My goal is a 20-minute sit in the morning and a 20-minute sit in the evening. The morning sit happens more frequently than the evening sit these days! I do ce

My goal is a 20-minute sit in the morning and a 20-minute sit in the evening. The morning sit happens more frequently than the evening sit these days! I do centering prayer, which is a very simple and receptive practice that involves the use of a sacred word to bring the mind to a state of concensual awareness. ("When thoughts arise, return ever so gently to the sacred word..") The benefits have been many; some I was initially unaware of. I asked my wife once if she had seen any change, and she said I am not as angry a person as I once was. This was slightly off-putting initially, because I had had no idea that people viewed me as an angry person. There appears to be developing body of science on the various effects of meditation. One is that the amygdala (a gland in the brain that is involved with fear, "fight or flight" reflexes, etc.) is calmed down. The extent to which highly charged emotions and fears have shaped my thoughts, actions, and reactions has been substantially reduced. Instead of spending all day reacting tactically to short-term crises, I find it easier to calmly consider the big picture. An example of this is in how I approach writing code (I am a software developer). There is a crisis-driven frame of mind, when I anxiously bang out a chunk of code in a hurry. Alternatively, there is a calm, aware, "outside of time" frame of mind, when I reflect on the cleanest, simplest, most gentle and easy-to-understand way to go about a piece of work. I am free to redo a piece of work a couple of times if needed to get it so that it really feels right. Needless to say, returning to code written in the latter frame of mind is a much better experience than returning to code written in the former frame of mind! The former results in an accumulation of technical debt that begins to compound, and productivity, code correctness etc. eventually grind to a stand-still. The latter results in code that is a pleasure to return to, and generally moves the codebase incrementally in the direction of sanity, quality, and trustworthiness.