditation.
So you need to learn how to concentrate in order to meditate. And we believe that you can't meditate if you can't concentrate. So we spent the whole day focusing on concentration. So when I spoke with someone in the monastery, I spoke with another monk,
I gave them my undivided attention. When I worked on my laptop, I focused on working on my laptop. When I swept the sidewalk, I focused on sweeping the sidewalk. So throughout the day, I'm practicing concentration.
And now when I go to sit down to meditate, I'm really focused and I can have a dynamic meditation session. And I always use the simple analogy of, you know, take Lucene Bolt, for example, the sprinter, right?
I don't know much about him except he won three gold medals, passes men on Earth from Jamaica. I can make an assumption and tell me if I'm wrong that his whole day is structured, that he eats the right kinds of food and drinks the right amount of water.
He goes to the gym. If you look at the boy, he's ripped, right? Probably works out, runs every day, I'm sure. He does all kinds of things, but his whole day is preparing him for what, 9.57 seconds
or whatever it is his world record is. Not the other way around. People come up to me all the time, Brian, and they say, Donalpani, I'm so stressed out. I've got so much happening in my life.
Do you think if I meditate for five minutes in the morning, you know, I'll help my whole day? I'm going like, well, what are you doing the remaining 23 hours and 55 minutes? That's what I want to know.
Because if you try to meditate for five minutes in the morning, and the rest of the day you just live a chaotic life. That's not, yeah, it's a good start, but it's not really helping you. It's like eating a carrot in the morning and then eating hamburgers and fries all day and hoping to have a healthy diet. You have to understand that your whole day, your lifestyle
is what's going to support your meditation practice at the start. Then your meditation practice grows and then it turns around and supports your lifestyle, but not the other way around. You don't create a meditation practice to support your lifestyle. You create a lifestyle That's meditation second.
Then meditation affects the lifestyle, not the other way around. Everybody in the West has got it backwards. And what should we be doing with our lifestyle
to make it to where it's maybe more meditation friendly? Well, a couple of things. I would say one is simplify your life. Everybody's so busy.
Everybody's got a lot of things to do. We don't actually have a lot of things to do. We like being distracted because then we don't have to think about ourselves.
Well, yeah. And we don't have priorities in life. Most people don't have clear priorities in life. You know, for me, my goal is to simplify my life, simplify the number of people in my life and simplify the number of things in my life. We only have a finite amount of energy each day.
All right. But every year we have more people in our lives. Is that a fast statement? More Facebook friends, more people you're connected with. But your energy stays the same.
So that's not a proportionate growth. If your energy is increasing every year proportionately with the number of things and people in your life, then we don't have to talk about this. But your energy level is the same. But the amount of people and things in your life are growing
almost exponentially. So whereas that doesn't work. So for me, it's always about simplifying first the people and things into your life and to who and what's most important.
Taking that finite energy that you have each day and focusing second step is learning how to focus and concentrate that finite amount of energy into the people and things that truly matter. Now you start to create a lifestyle that you actually love because
you invest into people and things that matter. and the byproduct of that is happiness.