Day of the Frontier, 40th of Spring, 525 M.E. (Electra): Timers. For those of us practicing sitting meditation at home, the selection of an appropriate timer is important.

The obvious solution is to put a clock somewhere in your field of view, but that usually just results in counting down the minutes. You're not practicing nonthinking, you're just passing time while warming cushions.

If you have a stopwatch or a timer function on a digital wristwatch, that should work fine - set it to the desired number of minutes and just sit, nonthinking, and wait for the alarm to ping. I've owned many digital watches over the years but don't currently have one at the moment, so that option doesn't work for me just now.    

However, nearly everyone has a timer/clock function on their phone and it's easy to set the number of desired minutes, set it down without watching the seconds and minutes pass, and practice nonthinking until the alarm goes off. That works fine if you're sitting for only one session, but if you go for longer periods and want to sit for multiple sessions with brief walking breaks at timed intervals in between, you have to constantly set and reset the timer. The problem is that when playing around with the phone, it's tempting to check for any new email that may have arrived, or to peruse any phone calls you might have missed, or peek at Facebook or Reddit or whatever social media you prefer. These activities tend to generate cascades of thoughts and make it difficult to get back to the state of nonthinking. You're basically engaging with your phone, interrupted by some longish periods of inattention to your distractions.

Finally, you can select musical tracks of the length for which you want to sit. But sitting listening to music, although not without merit, isn't meditation. I can sit and derive great satisfaction listening to 30-minute tracks by Miles or Coltrane, or Godspeed or Terry Riley for that matter, but that's something separate and apart from zazen. But I have found a way to use music as my meditation timer.

Here's what I do: the good folks at Other People have put out an album called Caves, a "compendium of silences" made up of eight timers for everyday use. Artists were asked to make "caves" for a length of silence of their choosing. Each track starts with a short bit of music that soon fades to 5 minutes, 10 minutes, as much as 25 minutes of silence, and then returns for a short coda. The silent caves are intended to be used as timers for cooking, meditation, running, walking, sleeping or anything you want.  

I have little interest in sitting for only five or ten minutes, though, and only one track, by the new age/ambient musician Laraaji, is 25 minutes in length. I've been using the Laraaji track since last August, though, to time my alternate day sitting, setting my computer to play his track (Twenty Five Minute Cave) three consecutive times. The opening part gives me sufficient time to light a stick of incense and settle in for the first period of meditation, and on the next two plays it gives me enough time to get up, stretch my legs, and walk once around the room before settling back in for the next "cave" period.

However, as useful and wonderful as the Laraaji track is, listening to the same piece of music over and over three times every other day for nine months gets a little old. So recently, I used some audio editing software and extended the silences on all the "caves" to 25 minutes. Some are more conducive to meditation than others, but in addition to Laraaji, two others work great - one by Will Epstein (Fifteen Minute Cave) and another by Ana Quiroga (Ten Minute Cave) - when expanded to 25 minutes.

If that advise doesn't work for you for some reason, or you simply insist on sitting to music while meditating, there are some longer ambient tracks that aren't as bad as other music for meditation. Obviously, much of Brain Eno's ambient records tend not to distract too much when meditating. Chamber Lightness from 2018's Music for Installations is exactly 25 minutes long and serves as a fairly good meditation timer, and if you're feeling adventurous you can go for 39:45 with the next track, I Dormienti. You might also consider his Neroli (Thinking Music Part IV), Thursday Afternoon, or Reflection, each of which clocks in at about an hour. 

My track of choice is World Rhythm by Annea Lockwood, a 46-minute composition consisting entirely of nature sounds artfully spliced together by the composer. Bird sounds give way to waterfalls to duck calls to gentle thunder without calling undo attention to themselves. It's like being teleported in meditation from a forest to a beach to a swamp and beyond. Also recommended are Lear or any other of Pauline Oliveros' Deep Listening recordings, or some (but not all) of Elaine Radrigue's Occam Ocean and Occam River recordings. Generally, any music that doesn't call too much attention to itself and doesn't include lyrics are candidates, and it's up to each listener to decide what works or not for them.