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"If you can't meditate in 5 minutes you should meditate for 3 hours" is good advice just like being forced to talk to a therapist for 3 hours up front is necessary to get occasional 5 minute check-ins to be effective.

While meditation is great as personal therapy it often has a hard limitation. Meditation is sought out often as alternative therapy due to a deep sense of shame for needing therapy. That shame prevents meditation from finishing the therapy.

You have to be able to get your mind strong enough to face its shame and admit its weaknesses. Meditation and therapy have to both feel equally appealing.

If trying to get "better" at self-therapy is driven by a strong desire to avoid therapy with another human being, that drive will never actually come up with the right solution. An executive will never present "the best solution for this company is to fire me."

Meditation can easily be used as an escape from facing the fear of admitting fear because you can use it to face other less important fears over and over again.

It's like having the ability to restart a game over and over again but you always restart at level 4 because that level is too hard but levels 1-3 are still fun to replay.

The ability to realize and thus transform any moment into a game is the ability to escape suffering at a whim. But post transformation you still have to actually get better at the game.

Otherwise your strong meditative abilities are equivalent to having pocket non-addictive no-negative-effect heroin.

You have to get so good at the game or games in general that you have access to the 'meta' game. You can turn every moment into a drama rather than a game. You evolve from reading a story to being in a story.

The pocket heroin state is perfectly virtuous if you are the only person in the universe. But as long as there is a cast of characters, true virtue lies in the power of story and drama rather than the power of games.

As long as another human exists what "this" is, is the Story of Humanity, not the Story of Me.