Nearly every spiritual advisor recommends meditation. The mind must be stilled to connect with our ground of awareness.
Modern civilization promotes busyness, which means meditation time may be scarce, or shoved aside for another activity, such as spending time gazing into one’s cell phone screen.
If you can’t meditate for 12 minutes, 20 minutes, or 60 minutes a day, here are two short, effective meditation techniques. They can be done as often as possible throughout the day while waiting in line, while in transit, or while in between other activities.
1) The first is simply to watch your breath cycle 21 times. Say “I breathe in. I breathe out.” Take in a belly breath, stretching the diaphragm, and contract those belly muscles on the out breath. Or, do 4-square breathing where you count to 4 on the in breath and count to 4 on the out breath. If you wish to enhance this even more, there is benefit to making the out breath last longer than the inbreathe, so for example, count to 4 on the in breath and to 5 on the out breath.
2) The second method that I like requires an electronic device. It is a 3-minute meditation that will still your mind by the end of the 3 minutes. Do this as often as you like throughout the day. This is on Peter Russell’s website here.
Some say doing more frequent short meditations throughout the day is as good or better than one long one. I prefer the longer ones, but doing short ones is a nice alternative.
One Seeker's Story 