Hello and welcome back to practicing human the podcast where every day we're getting a little better at life.

I'm your host Cori Muscarra and in today's episode we're going to talk about the benefit of practicing short bouts of deep presence.

More to come on that in a moment. First, let's settle in together

with the sound of the bells.

The Okay, so people often ask, you know, how long should I meditate for?

If I have some time throughout the day, how long should it be?

Should I do five minutes?

Should I do two hours? Should I do five minutes should I do two hours should I do one minute and it's not that

straightforward of a question because there are some other variables involved, namely what is going to be the quality

of presence during that period of meditation?

Because I think you would agree there's a difference between sitting down and the mind

just wandering aimlessly and you following wherever it goes and getting caught in those thoughts and doing that for an hour

versus maybe three minutes but you're really attuned to your moment to moment experience and you're observing your mind and observing

your object of awareness, perhaps the breath, with a deep presence and focus and monitoring.

Now that is a very different experience

and an hour of aimless mind wandering.

And not that there isn't a role for aimless mind wandering and daydreaming, but it is different than what we're exploring here, at least when we're cultivating a certain kind of presence.

And so the question then can become, well, which is more valuable?

And this is also a complicated question.

So I'll give you some different layers of responses.

The first thing we could say is that, you know,

if you can keep a really high degree of presence and attuned

...