learn · 2026-09-20 · 4 min read
Why the course asks you to sit at half past four
The instruction is short. Choose a time for the morning sitting between half past four and seven, and a time for the evening sitting between six and nine; write both in the notebook the night before, and keep them for the length of the five-day course. Morning means morning: as soon as you wake, not later than seven. Evening means before nine, and then straight to bed. Eat your last meal three or four hours before you sit. Otherwise you won't be meditating; you'll be observing your stomach digesting food, which is a waste of an evening.
Nobody likes this instruction. It's the one people negotiate with first, and the one that changes the most when you keep it. So here's where it comes from.
You may write half past five, or six, and the course will accept it. But you'll notice a tremendous difference if you can sit at half past four. I say this not as a rule but as a report: I've sat at every hour there is, and the sittings before dawn aren't the same kind of thing as the sittings after breakfast.
Part of it is the body. Before dawn the stomach is empty, the house is silent, and nothing has happened yet that the mind can chew on. The first thing the day puts into you is the sitting, and everything else lands on top of it rather than underneath. Part of it is simpler than that: the hour is the purest of the day. At Pa-Auk the monks are in the hall by three, after a cup of water, and when I asked myself why a tradition free to choose any hour would choose that one, the answer was the one everyone who's been up at that time already knows: the air, the birds, the light arriving. The tradition didn't choose it out of severity. It chose it because it's the best time, and then kept it.
The evening rule has a different reason. Before nine, and then bed, because a sitting that ends with sleep isn't followed by anything that undoes it. A sitting at eleven, after the screen and the conversation, is spent mostly settling what the evening stirred up.
As for the stomach: neither full nor empty, about half. An hour or two after a light meal will do, three or four after a proper one, and the best of all is the early morning before anything at all, with a little hot water to wake the body without feeding it. For years I've taken ginger tea with lemon.
This isn't asceticism. It's that a full stomach takes the attention with it. Sit after dinner and the breath is fine for two minutes and then the whole of the awareness slides downward to where the work is being done, and stays there. And if you find yourself dozing in a sitting, or unable to get to the end of one, the cause is almost always the same: the body is tired: too much food, too little sleep, plain fatigue. The answer isn't to push through. Rest, fix the food and the sleep, and come back to the course when the body can sit. A semi-hard surface helps for the same reason, because it keeps you alert, and if one day you're genuinely worn out, a softer one is allowed.
The times are fixed because the body learns them. After a while (it takes weeks, not days) you'll notice that the body itself asks to go and sit at that hour. That's the habit formed, and from then on the sitting no longer depends on a decision. A decision made fresh every morning is the thing that breaks.
I remember, on my first ten-day course, each student being given a place of their own in the hall for all ten days. Every time I sat down there I was certain something had built up around that spot: an atmosphere, a force that helped me meditate.
At home you can give yourself the same thing. A separate small room if you have one, closed to others, dark or dimly lit. If not, a corner of your own room, but always the same corner. Ask the household not to make noise at those two times. Turn off the devices, the wifi, everything. Disconnect the place from the outside world so that you're there alone with yourself.
Writing the times down the night before (tomorrow I will start my morning practice at…) is a formality, and the course is full of formalities: the signed promise, the notebook, the fixed hours. I keep them in because they're not decoration. By following these formalities you're already developing the two things the practice actually runs on, responsibility and determination, before you've observed a single breath. The breath is easy to observe. Being there at half past four to observe it is the practice.
When the five days are done, the last talk of the course lists what to keep. Five things, and three of them are about this: rise early; wait three or four hours after food; keep the back straight; don't move; and set a time limit and hold it.
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