When is the best time to practice meditation? For a sense of brightness and alertness, after bathing but on a relatively empty stomach (before a meal or a significant amount of time after one) is usually found to be best. Many dedicated practitioners get up very early in the morning, sometimes a long time before dawn, because they favour the stillness and serenity of the early hours, before the rest of humanity sets about its busyness. Others favour the evening, when the days activities have wound down and can be put to one side.
We all like to feel that we have been present and alert during a meditation, but why not also practice at all the 'wrong' times: when we are feeling angry, upset or agitated; late at night, when we are drowsy and dreamy; when we are really hungry or have just had a big meal; in the midst of a very busy day...? Or we can practice meditation precisely at the times when when we least want to.
At these times, we may not necessarily be the most settled or experience the greatest clarity in our meditation, but we have a special opportunity to explore and bring kind awareness to less common or desirable states of mind. We can practice patience and non-judgment when we get lost in the mind or drift into sleep or day dreams, we can experiment with ways to be with uncomfortable emotions, and we can investigate feelings that we would otherwise go out of our way to avoid.
Meditation isn't just about training the mind to be focussed, it is also about cultivating a different relationship with experience. In our meditation practice, we 'learn in the shallow end', that is to say we practice meeting whatever feelings that arise with an attitude of acceptance, curiosity, non-judgment and patience, so that we can do the same in our daily life. It is our reactivity to experience that causes a large part of our suffering. If we only meditated when we were feeling good, we would not have the opportunity to practice applying this mindful and heartful approach to exactly the kinds of feelings that we most often resist and struggle with.
