I was reading today about Acem Meditiation which sounds very similar to NSR

http://www.acem-meditation.org/english/method.shtml

They recommend for beginners two 30 minute sessions or one 45 minute per day.

I don't want spend much time on comparison but how is the session time determined? Many times it takes me a fair amount of the 15 minutes to get past the tremendous amount of noise and resistance thinking that occurs and to a more quite state and/or perhaps blankness. It feels like extending a bit at the end would be good. I am a beginner and am just asking questions. So just tell me to forget it and stay with what I am doing if that is appropriate.

The rest period at the end is most times for me an extension of the quite state

The sessions are going well and I look forward to them everyday

John P,

Yes, Acem Meditation certainly sounds quite a bit like NSR Meditation. It probably sprang from the same source as NSR, namely TM, which reached Norway in the 1960's.

The only problem I see is their recommendation of long meditation times. 45 minutes would most likely trigger an uncomfortable release of stress due to the depth of transcending. This may be why the Acem Meditation website talks so much about "periods of resistance".

NSR Meditation emphasizes balance, based on the actual experience of the hundreds of thousands of TM meditators and over one thousand NSR meditators. We dive within for just 15 minutes, then live our daily life, repeating this cycle twice each day. This is the optimum strategy, which avoid the "periods of resistance" in most NSR practitioners.

NSR also differs from Acem Meditation in another important way: we acknowledge the contribution of Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, instead of dismissing him as a cult leader. We make use of what works from TM (the knowledge of teaching transcending) while discarding what makes little sense (the high prices, the esoteric and mystical excesses).

Now let me address your question about experiencing inner quiet only at the very end of a meditation session. Doesn't that mean that we should meditate for a longer time, so we can experience that silence? It would mean this if the goal of NSR were merely relaxation, the experience of inner silence. But this is actually not the goal of NSR at all. The goal of NSR is the dissolving of stress, which is sometimes very different from relaxation.

In NSR (unlike many other systems of meditation), we know that when a stress dissolves, some activity associated with the creation of that stress is experienced. This may be a thought, a mood, a feeling, a dream, a bodily movement, or an experience of any of the senses of perception. Thus, a meditation session may be filled with any of these kinds of activity (rather than silence), yet we are in fact releasing stress, and feel refreshed afterward. What is important is to dissolve the stresses, strengthening the nervous system so we can resist acquiring further stresses.

In summary, don't worry about how you feel when you practice NSR. All that matters is how your life improves afterward.

Thanks for bringing up these important points.

David Spector
NSR Meditation/USA

Wow a lot of thought has gone into this. Thanks again for your time and direction. I will just shut up and hit the ball for a while.