Meditating for a long duration of time?!

Meditating for a long duration of time?

I have been doing meditation for a while. Usually my meditation session last for half hour to an hour, but I am considering extending that time. I have tried to meditate for more than an hour but I usually get bored and stop. Does anyone have any suggesting on how to meditate for a long time of period?

I would suggest increasing the number of times you meditate throughout the day. Instead of one four-hour session, do sixteen fifteen-minute sessions. The reason for this is two-fold. One, you will increase the amount of (total, actual) time you spend in meditation and two, you will be in and out of meditation absorption, which will necessarily increase your concentration on a particular subject or object of observation. This will necessarily increase your calm abiding and with wide study, your special insight. This will satisfy the attempt to unify method and wisdom in your practice. But I hasten to suggest that you do not shoot straight for high attainments (like pliancy) without understanding impermanence, karma and its effects and at least the Hinayana interpretation of the Four Noble Truths. With a firm knowledge base in these topics, you could maybe generate the definite wish to get out of cyclic existence altogether and with the practice of the three higher trainings of etchics, concentration and wisdom attain liberation, but this will not be complete and unsurpassable. For this, you need to generate the wish to be of benefit to all sentient beings and you can approximate this right from the start - like, why am I meditating at all? Well, I am meditating so I can learn to control myself and become a better person through recognizing that I will die and I don't know when I will die, so I don't want to treat this precious human life frivolously and so I will devote as much time as possible to generating love and compassion for my fellow beings who are limited because of the chains of delusion and ignorance. One, the ignorance that cherishes myself above all others and two, the grasping at a true self, independent and enduring. These two create the suffering, so in deciding to conquer them, you can become a better person, but only a Buddha can help all beings and help establish them in enlightenment, so you have to resolve to become a Buddha. You could resolve to achieve the level of Foe Destroyer, but sooner or later, a Buddha will exhort you to become a Buddha and you will have to traverse the Mahayana pathways. Just like refuge is the door to Buddhism, bodhicitta is the door to the Mahayana. A Great Vehicle practitioner would never slander the Hinayana teachings as they are absolutely foundational to any subsequent realizations, such as those you seek in your approach to meditation. At their basis is ethical behavior. You have to clean up your act. This will allow the development of single-pointed concentration taking as its object of observation selfless-ness (of the self and phenomena.) These two together become the foundation for wisdom, more specifically, the wisdom realizing emptiness which is the supreme antidote for the grasping that creates the suffering in the first place. Anyone can see that achieving liberation for themselves alone is quite selfish, after all, so many beings have been kind in three ways to us in so many lives; even in this life alone, many people work to see that we survive. Our desire to repay this kindness helps us generate compassion, which then leads to the wish to help liberate these various beings, which hopefully, after repeatedly thinking about this over and over, will help us develop the wish to become a Buddha which will take three countless eons. With this extensive motivation, realizations can't help but come sooner. For a much more complete analysis of the Stages of the Path to Enlightenment, I recommend anyone who might be reading this to pick up the three book series by the great master and scholar, the guru, refuge and protector Lama Tsong Khapa.