How much practice time needed for awakening? Can i get enough sleep?

Dear Gary,

In your book...talks...interviews you mention how you would get up early every day to practice meditation or yoga. It seems to me that...sleeping time is the vast untapped resource to be harvested for the benefit of meditation. And yet, we know that sleep is very important for healthy brain functioning. 

Have you come across any evidence, whether from the lab or from the meditation cushion, that demonstrates healthy ways to minimise sleeping? And have you found that meditation...can provide the kind of relaxation of body and mind that sleep provides, while also enabling spiritual progress?

Thanks for your time.

With good wishes,

G.  IME, asana and meditation time is about, but not quite, an "equal replacement" to that additional time spent sleeping.  

As i was working in some really full-time jobs, w/two kids, and much job-related travel, the only time i could practice was in the early morning.   The key is making it a priority.  i knew, somehow, at some level, that "awakening" was the most important thing in "this life".  So i just did it.

Having said that, make certain that you get enough sleep and "good" food.  Folk grossly underestimate how critical the energy of "body-mind" is to successful long-term practice.  IME, the "ego" is stronger, and the ability to focus your mind weaker, if your physical energy is low.  Much meditation time is wasted this way.  

Swami Rama
as Shankaracharya

As you read in my book, "good" food is what works for you.   The controversial Swami Rama, in my second yoga teachers' training course, told us to do a "food log" on how our body felt after different foods.  It will change w/time, and nobody else's perfect diet will be your perfect diet, but give your body-mind the foods that work for it.

What you do in practice depends on how long you have.  Am a huge fan of physical practice.  If you only have 20 minutes, do the yoga flows in the book w/breath awareness and inquiry; more useful than 20 mins of meditation.  Many folk neglect physical practice; this works against you in many ways.  There is much "stuff" stored in the body that needs to be released.  

If you have an hour/day available, do 20 minutes of physical practice and then 40 of meditation.  IME, at 30 - 35 minutes of sitting meditation, a "high" kicks in, like a "runners high" from endorphin, much like "flow".  This lasts for several minutes.  IMHO, this is critical for awakening as the brain will repattern to the "highest" state it "knows" but only if it gets enough instances to give it the data to reorganize its functional pattern.        

If you can get 2 hrs/day, spend 1 hr on physical practice and 1 hr on meditation.  IME, with 2 hrs/day, serious progress can be made; 3 hrs/day was rare, and it was not clear that it was better than 2 hrs/day.  

i did many sesshins where we sat for the entire day for a week or 10 days x/c for meals, an hour of work, and a lecture.  i would highly recommend these if your schedule allows.    In general, what generates more progress is hard to determine, as "progress" always lags, and most of the real work is done "off line", so we have no idea what really caused what.

When it comes to whether you practice or not, be clear on why you would practice at all rather than just sleep longer.   

Secondary consciousness atop
primary consciousness

IME, i did the practices i did because they were the most enjoyable and "useful" ones i could find.  If i had found something better, i would have done that.  As you recall, we used an elephant and rider metaphor in the blog "Elephant or rider? intuition or reasoning? reaching the "other side w/o argument..."

In that blog, we described a "rider" and an "elephant.  The "rider" is the self-referential thoughts, very limited CPU  and working memory of "secondary consciousness"; the "elephant is the "automatic", intuitive, "primary consciousness" with massive memory capacity and high speed parallel processing.  The elephant ran the show, alone, successfully for a long time, evolutionarily, with an operating system with many upgrades and  extensive and exhaustive "field testing".

When language developed about 200,000 years ago, the 
rider/"secondary consciousness" manifested w/the ability to process symbols and language.  The elephant created the rider as a sort of spokes(wo)man, public relations firm, and means for translating information for processing.  The rider, unfortunately, insisted on talking non-stop about anything and everything, often with great emotion and imagined urgency.  

my practice focused on getting the rider to be quiet so that the elephant could go about   in happiness and peace, and yet still be an elephant in every sense of the word in "everyday life".  i had been told this was possible by many teachers like Ramana Maharshi, Nisargadatta Maharaj, and Bassui, a 14th century Zen Buddhist monk as discussed earlier in the blogpost "What is the "Direct Path" to nondual awakening? What is "self-inquiry"? .   

Ramana Maharshi

The rider was always blaming someone else (who could never be found) for not delivering the great pleasures w/o the pain that seemed to unavoidably come along with them.  There was always a "new plan" which was certain to produce spectacular results, but never did.  

There were also plans to say important things to other riders (which never were said when he met the other rider) and certainties that past mistakes would not be repeated, and yet they were.   

i found that if i inquired into what this rider was, where or when he was, or if he was just Memorex, he became quiet, if only for a few seconds.  The more i inquired, the longer he was quiet.  Finally, after a lot of those small periods and much practice, he lost his "self speak", i.e. the ability to speak about anything that involved personal emotion, regret, pain, future pleasure, etc.  He also lost his fears, clinging and suffering.

He could speak to solve a problem, plan, strategize, etc., but he was just unable to "self speak" about anything "personal".  It was the strangest thing. 

The quieter the rider was, the better "everything" was, and the sweeter, more aware and present "life" was.   If something came up that looked like it might be a greater pleasure, the elephant, pleased by this new state and the lack of shouting from the rider, wasn't interested.   

The elephant ate whatever foods agreed with him, slept when he was tired, and was able to do great tasks, in fact even better than before when the rider was shouting all the time.  he also found that he did things better than most elephants who still had their rider "blah, blahing" at them.  

Now, "practice" continues, but it is different w/o the rider's "self speak".  The elephant does whatever arises; sometimes it is physical exercise, sometimes "chanting/trumpeting (softly so as not to wake the neighbors @ 4:30 am)", sometimes he just sits quietly for long periods, immersed in this great sweet, aware, presence.  The rider is sound asleep.