MEDITATION - Why is regularity essential?

Let me once again go back to learning to drive a vehicle. You probably remember how you had to practice it every day over a period of time before you could drive almost unconsciously. Since meditation too starts with training your attention system, regularity is a must – at least in the beginning. 

I have seen many meditators meditating once in a blue moon and getting frustrated with not being able to meditate with full attention. It is like appearing for a driving test before you have practiced regularly. You are sure to fail. 

What is involved in this regular practice?

When you practice driving, or for that matter any learning, certain parts of your brain get rewired in such a way that the brain ’remembers’ the entire process. This rewiring involves repeated cycles of learning or going through the act consciously. 

But once the rewiring is perfected, you don’t need to keep doing the same with that much of regularity. The memory remains almost permanently and you can drive even without being conscious of the act. Curious of knowing why this happens?

I will not go into the details of how our brain learns things. You can get some insight in my book “How does the mind work?”

Our memories are ‘encoded’ as a pool of neurons interconnected in a complex fashion through what are called ‘synaptic contacts’. The strengths of these contacts grow gradually over a period of time and not instantaneously. They may take several days before they can stabilize.

This slow building up of synaptic contacts has mainly two reasons – the nature intentionally wants to delay this process so that we don’t unnecessarily accumulate useless information. Secondly, the strengthening involves various biological mechanisms – back firing, protein formation, and gene activation – each of which needs varying amounts of time to take place.

Regularity in practice gradually strengthens these synaptic contacts which would otherwise start degenerating (degeneration is part of the process to dismantle a connection that is no longer needed). So, regular practice is a must.

Does that mean you keep doing practice whole day? Probably that would be counterproductive. It is generally observed that learning is more effective if you intersperse it with regular breaks – not too short, not too long. A night of good sleep before another run of practice is generally found to be very beneficial. Probably, that would avoid unnecessary load on the system and give enough time for the biological mechanisms to settle down.

You have done the regular practice for some time. What next? That is what I am going to discuss in the next post.

Start(Meditation)            Previous              Next