Dealing with impatience

[Egil137]

Hello everyone,

As you have probably guessed, I feel myself wondering "how much time is left" during my practice. I always use a stopwatch and I've been building up from 5 minutes to 30 minutes just recently, which has helped a lot to get my mind used to it.

However, in the past sessions I've developed some strategy to cope with it but I'm not sure if it's some kind of cheating! What I do is basically "question" my memory, in the sense that I try to imagine that I have just sitted a second ago, even if I know it's been more than, let's say, 10 minutes. I think in Mindfulness in Plain English the author recommends to imagine one is going to meditate for the whole day, so I guess I sort of inverted that. Another thing that I've been doing is to acknowledge that time has passed but I intetionally distort it to make it seem go slower: for instance, yesterday when I was thinking there were 20 minutes left my 30 minute countdown was ringing!

So these thoughts have helped me to reduce my anxiety, but I'm wondering if this is something that I should do, because it is basically distorting reality. Any thoughts on this would be appreciated.

PS: I've also noticed that I've applied it to other distractions as well, so I just imagine "what if I don't have any memories of anything?"

[piedwagtail91]

hi,
i think a lot of people go through this at some time.
personally i don't use a clock or watch, as part of my work as a mindfulness volunteer i made a mp3 track with bells and bowls, bells at 5 minutes and differing numbers of bowl strikes at the 10 , 20 , 30 and 40 minutes.
i find that less distracting and going of what sounds - bell or bowl - i know where i am time wise.
we mainly use guided meditations so people just settle into those at first, knowing that they're a fixed amount of time.
in sessions we use 'live' leading or recorded cd/mp3 for home
as we get to the end of sessions, possibly session 7 we give out the bells and bowls cd and introduce people to silent unguided meditation, by this stage they have a good few hours of meditation practice under their belt..

[Gareth]

As you have probably guessed, I feel myself wondering "how much time is left"

I used to be exactly the same way. Heck, it feels like such a long time ago now. "Is it over yet?" used to be such a regular thought during my meditations. For me at least, this just drifted away with time. Now the thought never crops up at all.

I meditate to a timer, and I'm pretty good at gauging where I am within the thirty minutes. My favourite meditations though are the ones where you lose the thread of time completely. The timer goes off and feels like only ten minutes has passed.