The Minimum Viable Spiritual Practice

I used to meditate for two hours every day. Now I do thirty minutes.

This isn't a confession. It's not a story about giving up or scaling back because life got in the way. It's the opposite: after twenty years of practice, I finally figured out what actually matters. And it turns out, a lot of what I was doing was noise.

Here's what I kept—and what I do with the silence afterward.

The Myth of More

For years, I operated under an assumption so embedded I didn't even notice it was there: more meditation meant more growth. More hours on the cushion translated to more spiritual advancement, whatever that means.

In the community I was part of, there was an implicit hierarchy. People compared hours like investors comparing portfolios. Two hours a day? Good. Three hours? Better. Someone meditating four hours daily while working full-time? Basically enlightened. Probably also boring at parties, but nobody mentioned that part.

The math seemed obvious. More input, more output. Grind your way to transcendence.

Except it doesn't work like that.

I've met people with decades of practice who still react to criticism like teenagers who got their phone confiscated. I've watched meditators with impressive hours treat waiters with impatience that would embarrass anyone paying attention. And I've caught myself—thousands of hours deep—being just as petty, just as reactive, just as unaware as I was at year one.

Time on the cushion isn't transformation. It's just time on the cushion.

Neuroscience lines up with what I learned the slow way: what seems to change the brain isn't logging marathon sessions—it's showing up regularly.¹ The brain doesn't care about your impressive meditation hours; it cares about repetition.

What Sleep Taught Me About Practice

Here's a reframe that changed everything for me: meditation isn't something you make time for. It's something you give time to—like sleep.

Nobody says "I need to make time for sleep." You don't negotiate with sleep or treat it as optional when things get busy. You know what happens when you skip it: everything else degrades. Cognition. Mood. Decision-making. The ability to be a decent human being.

You don't skip sleep because you're busy. You sleep because you're busy.

At some point, I stopped treating practice as an addition to life—something extra I fit in when conditions are right. It's not a supplement. It's not self-care. It's not even "me time," whatever that means.

It's maintenance. Non-negotiable maintenance for a system that doesn't function properly without it.

The shift sounds semantic, but it changed everything. When practice is optional, it competes with everything else. When it's maintenance, the question isn't whether to do it. The question is how much the system needs.

And it turns out, the system needs less than I thought—but it needs it every single day.

The Actual Minimum

So what's left after stripping away everything that was noise?

Thirty minutes of sitting. My threshold, not a rule.

Some days it's an hour. Some days—the rare, luxurious ones—it stretches longer. But the floor is thirty minutes. Not because some teacher prescribed it, but because that's where I notice the difference. Below that, the day feels off—like I skipped a step somewhere and can't quite remember what. Above that, returns diminish rapidly.

Could someone else's minimum be different? Absolutely. That's the whole point. This isn't a prescription. It's what I've found works—after a long time of thinking more was always better.

But here's the part most people skip, and it's the part that matters most:

Immediately after meditation, I write.

Not always much. Sometimes a sentence. Sometimes pages. But the transition from cushion to notebook isn't optional—it's the second half of the practice.

The Meditation-to-Page Pipeline

There's something about the mind right after practice that took me years to understand. It's not calm, exactly. It's not blank. It's... clear. Like water that's been allowed to settle.

During focused attention, the brain's wandering, self-referential chatter quiets down. Afterward, there's a window where thinking feels different. Cleaner. Problems I'd been circling for days suddenly have obvious solutions. Connections I couldn't see appear fully formed.²

That's what I discovered by accident: that window is extraordinarily useful for writing.

But none of it matters if you don't do something with it. The window closes fast. If I check my phone first, it's gone.

That's why the notebook sits next to where I sit. Not across the room. Not on my desk where I might decide to make coffee first. Right there.

Meditation alone didn't give me this. The combination did. The sitting settles the water. The writing captures what's visible once the sediment falls.

What I Actually Do

Here's the unsexy reality of my practice now:

Wake up. Don't check the phone. Not because I'm disciplined, but because I learned the hard way that the phone ruins the morning faster than anything else.

Sit. Thirty to forty minutes, sometimes more if nothing is pressing. No special room. No candles. No ambient sounds.

Pause. When I finish, I don't get up immediately. There's a moment there—between practice and day—that I've learned to protect. It's where the insights live.

Write. Sometimes it's about what surfaced during meditation. Sometimes it's whatever problem I went to bed unsolved. Sometimes it's nonsense that becomes useful three weeks later.

Stop. This is the part I resisted for years. No second session. No "bonus" practice in the afternoon. No compulsive accumulation of spiritual credit. I do the minimum that works, I do it every day, and I let that be enough.

The two-day rule applies here: I never miss two days in a row.³ One day off is life happening. Two days is a pattern forming. Three days is the practice dissolving.

The Accidental Benefits

Nobody told me, when I started, that the real changes wouldn't be spiritual at all. They'd be practical.

I'm less reactive. Not unreactive—I still get annoyed, still snap occasionally, still have moments where my response embarrasses my self-image. But there's a sliver of space between trigger and reaction now. Just enough to sometimes choose differently.

I procrastinate less. Something about sitting with discomfort for thirty minutes makes other discomfort easier to face. Writing the difficult email feels like less of an ordeal after you've already spent half an hour not running away from yourself.

None of this is guaranteed. None of it is universal. Not enlightenment. Not transcendence. Just a slightly more functional operating system.

Is that less romantic than what the books promised? Sure. Is it more useful? In my experience, yes.

What This Isn't

I'm not saying meditation is the only path. Some people connect through movement, through nature, through art, through service. If you've genuinely tried it and it genuinely doesn't work for you, find another door.⁴

I'm not saying thirty minutes is the universal minimum. Maybe yours is fifteen. Maybe it's an hour. The point is to find your actual threshold and protect that amount every day.

I'm not saying I've figured anything out. I'm fifty, I've been doing this a long time, and if someone asked me what enlightenment is, I'd shrug. What I know is what works for me, right now. Tomorrow that might change.

What I'm saying is simpler: after a long time treating practice as something to maximize, I finally learned it's something to integrate. Not special. Not separate. Just part of the day, like eating, like moving, like sleep.

The Non-Negotiable

I used to meditate for two hours because I thought I needed to become someone else. I was chasing some imagined version of myself—calmer, wiser, more evolved. Someone who had transcended the ordinary irritations of being human.

That person doesn't exist. And if he did, he'd be insufferable.

Now I sit for thirty minutes and then I write. Not to become someone else. Just to function as myself—the version of me that can think clearly, respond rather than react, and notice what's actually going on beneath all the noise.

That's it. What remains when everything unnecessary falls away.

Meditation. Writing. Every day.

You don't skip sleep because you're busy. You sleep because you're busy.

Don't skip this either.

Notes & References

¹ Hölzel, B.K. et al. (2011). "Mindfulness practice leads to increases in regional brain gray matter density." Psychiatry Research: Neuroimaging, 191(1), 36-43. My takeaway from this study: structural changes showed up in regular practitioners regardless of session length—what mattered was that they kept showing up.

² The neuroscience here involves something called the Default Mode Network—basically the brain's "wandering" circuit that quiets during focused attention. Some studies suggest meditation can enhance creative thinking and working memory afterward. See: Brewer, J.A. et al. (2011), PNAS; Colzato, L.S. et al. (2012), Frontiers in Psychology; Jha, A.P. et al. (2010), Emotion.

³ The "two-day rule" is a habit-maintenance strategy: allowing occasional misses while preventing the slide into abandonment. See: Lally, P. et al. (2010). "How are habits formed." European Journal of Social Psychology, 40(6), 998-1009.

⁴ Meditation is one contemplative practice among many. Movement practices, nature immersion, creative arts, and structured reflection can produce similar benefits for some. The key is regular, intentional attention to inner experience—the form varies.