Do it! Okay, remember about brushing your teeth: Do you all brush your teeth? Maybe once a day, maybe twice. Why? You could live without your teeth. Did we do that earlier in the retreat? Right. It's so important to remember the value of your daily Meditation practice. You have to train, you have got to train, then you use it in your normal life. If you don't train, what happens? You will be able to use it to a certain degree, but slowly you forget things, things get lost, you won't use everything in your every day normal life. Progressively the practice will get lost and confused. The other side, Mara, wants you to push that way and this and that. That's why you have to train regularly.
We never put a time limit on what is a minimum amount of time or how much you should practice, but to train it regularly is more important than time. Whenever you can do formal meditation, do it regularly every day. If it's only ten minutes, fine, make it ten minutes. After you do that for one year, you may find that you can do it fifteen minutes or twenty minutes and so on. On days when you actually have more time, don't hold on to your limit, do it for a whole hour if you can.
Don't forget all the different tools. Don't get stuck on just the "hammer" and don't get stuck on only sitting meditation as your formal practice. So many westerners forget the walking, forget the standing, all they do is just sit. Every morning they wake up, they kind of get out of the bed, they go to the toilet and come back and sit and for many, they fall back asleep "Chhhhh" (snoring sound). Ten, fifteen minutes go by, they awake and they don't even know what has been going on.
And often in the evening, reverse order. As to walking, if you are too sleepy, walking is the best posture to use. It's the best. If you find every morning you are too sleepy when you wake up, walk, there is no reason not to do it. It's a valuable practice. For me personally, when I am in retreat, I like to walk first when I wake up.
Why do you think we give you so much time before the first sitting? So many people ask us in all these years, "Why 45 minutes? It's such a long time." We want you awake when you get in there. 45 minutes gives you time to walk around, wash your face, have a shower if you want. It gives your body time to do things, to kind of energize before you go in there for that sitting. We don't specifically say that you do walking meditation before the sitting, but we want to give you enough time to wake up before you sit down.
And with your formal practice, I said use all the different techniques. Some can be used more often than others. Compassion/Lovingkindness you could do a bit every day, no problem. Sympathetic Joy, no, you are not going to be able to do it every day because there are not so many people you can have Sympathetic Joy with compared with the entire world which you can have Compassion/Lovingkindness with. Reflecting on how fortunate you are, that's not something you are going to do for an hour every day, either. Hopefully, you do it a few times longer, but a little bit every day is good, at least one sentence: I am fortunate.
You have to adjust and adapt, and don't forget using all the tools.