How often should I switch my focus on senses or body parts during mindfulness meditation? I usually do this fast.

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If it’s just body / sensory stuff, it’s really really hard to focus on one part of your body for longer than a few seconds. Other senses and body parts just grab your attention. Just linger on one general area, like say, the right leg, feeling each part, the knee, toes, ankle, and so on, for like 15–30 seconds then move on to another. You can spend like an extra second or two on a given part if you want to switch it up, always good to keep things fresh.

More generally though to speak to the general practice of meditation, Buddhists generally call what you’re focusing on during meditation the object, and the type of object determines what kind of meditation you’re doing. Skilled meditators can keep track of much more stuff without breaking focus.

Once you start working on non-seated practice, like walking meditation or remembering practice, the lines blur even more, as low-grade meditative states become accessible pretty much all the time, and as the years go by, even medium grade states can become normal.

This makes advancing your skills somewhat of a creative process. If you have been doing this for less than six months, I’d say focus on what’s called “access concentration,” which means keeping one thing at the forefront of mind for a minimum of ten minutes.

When I was learning to meditate, I had a few visualization meditations taught to me that I would do daily, one was eating an apple, and another was a breathing, candle flame meditation. The beginner needs to spend time nailing down their mind so it can develop the ability to focus.

For the intermediate meditator, so long as you’re not jumping topics, like, say going from body-focused meditation to insight meditation, at least, not willfully, like you’re read about it beforehand and you set an intention to specifically do it that way, I think it’s fine.

One thing that can greatly help with wandering is noting practice. Every last sensation you get, note it in your mind. Starting out, you can’t actually note as fast as you experience, and really, you never really will, but eventually, your mind will slow down as you actually process everything you experience and not just let it pass you by. So if you feel a certain sensation, you announce to your inner mind that you just felt that. You can briefly maybe consider why you felt that, and then note that you’re going meta in your thoughts. Noting flattens out experience.

All in all, you need to switch up how you’re meditating, but it’s much better to do this deliberately and not in the middle of a session, unless you’ve been doing it so long you don’t need to be asking these questions anymore.