1-minute Meditation

Fragments from imaginary dialogues

“The goal of the 1-minute meditation is to focus on your breath for one minute.“

“What’s the benefit of meditating for just one minute?”

“A lot can happen in your mental-space in just one minute.

The 1-minute time-frame is deceptively small. When you use it to frame your meditation practice, time seems to dilate, in the same way putting your hand on a hot stove for a minute seems like an hour. I call it subjective-time. You can have a deep practice session in just one minute. 

And there are other benefits. It’s impossible not to find time for it. It makes it easier to get started. However one of the main benefits has to do with Deliberate Practice. 

You can string 1-minute micro-meditations one after another to form one continuous block – what I call modular-meditation [<link; medium read].

Let’s compare a 10-minute meditation with a modular-meditation consisting of 10 1-minute micro-meditations.

The essential unit of effective practice is the quality-rep(etition) – or, as I call it, the beautiful-rep. The more beautiful-reps you can get within a certain time-frame, the more effective the practice. Using the density [<link; medium read] model, we can say effective practice is denser.

During a 10-minute meditation, it is possible for your mind to wander most of the time. That’s a low density practice.

The 1-minute micro-meditations structure your practice. You can think of them as checkpoints, which bring your wandering mind back, ensuring a higher density practice.

You can think of each 1-minute block as a bigger rep – 1-minute-reps. What the 1-minute-reps offer is fast feedback. Once a minute passes, you immediately know if it was a quality-rep or not.” 

“A quality 1-minute-rep is one in which your mind did not wander?”

“Yes. 

You can even count them, just like you might do with breaths.

Another approach I use is to aim for just one quality 1-minute-rep. Once you get it, you’re done. If you don’t get, add another one, and another one, until you do get it.”

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