Marion Gilbert said that one of her meditation teachers taught her that “if you can stay present with one thing in an undivided way for two minutes, you are bursting out of the conditioned realm where you’re captured inside of it- you actually burst out of it.”

Stay present with one thing in an undivided way. That’s Right Concentration. And it only takes two minutes to break free from our normal pattern, where we get distracted every few seconds.

We can also call the conditioned realm our habitual pattern. In this case, we don’t tend to stay in the moment, because we’re always moving to the next one. And in our pre-COVID everyday lives, we didn’t find much quiet, either. (We may still not…) So we find ourselves stuck inside of that normal noise. But here’s the good news: it only takes a couple of minutes of focus to burst out of it.

I know that meditation and concentration may feel like a gargantuan task right now. So many of us have noticed that we can’t concentrate on a task, or what we’re reading, because our brain feels like it’s in a kind of haze. It’s completely ok just to accept that. Maybe our brain feels fuzzy because it needs a break. But sometimes, that “fuzz” may just be another form of noise, of mind chatter, and two minutes of sustained focus can clear it out. It might be worth a try. And even if it doesn’t work, it only took two minutes.

Your wisdom resides under that brain haze. Trust it will be there when you need it. And trust that it takes a lot less effort than you imagine to begin to access it.

Can you find two minutes to practice Right Concentration this week?

This post belongs to my series on practicing the Eightfold Path. Find all my posts on Right Concentration here.