One of my favorite places to meditate is on public transport, or in the passenger seat of a car.
Things come and go on their own. Sights, sounds, vibrations...
This is a great intermediary step for scaling meditation into more difficult areas (human interaction, for example).
Conversation
A huge impairmens to meditating in life the way you do on the cushion or in a group, is the radical change from relative calm to total chaos.
You're trying to port the entirety of your skills, attitudes, everything to a radically different environment. We're pretty bad at this.
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So having structured, semi-random uncertainty - the many strange sounds vehicles make, the ratcheting of the tracks, the turns in the road
- helps you condition yourself for the more expansive, constant uncertainty of situations in which you're more active.
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The twists and turns of conversations, the turbulence of work, the soothing (or numbing) rhythms of routine...
... all these can be prepared for, even if you still have to make the step of opening and maintaining your practice there, before you can fully benefit from it.
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If I spend an hour on public transport, and it isn't particularly hellish, I tend to find myself thinking very little, noting very much.
I sort of glide through life effortlessly.
I've also had this effect after multiple hours of sitting, or rigorous daily practice.
Replying to
Meditation matches resistance training in any number of ways. Here's one:
It will often totally exhaust a novice to try to meditate while talking to someone, but eventually you almost need to do this to progress.
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You can sit and do the simpler exercises, and do just fine, but while this slowly grinds away certain impurities, it is also taxing on one's routine.
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Oftentimes the better response to "huh, this is easy," is to up the intensity or difficulty of practice, not the duration or frequency.
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Simple example: I can pretty much turn off conscious thought at will, for a limited time. This has a number of positive effects.
Can I do it when I'm really fucking stressed, or struggling with a lot of things elsewhere in life? No, mostly not.
Could I learn to? Probably.
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The entirety of my current practice is bent towards doing things I can do with ease in pleasant circumstances, when circumstances are bad.
Anyway, going to go put some stuff into practice now. Have a good 'un.
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