And I still don’t get it.
Honestly It still looks like a big scam to me.
Some “teachers” say that you just focus your attention on breath or whatever you choose as a focus point.
But then isn’t our whole life a sequence of meditations? Because we always focus on something (with sleep breaks).
And then following Occam’s razor - why need separate concept for that?
Other gurus teach that meditation is “doing nothing”. Okay, but then again there’s nothing special about it, we all do it from time to time.
More than that, it means you can’t really practice such meditation, by its definition.
Another way to look at it - just sit peacefully and observe your thoughts.
Then again, aren’t we doing it anyway on a regular basis without introducing a word for it?
Can you please share your own personal specific definition — what exactly is a meditation for you?
Please be as detailed as possible and avoid abstract discussions and arguments (I’ve had enough of it already :), just your own experience.
Thank you.
Washing dishes can be a meditation. Talking a walk. Focusing on the breath. Repeating a mantra. Lifting weights. It doesn't matter what the technique is, the important part is that you are aware of what happening now and being present in that moment, from moment to moment.
For many people, focusing on the breath is an easy way to notice when the mind wanders, so they can bring it back to the now. It's an effective technique that helps your practice meditation through trial and error (bring the mind back when it wanders and repeat), but it's not a definition of meditation. It's a practice, just like you practice for a sport, with the goal of applying it to real life.
A good example of a meditation is what professional athletes do. Almost every athlete has some kind of "routine" that allows them to clear the mind before performing their act, be it lifting a heavy weight or hitting a ball. That's a type of meditation.
Another example of the result of practicing meditation is that it helps you to create a gap between trigger and response allowing you to make a decision. For example, when someone says something that hurts you, you may be tempted to respond back with something angry and hurtful. Often this happens by default or impulse due to strong emotions. It's not a conscious rational decision made by you. Practicing meditation can allow you to be fully present in that moment. Because you've practiced, you realize what you are feeling and thinking, what your choices are, and catch yourself before you respond back with something angry. You're in a mental state where you can make a rational decision about how to respond because you are aware of your own feelings and thoughts.
For example, while we eat, we get all kinds of thoughts, and we can easily get lost in them. Planning about the future, thinking about the past. We can get lost in our mind and our thoughts carry us around.
This is our default mode.
With meditation, we can learn to focus on what we are doing much more precisely than "typical" focus that we think is focusing, but the typical one we consider mainly "what we think our body is actively doing". We do not typically consider what's going on in the mind.
With meditation, we can learn to let go of the thoughts in our mind, so that we do not get dragged around this way or that way easily.
Training the mind is a skill that one learns over months and years.
When I meditate, I deliberately let the thoughts pass, and every session of meditation trains me to automatically be able to do it during my daily activities.
So when I am eating, I am only eating, with my body, but also my mind. When I am relaxing, I am truly relaxing. When I am thinking about something, I am truly thinking about only that thing.
You have to separate the pragmatic aspects of mindfulness meditation, which are more commonly stressed in the West, and the "less pragmatic" aspects (call that "spiritual" or "transformational" if you like) which are part of the actual practices/systems from which it originates. I'm focusing on the first as that seems to be your interest.
The core pragmatic purpose of mindfulness meditation is to notice when your mind has become distracted. Returning your attention to your breath (or whatever) after your thoughts have drifted is the practice. That's it, but if you think "that's all?" then you haven't practiced this and have no idea juuuuuuuuuuust how distracted you are.
As with "doing nothing", if you think that's easy or something "we do all the time", then you haven't really experienced or understood it. You're dealing with an intellectual preconception rather than the lived experience of recognizing your turbulence.
It can go beyond that, into disidentification from thoughts and sensations, experiencing "awareness", and so forth, but that isn't the pragmatic aspect, which comes first.
> But then isn’t our whole life a sequence of meditations? Because we always focus on something (with sleep breaks).
> Other gurus teach that meditation is “doing nothing”. Okay, but then again there’s nothing special about it, we all do it from time to time.
> Another way to look at it - just sit peacefully and observe your thoughts.
from my understanding, don't observe in your head, you observe the lowest point on your body when you are sitting. And you have to know your breath when it is in and out.
If you think nothing, you can sense your body.
Ex: when you work or play games or watch movies, and a moquisto bite you, you almost don't know. But while you observe, you can sense tiny things about your body, even if a mosquito touches your skin.
And It is hard to mediation when you don't know basically about Buddhism - This is my guess from what did you write.
Sure, it's true that we always "focus" on something, but, like there is a difference in degree between a trained weightlifter and a non-weightlifter, there is a difference in the ability to focus that comes from intentional practice.
Of course there are people who are able to practice mindfulness in their lives without meditation, just like there are people who have strength without going to the gym - they just got a similar result from a different path. It certainly doesn't mean you can't practice mindfulness, any more than the existence of a strong (e.g.) construction worker means you can't practice weightlifting.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_tea_ceremony
The items you raised as commonplace things we all do anyway is understood, but it seems you assume that most people are present for their own life, when actually people are often a million miles away thinking about something else.
Did the dinner you had last night taste good or did you not stop to enjoy the taste? Do you remember what you had for dinner last night? When you went on your last vacation were you really there enjoying it or were you enjoying the concept of it and how you could record it and share it with others on social media? There is even a psychological condition called disassociation that many people suffer from but don't know what it's called. Disassociated people see their life as a passive observer, like watching themselves act in a play.
Mindfulness is an Eastern solution attempt to counter these tendencies. In fact, mindfulness may be the only solution for disassociation because there isn't a pill you can take for that. Disassociation comes about because of trauma and a person's need to disengage from the pain. The "thousand yard stare" of war vets is an example. Mindfulness training is used as therapy by the VA but they don't call it that.
https://www.apa.org/ptsd-guideline/treatments/prolonged-expo...
I'm not saying there aren't "mindfulness" scam teachers, but that's true of just about any topic, at least in America
That is great you can do that naturally. Personally, I struggle with doing nothing. Even when I am resting or waiting for something, I am on my phone or thinking about problems in my life.
Meditation helps me release those stresses and gives me permission to "do nothing".
I think this is the heart of the matter. Meditation is not something you need to "do" in addition to the living of your life. It's just an awareness of what your mind is actually like in the present moment, as your life unfolds.
The "practice" of meditation is just a way of conditioning your environment in a way that makes the processes of your mind more obvious.
Many people spend most of their waking moments identified with and fascinated by an ongoing internal narrative that aggressively converts sense experience into language. The stream of lived experience is instinctively and unconsciously divided into separate things and events, and usually those things are immediately classified as either pleasant (to be grasped at) or unpleasant (to be rejected).
There's nothing inherently wrong with this process, but because it tends to happen "under the surface" of conscious attention, we can easily forget that we're doing it.
The brief cessation of this process is what I believe people mean by "doing nothing" - you're not actively "doing" nothing, which as you note is logically impossible. But you are ceasing to do something that has been happening so constantly for so long that it has become part of "the background" and faded away from conscious awareness. The thing that you are ceasing to do is the constant identification of "yourself" as the stream of thoughts and classifications that occupy your mind.
If you are able to experience that without the practice of meditation, or if you have no interest in experiencing that state of mind, then of course there's no need to meditate. Or you could easily say that whatever you happen to be doing while this state of awareness is happening _is_ the practice of meditation - there's nothing special about sitting with crossed legs or chanting or whatever.
What keeps this going is the phenominon of thinking without realising you are thinking. You are simply being captured by thoughts that on the face of it (from the first person perspective) are coming out of nowhere. The analogy used is a dream. When you go to sleep you dream and usually you are not puzzled by the fact that a moment ago you were in your bed and the next you are in this dream situation. You completely lose the perspective that you are in a dream. Thoughts have this same quality. At the core of this issue is the sense of self.
Meditation is a means of becoming aware of this process (hence the practice of becoming aware of your thoughts). To do this successfully you need to develop a certain level of concentration (which is why there are practices that involve focus on the breath/some other meditation object singularly).
Sometimes people get caught up on the whole idea of meditation and try too hard (hence the gurus saying 'do nothing'). They revert back to the idea of a self and they try to improve themselves in some way. Really in meditation we are trying to become aware of something, a continual process playing out in your minds, a perpetual stream of thoughts that we are completely unaware of that is distorting our perceptions, creating an identity (in the first person sense) from which then arises all the emotional and psychological problems we tend to encounter in our daily lives that are as relevant today as when the Buddha was knocking around.
But the actual, original purpose of any inward looking practice -- meditation, inquiry, contemplation -- is to discover the nature of your consciousness, to answer the question, "who or what am I?" by starting with the only part of our experience that is not changeful -- our awareness that we exist.
When you begin to try to honestly answer this question -- "when I say 'I', what am I referring to? this body? this mind? how can I know what I am, beyond a theory or thought? etc" -- it leads to a radical and yet in retrospect totally natural process of self-investigation -- turning your self-awareness upon itself -- whose end product is called self-realization, spiritual awakening or enlightenment.
Think of your focus like a spotlight. Most people have very little control over their spotlight and it gets aimed at whatever is the latest thing to enter their awareness: a thought, a sound, another thought, a visual, etc. It's bouncing all around, all the time. A proficient meditator can more effectively control where the spotlight points. Over time, as the mind slowly learns to do this better, the stuff outside the spotlight fades and become less intrusive. This leads to increasing states of calm and peacefulness which extend even after the meditation session ends.
Eastern spirituality sees "nothing" or nothingness as a spiritual place to relax in and be.
Western religions see "nothing" as something that can't exist. That nothing is impossible for Christ.
One function of prayer and meditation is to organize your thoughts and let go of thoughts and aims that are not helpful, sometimes called Sin. You can let them go into nothingness (eastern), into the altar of fire (catholicism) or let them flow away (anglican/methodist). You can also use prayer to aim and think about things that are good for you and you do want.
If you want real detail, John Vervaeke's Awakening from the Meaning Crisis series [0] does the history of spirituality as a psycho-technology, cog-sci breakdown.
It is very good and leads into discussions with him and Curt Jaimungal [1] on the Theories of Everything channel, which has a slightly more Eastern and hyper-intellectual physics blend to it.
[0]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=54l8_ewcOlY&list=PLND1JCRq8V...
[1]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3p8o3-7mvQc
The practice of prayer and meditation has been degraded by practicing psychologists and pop culture. Stay away from that stuff, it eats into the prayer life and meditation from the inside or bottom-up.
To give you my own answer to your question: First, you say, "we always focus on something". In truth we rarely achieve concentrated focus that tunes out everything else. We rarely "just sit peacefully and observe .. thoughts", though we might think we do, we are constantly evaluating and making judgements about our thoughts. So meditation practice can help refine the skills of focusing and observing. Second, everything you say about not needing a separate concept or word is true in an intellectual sense, but to actually know and experience mindfulness is different from merely having a rational understanding of the ideas.
The purpose of mindfulness meditation is to develop the habit of being present to what we are experiencing now. Like all habits, it is strengthened through practice. Of course, sometimes we must think about the future or the past, but this should be a conscious choice rather than an unconscious habit.
With time, our ability to be mindful gets stronger so that we can practice meditation without an object. In this sort of meditation we remain aware on whatever arises in our minds without trying to alter in by holding on or pushing away. The advantage is meditation without an object is less artificial and allows us to understand the mind as it naturally is instead of some contrived state. This meditation is sometimes called "doing nothing." This is both true and false, because normally we are always doing something with our minds. Simply observing is unusual. You might object that we are always aware of our minds. Yes, but there are degrees of awareness. Just as we always have some attention on the present, we are also always somewhat aware of our minds, but the degree of awareness can be less or more.
LOL. From your wording and questioning, my guess is that you have been reading too much Meditation from a Western cultural perspective. And I would not be surprised if most of them are indeed, Scams.
My suggestion would be to travel to Japan and find the answer for yourself.
Think of yourself like a wireless radio and think of the meditation like putting yourself into monitor mode.
It's definitely not a scam and it has been practiced a lot in the Eastern culture for long periods of time with observable true benefits.
However, like everything that gets popular in the west, there are many charlatans out there who are scammers.
There is a way out of this suffering.
The way out is by investigating and comprehending your experience.
That’s the gist of it.
Edit: you asked for personal experience:
Sitting on a cushion: calming and gladdening the mind by working skilfully with intentions, attention, and awareness to create the conditions for insight to arise
In daily life, off the cushion: cultivating awareness to notice what happens inside it more (to notice patterns about mental activities that lead to suffering and those that lead to happiness :))
"...practicing meditation is a process of exploring the heart and mind, of fully experiencing the richness of awareness itself. This implies that meditation is not meant to eliminate the things we don’t like about ourselves, or even to become “better” people. Meditation helps us to see that we are already whole and complete. It is a practical tool that enables us to get in touch with our true nature.
The path of meditation unfolds in two stages: We begin by recognizing that the nature of awareness is fundamentally good and pure, and that it is the source of true and lasting happiness. Once we have directly experienced the basic goodness of awareness, the path of meditation then consists of nurturing this recognition and allowing the qualities of awareness to manifest fully."
You seem to have read a lot but unfortunately they have left you confused. This is normal when studying any complex subject and hence the need for somebody to show you the correct path or teasing it yourself from your own studies. In today's world both are difficult because of all the scammers/charlatans/woo-woo peddlers and the sheer volume of noise available on this subject. Nevertheless there are some correct starting points which will show you The Path to Understanding.
The following three texts are recommended;
1) The Samkhya Karika : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samkhyakarika - This sets up a Worldview (i.e. a Model) with the main concepts of Purusha (The Experiencer) and Prakriti (The Experienced).
2) The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yoga_Sutras_of_Patanjali - Pay particular attention to the concepts Pratyahara, Dharana, Dhyana and Samadhi.
3) The Vijnana Bhairava Tantra : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vij%C3%B1%C4%81na_Bhairava_Tan... - This lists 112 different activities which leads to the state of "Meditative Dissolution". See also my other comment in this thread.
There is no magic here but "Meditation" is merely a practice which leads to a hard-to-define-without-experiencing Mental State.
The above are the "Traditional Viewpoints" from Hinduism/Buddhism. You should also look at the various Scientific Research published on this subject (Google gives me plenty).
When I first learned about pizza I didn’t have much use for it. I heard from others their interest in pizza. This was my growing awareness, but not interest or focus on pizza.
As with many things, as I have grown older I hear more about pizza and I encounter different practitioners and media discussion of pizza.
I only became interested in pizza as a practice when I heard an interview between zen master Thich Nhat Hanh and radio host Krista Tippett.
It doesn’t take more than a few very clever ideas for me to take notice, and these people are clever and insightful thinkers. It was an interesting discussion.
I learned that pizza was part of the practice, and that pizza can be practiced by lay people.
It was then that the reference pizza lost its singular representation and became, for me, something more. It became something for which the term pizza was useful and convenient, but not necessary.
I don’t question pizza in terms of the single referent pizza. My interest has transcended the singular reference. My thoughts on pizza are many, multi-facetted and self-sustaining (in my memory and understanding).
For me this missive is very honest account of how, leading to what, pizza is to me. Not what I do with pizza, or how much pizza I … consume (haha!). Maybe I’m not _persuasive_ enough to bring you to the point of liking pizza as much as I do.
Maybe you’re interested in other things and pizza is just the ‘word’ or object you have focused on?
You'll find an organization that has been teaching meditation for decades or longer with good results, and commit to their introductory training. Only such a group has the integrity and intelligence to help you untie your specific knots at specific moments in your journey.
If you need justification or a mental model, think of it this way: the mind presents itself as a series of often-mutually reinforcing emotions and concepts, based in limbic and associational networks of the brain. Meditation is training that decouples associations and valuations, to avoid vicious feedback cycles driving most thinking and feeling. It is hard, hard, work to reprogram yourself, but it's also natural: if you just don't feed the feedback or practice the reaction, then the reinforcement decays, and you discover you can experience sensations instead of emotional reactions and assessments. That can seem relatively (though briefly) liberating. You will find yourself more capable of changing your mind, and more interested in having a true sense of the world than in promoting your personal perspective/agenda/emotional-crisis.
Meditation will not make you more likable or marketable or powerful. If you want something out of it, you will get nowhere. It may destabilize your personality and your relationships, to the extent they depend on mutual "interests" that decay with meditation.
If you want to be alive, do it. Practice until you can at least go to a 10-day retreat. Daily/hourly meditation may be calming, but you won't experience the depths of your mind until it's all you do, every day, for more days than you can count.
To live is more important than success, work, education, or marriage (but perhaps not kids).
""Breathing in long, he discerns, 'I am breathing in long'; or breathing out long, he discerns, 'I am breathing out long.' Or breathing in short, he discerns, 'I am breathing in short'; or breathing out short, he discerns, 'I am breathing out short.' "
https://accesstoinsight.org/tipitaka/mn/mn.010.than.html
Do you do that already with every breath? Great!
I think you are saying you are naturally aware of everything your body does and thinks as it is happening. You use your "third eye", the eye in your brain that looks at yourself as you do what you do, noting everything that is happening. Your mind doesn't attach to what it sees or thinks, but remains ready at all times to notice the next thought, the next breath, the next footstep in the present as it is happening.
Am I understanding what you're saying correctly?
Somewhat flawed transcript here: https://alanwatts.org/2-5-4-meditation/
"the way to train your mind after developing the mind of enlightenment, by training the six perfections:
1. training in the perfection of generosity 2. training in the perfection of ethics 3. training in the perfection of patience 4. training in the perfection of joyful effort 5. training in the perfection of concentration 6. training in the perfection of wisdom"
Number 5 is meditation, or shamatha. Volume 4 of lamrim explains at length what meditation is and how it's achieved. It also repeatedly reminds the reader that this gigantic book is just a brief summary of the more foundational sources, such as sravakabhumi (the ten grades of sravakas). Problem is, neither book, that volume 4 in particular, has been translated to western languages. Still, it's a good starting point to do your own research.
https://fc.univ-paris8.fr/-etude-des-transes-et-des-etats-de...
"Trance" and meditation are for practicals reason the main focus and the main goal is to allow to use 'meditation induced trance' (as far as I know it's the same thing than mindfulness meditation) to allow people to handle things like stuttering for exemple. They do teach students to put themselves in trance.
For what I heard, it's still a very fresh field but 'there are studies about it'.
If you didn't get it after years of trying why not just stop? Maybe it is useful to some people, but you are not one of them.
Meditation is ultimately a focusing and calming technique; it's an intentional way that you can find a way to calm down and relax and destress. If you've ever sat outside and just stared off into nothing, feeling your mind slowly calming down and the thoughts that have been bugging you all day/week really not being that strong anymore, you've felt the result of meditation. Maybe you step out at the end of a long day to smoke, or you sat in a sauna or shower and no longer felt so bothered or focused on your troubles, you got the same result. Or maybe you just listened to music and felt your muscles relax and lose all tension.
There are many ways to get to this state and meditation is just a means to get thereike any other. Guided meditation can be pretty powerful too, but it's a different item for a different purpose. I've had guided meditative sessions that felt so surreal and powerful it was like a small acid trip, no exaggeration.
Mindful meditation is something I do a lot just for short bursts to calm down and focus a bit on my feelings since I deal with a lot of nonsense. Just thinking on it isn't great because I get too focused on trying to solve the issues instead of how I'm feeling and reacting. By focusing on this first and understanding what my feeling is trying to do for me and what is the outcome it wants I understand better why I'm angry or upset or feeling helpless. The feelings have a biological goal (fear of things that might hurt me, anger towards things that o don't like and cause me stress, etc) and focusing first on this helps the feelings be more comfortable. Once I get to this state, it's a lot easier for these feelings to lower and I'm able to act a lot better.
It's not magic and it's not hoodoo, it's just what you likely do already in many ways but with fewer external stimuli and a focus on reviewing your own thoughts and feelings. I'm not magically happy at the end of it, instead I'm feeling more in control.
Mindfulness meditation is a technique where you learn to keep the default mode network inactive while not engaged with any external activity. The resulting subjective state feels quiet (as opposed to constantly occupied with stray thoughts) and somewhat like Csikszentmihalyi's flow.
I started out with meditation after reading how it was integral in hindu philosophy. I subscribed to the 'think nothing' path of meditation. The focus on your breath or on an 'Om' chant is just a pathway to get to that state of mindfulness. As background, I consider myself as someone who has a decent amount of control over my mind (It's probably just my ego). However when I tried to start thinking nothing, I found it incredibly hard to do. I try to suppress all the thoughts in my mind and actually think nothing, something keeps creeping in.
After a few weeks of practice I began to get there, actively suppressing my conscious thoughts for a few minutes at a time. That's when the senses hypersensitivity began to kick in. I began to hear every bird, every small sound and every smell in the vicinity. I meditate outside so sometimes I'd feel a small ant crawling near my arm, or a small insect sit on my neck. Since I had my eyes closed, visual stimuli were technically already blocked out, but I still sometimes saw phantom images or these fractal patterns from the light leaking through my eyelids. Suppressing these and stopping thinking about these were another level of effort that took weeks.
One other thing I noticed is how time sort of lost meaning. Sometimes I'd stop meditating to find that 25 minutes had passed, sometimes I'd find I barely did 7.
I'm by no means any expert at doing this for myself. Everytime I had a break and stopped meditating for a few days or weeks (when I was on vacation or such), it took weeks to get back to the state I was. If I meditate for like 25 minutes, it's like only 12-14 minutes I'm really in the deepest state. The rest of the time I'm trying to get back there since something has distracted me.
I honestly don't know what it does for me. I do feel next level refreshed after a longish session, even better than the best sleep ever. Honestly, the thing that keeps me going on this is my ego that I can't even control my own mind. I actually try to ignore all commercial forms of meditation training and try out stuff on my own. That way I don't really have the need to validate it as a 'scam' or as 'worthy'.
Just my personal 2 cents.
I think of mindfulness as developing as complete an awareness as possible of the present without any past biases or perceptions affecting you. This is done to respond to the present situation you are facing more effectively. Too often, we associate a past experience with current experience, and react to the current experience as if it should play out in the same manner as the past experience had played out. We do this because we lose all situational awareness because the bond we have to this past connection is too strong. Mindfulness is intended to understand the present situation, what your possible present responses are, and to evaluate them to determine what to do this time around. The technique is effective because the situation is oftentimes more significant than our past experience even if we didn't realize it.
> Other gurus teach that meditation is “doing nothing”. Okay, but then again there’s nothing special about it, we all do it from time to time.
This makes me wonder: have you ever felt overwhelmed by anxiety? Or experienced a panic attack? Or like you had so much stress that you couldn't eat, sleep or focus at all?
If so, you said that you tried meditation: did it help you at all?
Honest question, because from these statements sound to me like you perhaps don't see the value proposition of meditation.
The first goal is to use attention to notice why attention fails to stay focused. You realize you involuntarily experience thoughts arising and pulling you from what you are focusing on. Eventually, you become aware of the ceaseless, rootless, seemingly causeless stream of thoughts that you've been calling your "inner self" this whole time. At this point you are experiencing the "Movie theater effect" described in other replies.
So, stage one is "So what". Stage two is "Holy shit I'm always distracted". At stage two you start to feel relaxation as you detach from the feelings that those thoughts cause. Because those thoughts don't feel like really "yours" anymore.
You can stop here and read "waking up" a few times to get a better diagnosis of the problem with this pathway to enlightenment.
I'll try to summarize:
Stage 3 is ... Nothing, really. There is no "you" there is only these stream of thoughts, and the thoughts about those thoughts, and etc etc. You could have seen this without all this focus-on-breath business.
Or so I'm told. I'm at stage 2, and stage 3 makes sense to me in terms of physics, but it is difficult to push back the fog of self-delusion.
If you go back to the gym after a long break, you spend a lot of time conditioning your body just to get your muscle memory back in sync with the machines, or free weights, or whatever you like to work out with.
Meditation is analogous to that. Once you get past just figuring out how to sit, you spend more time figuring out how to breathe, and then you get to the part where you let your mind do what it does while you're breathing. But the breathing (and the standard advice to keep your attention on your breathing) is just the tip of a much deeper iceberg.
So over time you get to explore the part of the iceberg beneath the water. You begin to unwind the long chains of association that exist below the level of words and verbal formations. There are good books about the impediments you will run into and strategies for getting past them (it really is like exercise).
But to what purpose? Why do you exercise? Do you just want to look good? Or have more strength? Or just health for its own sake? Or do you enjoy the social camaraderie you find at the gym? Or maybe a workout just makes you feel good and requires no other justification. In the end you will need to find those answers for yourself.
You have a body, but you are not your body. Exercise is practical and it works.
You have a mind, but you are not your mind. Meditation is practical and it works.
I will try to touch on one aspect of my experience with formal meditation practice, which is as a way of reconditioning the mind. It has helped me become more aware of how I am in relation to what I experience, more open to experience generally, less reactive to emotional stimuli, less judgmental of my inner narrator and therefore more gentle with the way I talk to myself.
The formal process is as you describe, bringing your attention to a focal point (often the sensation of the breath wherever it is felt most strongly in the body), noticing when you are distracted, and simply bringing it back. The quality of mind you bring to this practice is important. For example, not judging yourself for becoming distracted, and not judging yourself for the content of your thoughts.
With regular practice, this kind of gentle nonjudging way of experiencing will spill into daily life, outside of formal practice. And that is where meditation becomes a way of being (or perhaps as you put it, our whole life is a series of meditations). But formal practice serves as the foundation, conditioning our minds which are typically very judgmental and reactive to be less judgmental and therefore to be more open and see more clearly.
The difference of ours compared to a lot of other types of meditation in the West is that when you are meditating, you do not try to think about stuff, you instead try to clear your thoughts and have your mind be silent. Unlike say sleeping, you are fully aware of what is going on around you - it's not a trance. That's basically the gist of it: clear your mind of thoughts.
Ignoring the spiritual parts, I'd imagine the way it is beneficial is that by reducing your cognitive load thinking about that presentation you need to give tomorrow and how everyone will react, it allows your body to focus on more mundane health-keeping tasks while in this meditative state. People in our group have reported various annecdotal health benefits, however there was also a peer reviewed study in Australia where our methods were used to help children with ADHD:
https://www.abc.net.au/science/articles/2007/11/30/2106111.h...
The spiritual parts supposedly help you to get into that state easier, but as there isn't any scientific evidence of that I'll leave you to make your own decision.
Another benefit of the methods I follow is that they are always free - you can do then at home and do not need any special equipment. Anyone charging you to learn how to meditate is probably just scamming you.
Free resources here: https://dbtselfhelp.com/dbt-skills-list/mindfulness/
Particularly when observing the Buddhist monks it is clear that by and large they practise what they preach. And a big component of that is meditating.
> ... And then following Occam’s razor - why need separate concept for that? ... Then again, aren’t we doing it anyway on a regular basis without introducing a word for it?
Every mind is unique. There might easily be people out there who naturally have such organised and orderly thoughts that meditation is useless to them. Or view the world in such an unusual way that the standard meditation practices are useless. But for most people, practising how to perceive the world is useful and so is actively focusing on the present.
There is a reason that meditation gets classed with the religious practices. There is a leap of faith at some level in believing that raw instinct alone will not lead people to perceive and respond to reality in a practised way.
At Harward a bunch of young guys appeared who had an interest in some ideas coming from the east. One is Daniel Goleman ("emotional intelligence" etc). Others developed their "western constructions" over it. That formula you mention in the title is one.
> Some
You are constantly confusing practical advice ("try this and that") with the real thing - as if the point were "sleep" or "focus" or "relax" and you were criticizing "count sheep", "breathe deeply", "contract your muscle and release".
And your approach is fully alien to the matter: e.g. there is no «discussion» about it, it is not in that realm.
If you want to understand the matter, you will have to avoid those superficial, formal considerations and get an idea of the practical goal.
But then again, if you are so used to that kind of approach you showed - which you should not spend on things that do not match it: if you intend to remain in that approach, you should practice it on appropriate topics; if something in you is actually interested, you will have to abandon that unfitting framework. Don't tackle things with persistently short curiosity. The mental framework is built by the matter studied - otherwise it would be like applying e.g. (just figuratively) that of an historian to molecular biology.
Maybe start with approaching Mathematics: there is no really "concept", "word", "discussion" there in the way you used them (you would not be able to solve problems if you focused on the wrong things) - you will have to "go to the thing directly" instead of dreaming ideas about it.
It is a secularized form of an eastern religious ritual, the ultimate goal of which is ego death.
Mindfulness is a trendy feel-good fuzzy yoga mom term that's often used to sell something.
For many who adopt routine secularized meditation, it becomes a great exercise in Missing The Point, the point being ego death. It's a very strange thing to kill the ego but then immediately return to an egocentric life, with all the hustle and bustle and manufactured stresses. After all, this ritual typicaly accompanies a fairly ascetic lifestyle.
Meditation, for me, a Roman Christian, is more akin to contemplation in the Greek stoic sense. It's good to set aside some time each day to just sit and think, to reflect on things.
If consciousness is a stream of "nows" the idea is to be aware of the stream instead of being a passenger, if it makes sense.
I think it has value, it can help with anxiety, i'm too lazy to make a habit of it.
Just sit in a darkish room, no noise, close your eyes and just say in your head "breathe in" as you breathe in, hold for like 3 sec and think nothing, then breathe out saying in your head "breathe out", hold for 3 sec while thinking nothing.
Repeat.
You wont get to round 2 without your mind wondering and thinking about something else. Just focusing on your breathing without thinking about work, friends, politics or when you stubbed your toe yesterday is an incredibly hard task.
That's 1 part of meditation.
Another part is then doing the same idea with your breathing but then to an "idea". I find when I try to do focus training, I run into thoughts that "bother me". Well, I'd say it's my subconscious trying to warn me about something. Thus, I'll do the same thing with just that thought, and funny enough the wandering thoughts will relate heavily to whatever that issue is. I then start to analyze the issue in now a really calm state. Eventually I come to either the conclusion to the problem in a way that brings me closure to never worry about it again or what my next step is, which again, gives me a sense of closure/stop worrying.
Breathe in/breathe out, my subconscious brings up another stress/anxiety ridden issue tormenting me. Time to meditate on that.
A lot of it is like surfing a wave. You're just letting your mind bring up thoughts. You cant consciously force it without inflicting a bias. Once you feel like you have all the evidence, then you can put it together. Eventually, you do this enough, the amount of time you spend focus training will be on your breath as you've dealt with all the things your subconscious is pressuring you about.
The second part is what I think is closest to traditional meditation, but I cant see how to get there without the first part.
It was explained to me as the opposite of CBT. It's being aware of what you're feeling and acknowledging it. That can be physical sensations or it can be emotions.
All worlds, real and imaginary, all meditations of any technique, all are distraction.
Who is it that is having this experience?
From this POV mediation is the practice of discerning illusion from being. E.g.:
"I have a body but I am not my body."
"I have emotions but I am not my emotions."
"I have mind but I am not my mind."
"I have will but I am not my will."
As you discern and give up attachment to subtler and subtler aspects of what had seemed to be "you" something great happens.
The key is to ask, "Who is it that is having this experience?"
I personally really like David Chapman's stuff, it's a lot more practical and hands-on (and free from woo): https://twitter.com/meaningness/status/1356651259764215808
That's what meditation will eventually unearth for you. Through meditation you'll experience and begin to gain an understanding of how your mind works and how that flavors the way you go through life on a moment to moment basis.
Kinda like shadows on the wall. A nice, steady light on a clear surface makes it easy to pick out the shapes your shadow makes.
1. Why were you looking into meditation practices as a hobby in the first place? 2. Are you happy?
No amount of googling will not find a Guru. It is your intense desire to find a "Guru" will attract you towards the "Guru".
1. Mindfulness in Plain English by Bhante Gunaratna [0]
2. The Mind Illuminated by Yates et al. [1]
And plese steer away from awful sources. People, the modern day "influencers" are piggybacking on Meditation to sell their own stuff. And it is related to a lot of stupid concepts that higher practitioners of Eastern Spirituality themselves reject. "Kundalini"... My ass.
Meditation, when reduced to the physical technique itself, is utterly worthless, I assure you. There are several 5-minute videos that teach you meditation are shit.
________
Since you want to know about personal experience, let's do that.
I also fell prey to the snake-oil salesmen at first, who taught meditation in five minutes.
I tried for months and years, and nothing came out of it.
When I was going through a list of books recommended in Hacker News, I learned about The Mind Illuminated by Yates.
I bought it and started studying, and practising.
And, I promise you it changed my life.
I meditate from 15 to 45 minutes a day. Everyday.
I will list here some aspects of it.
I sit there, I observe my thoughts, and gently bring my mind back to my breaths.
Primarily, it is like "intuition training" for attention holding.
Whenever I am doing work or studying for my research, whenever my mind deviates, this training kicks in, in an automated way. I can very quickly bring it back. And it does get better with time.
My fully-sanctitious Pomodoro cycle went up from 20 minutes to 90 minutes. I can hold my attention, unadulterated, for that long.
This was the first benefit.
Secondly, I am much better at processing my own emotions. Every kind. I am much saner and calmer for it. I can process and handle and deal with all my emotions.
Thirdly, I am a much better decision maker from meditating. Before, I often suffered with my options. I could not decide what to do- from small decision to big.
Now, it's like my emotions are wiretapped and I know better what I want. And I can act accordingly.
And I am able to enjoy pleasurable activities more. Swimming, walking through the forest, eating favorite dishes, sex- all are much more pleasurable for me.
I feel the "training" from meditation kicking in when I want to have deep experiences.
I am also a better learner now. This could be a placebo. I always was a good and fast learner, but, I have more experience with myself now, but I feel this happened from meditation.
Meditation is hard. I always was interested in Buddhism (the non-spiritual kind. Read: What the Buddha Taught by W. Rahula [2]). And Buddha was a total no-BS guy. He asked people to experiment and if they didn't find the results alignigning with what he said, he said that he should not be listened to [3]. So, if he asked to meditate, and talked about its benefits, there must be something in it- that's what I thought. That's why I prevailed.
Learning coding took time. Learning Math and Spanish took time. Meditation should take time to be learned properly. Buddha, an athiest, an unorthodox, an uber-debater, and rationalist talked about benefits of it, and that made me prevail.
I am so happy for it.
Please reply to my comment if you have further questions.
I am currently on the deep peace stage. Seven times out of ten, when I try to be in the deeply peaceful state, I can be.
[0]: https://www.amazon.com/Mindfulness-English-Bhante-Henepola-G...
[1]: https://www.amazon.com/Mind-Illuminated-Meditation-Integrati...
[2]: https://www.amazon.com/What-Buddha-Taught-Expanded-Dhammapad...
[3]: https://becoming-buddha.com/ehipassiko-come-and-see-for-your...
When it comes to mindfulness, in my experience, for SOME people, their mind is so far overthinking things. About themselves, about the people around them, every possible factor in life is fair game really. This can end up causing anxiety and impulses to take control of actions. It's possible to have so much physical tension built up all around the body all the time that it feels shut down. In these cases, learning how to just close your eyes and let go of all those thoughts and all that tension... in your face, in your shoulders, around your hips... bringing your mind away from those thoughts and that tension by focusing on your slowwww breath, might just bring you to a place of comfort that you didn't realize was possible. In the end what all of this represents is stress. For someone who has stress and benefits from this practice, it's an actual battle to let go of the thoughts and tension. But if you get there, you have a whole new level of growth you can do from there. In that case, this practice feels like a super power. So you might want to let everyone know. But if none of this applies to you, it will probably look like a scam.
Let's consult with some famous faces in the community. I've provided some short excerpts so that you can skim each link and get a flavor of what the essays are like.
Thanissaro Bhikku, on mindfulness defined: https://www.accesstoinsight.org/lib/authors/thanissaro/mindf...
> Mindfulness is what keeps the perspective of appropriate attention in mind. [Goes on to discuss what different definitions of mindfulness, and where some get it wrong]
Hsuan Hua, on what meditation is: http://www.cttbusa.org/chan/chan1.asp.html#whatischan
> Chan means stilling thoughts. We will only realize Chan if we still our thoughts. Samadhi means not moving. If we move, we have no samadhi. [Goes on to discuss samadhi and posture]
Ajahn Sucitto, on different definitions of mindfulness: https://ajahnsucitto.org/articles/what-is-mindfulness/
> [Mindfulness] has a referential quality; it connects present-moment experience to a frame of reference. The teachings on the four establishments, or bases, of mindfulness exemplify this.
Ajahn Sumedho, on what mindfulness is: https://buddhismnow.com/2019/03/16/mindfulness-is-an-interes...
> It does not mean just to have an idea that one has to be mindful of each step while walking on an almsround, as a kind of fixed view of mindfulness. Because that can be merely concentration. Mindfulness allows us to really notice the way it is, where we are, the time and the place.
Ajahn Chah, on what meditation is: https://www.ajahnchah.org/book/On_Meditation1.php
> When the mind is peaceful and established firmly in mindfulness and self-awareness, there will be no doubt concerning the various phenomena which we encounter. The mind will truly be beyond the hindrances. We will clearly know everything which arises in the mind as it is. We do not doubt because the mind is clear and bright. The mind which reaches samādhi is like this.
Culadasa, on what mindfulness is: https://culadasa.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/Magic-of-Min...
> But what is mindfulness? “Mindfulness” is an unfortunate translation of the Pali word sati – unfortunate in that it suggests attentiveness or remembering to pay attention. This fails to capture the full meaning and importance of sati. We are always paying attention to something, even without sati, but sati means, among other things, paying attention to the right things in a skillful way. A more appropriate but clumsy phrase might be “powerfully conscious awareness” or “fully conscious awareness”.
Bhante Vimalaramsi, on the four foundations of mindfulness: https://www.lionsroar.com/living-with-awareness-an-excerpt-f...
> The practice of contemplating (or as we might say, meditating on) the Four Foundations—mindfulness of the body, feelings, mind, and dhammas (or phenomena)—is recommended for people at every stage of the spiritual path.
Ayya Khema, on the meditative mind: https://www.vipassana.org/meditation/khema/hereandnow/medita...
> Another facet which goes together with mindfulness, is clear comprehension. Mindfulness is knowing only, without any discriminating faculty. Mindfulness does not evaluate of judge but pays full attention.
Sekkei Harada, on peace of mind: https://buddhismnow.com/2013/12/21/true-peace-of-mind-by-har...
> The expression ‘casting off body and mind’ means that by being one with a certain condition or circumstance, you assimilate all other things. It is said that for three years Dogen Zenji didn’t lie down to sleep and that he couldn’t recognise the faces of the monks who sat next to him. These words ‘casting off body and mind’ express the result of his ‘just sitting’. The other half of the above expression, ‘body and mind cast off’, refers to a condition where having forgotten the ego-self, everything disappears. This is all the splendid result of his having sat zazen single-mindedly.
So, in shortest words, what definitely surprised me most was that there seems to be something to it. I went to the first Iesuit "retreat" very sceptic and with an attitude basically of: "meh, I'm a Catholic, so by this logic, praying isn't the worst thing I could waste a ~week on". Trying to summarize most succintly and "secularly", the gist of it for me is, that during meditation, I tend to get thoughts in my mind that I just didn't see coming. It's not any kind of "voice". Those feel 100% like my regular thoughts; just the conclusions and ideas I get from them are quite often completely surprising and unexpected to me - if in subtle ways and generally on topic of "how to live life", what's important, etc. Interestingly to me, I find that those thougts tend to align with and seem to help me understand the Bible. Also what I found very surprising, is that through meditation of the Bible fragments and also trying to meditate scenes from my life that might be relevant, I seem to be finding new meanings in the Bible. That was a huge surprise to me, given how being a Catholic long time, I heard a lot of those quotes tons of time already, and heard them interpreted various ways tons of times, and my general opinion before was that there's not really much more that I could find there, and was rather sceptic towards then notion of people finding deep meaning in Bible by studying it more. So much sceptic before, some suddenly seem understand now, very unexpected and surprise.
One "sceptic/physicist" thought I tend to be having on that, is basically kind of reminding me of "simulated annealing" and leaving local maxima in search for more global ones. Which, even if true (seems a huge simplification, given we still don't really know much about mind, and basically zero about consciousness), doesn't oppose faith to me personally. If I believe that God created the world, I also believe he created physics etc. the way He wanted them, so "trivially" He created them in a way to make meditation & simulated annealing work like that. But that's probably not super interesting to you :)
So, just my $0.02, in case that could help you in any way.
I'm speaking to two of your points, I think:
1) "isn't our whole life a sequence of meditations? Because we always focus on something"
2) "aren’t we doing [sit peacefully and observe your thoughts] anyway on a regular basis without introducing a word for it?"
In my direct personal experience, sitting in awareness, noticing thoughts and sensations, etc. is simply a materially different experience from... the rest of my time when I'm not doing that. It's materially different from when I'm focusing on an activity like coding (perhaps in a deep state of focus or "flow" [0]) or just habitually/pathologically scrolling through HN.
Did you ever get fully engrossed in a coding session and "lose time"? And eventually you "came around" or "landed" and realized you were "back" and 2 hours had gone by in deep focus? Did you ever realize that you'd been ruminating about some stupid thing for ages? E.g. repeatedly going over a difficult interaction from earlier in the day, or thinking about a difficult interaction that's coming up tomorrow and imagining how it might go? Did you ever snap out of that?
That feeling of "huh... I'm back - here I am." - that's what I am recruiting when I deliberately practice mindfulness. And then I get distracted... and when I notice, I bring my attention back... repeat.
To the second point of yours I quoted, i.e. are we doing this "anyway" on a regular basis? Maybe you are. For me, regular moment-to-moment thinking is generally not the same as mindfulness. I'm thinking, but I'm basically lost in the thoughts. I'm not observing them, I'm just thinking them - or they're thinking me. (And not just thoughts - this all applies equally well to emotional, interoceptive, and sensory experience.) Mindfully observing my experience is materially different, although I do get flashes of it throughout the day without reaching for it deliberately. Whether that's something I had before I started sporadic practice and just didn't have words for, or something the practice has unlocked for me, I can't say, because I can't faithfully recall what my moment-to-moment experience was like that long ago.
Maybe you're experiencing mindfulness frequently throughout your daily life, so you don't notice anything different when you set out to practice it deliberately. Maybe when you practice it you are getting lost in thought and not noticing. We'll never know, given the subjectivity of the experience and our limited tools for communicating about it, but I enjoyed the attempt :)
[0] https://www.amazon.com/Flow-Psychology-Experience-Perennial-...
The scam is actually every second when one is not meditating. Most people most of the time live in an illusory dream world, lost in their thoughts, pushed around by those thoughts (often called “the ego”), and suffering due to them. Meditation means practicing to wake up from that illusory dream world, over and over again. And it can be done in every situation. The formal sitting down meditation is simply a process to develop, maintain and strengthen the habit.
It’s a great practice, which can both improve each moment (by realizing that each moment is actually as good as the next one, if one is simply aware instead of lost in thoughts) as well as build incremental long term resiliency against life’s adversities.
The gist of it is it's a type of meditation where you sit quietly, listen to your own thoughts and being to realise that thoughts are just thoughts, they come and go, etc... It's about being mindful of your own psyche as opposed to being distracted by outside factors. Lots of people react to stimuli and blame their mood, thoughts or actions on those stimuli, mindfulness is about being more aware of these things and being able to live life on your own terms instead of merely being swayed by outside influences. Plus other things.
Anyhow, monastics will devote their entire lives to meditation, it goes deep, but that's an attempt at an explanation.
Deep in Covid lock down we had a virtual off-site for a load of the management. They hired (hired!) some mindfulness expert to come and do a session over zoom. "Just think about all of your frustrations, all of your interruptions, all of those things that take away your attention and just let them evaporate away". 10 minutes later my toddler burst in the door and zoom-bombed the meeting (I had left my.mic unmuted) screaming something about Peppa pig. Turns out you can't mindfulness your way out of looking after your kids while trying to work.
TL;Dr - if you can just ignore your problems and frustrations and not have any consequences from doing so, then they are probably not real problems you need to worry about anyway
https://dynamic.wakingup.com/shareOpenAccess/e9c4eb
You can do the introductory course in that time by allocating about 20 minutes every day.
I was like you, had been meditating and studying buddhism for years. Sam's app isn't life changing (like almost nothing is) but it was different enough from what I've tried previously that it gave me a new perspective to the whole thing. Perhaps it could do a similar thing for you.
But I still have severe doubts about some of these claims, because I wonder where the beef is. If, as Harris suggests, over time the practice gives you a kind of mental superpower, where are the mathematicians who ascribe their solution of a long-unsolved problem to meditation? Where is the evidence that meditation actually improves the functioning of the mind, aside from making its practitioners feel better? (The latter is valuable, but it’s different from the implied claim that I‘m skeptical about.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ashtanga_(eight_limbs_of_yoga)
The yamas, niyamas, asana, pranayama are preparation for meditation, pratyahara is the transition point. One starts withdrawing from the external sensory input and brings the focus inward. Dharana and dhyana are the stepping stones to samadhi.
Meditation is not easy and it takes many years. Many people are not succesful at Dharana; i.e. able to maintain the focus. Consider the constant stimulus in today's environment with instant messaging, email, texts, etc kills out concentration. Also, one can't measure one's concentration during dharana otherwise one is not doing it. So, for us techies, it is difficult. The point is to keep improving one's ability or length of time to maintain the concentration during this phase.
From my point of view, weight lifting and similar activities can be done mindfully; however, they are not meditation. The reason is that they are externally focused.
So, I guess I have defined meditation as being mindful and concentrating inward. I would think that somebody that has reached samadhi and/or nirvana or what ever it may be called in their practice could probably give more precise definition of meditation.
One also needs to look at one's goals with meditation. Is it samadhi/nirvana/enlightment? Is it being able to clear the mind? (If it is to clear the mind, then one's goal could be to do dharaha; for example, to maintain the the concentration for 20 minutes.) It is probably difficult motivation wise to do meditation, if one does not have an end goal.
When you tried it, what was your goal?
I would also mention that it is something that one has to do daily to improve. If you do it once a week, very unlikely to see improvement. I would also look to do as many non-meditation activities mindfully, to see improvement in meditation. Perhaps the goal for some people is not the meditation, but to be able to be more mindful and present in their daily activities. It is very unlikely that one can enjoy an activity if one is not mindful during that activity.
So after writing this, I would think two goals would be good for people that are not necessarily looking at samadhi/nirvana as the end goal: 1. able to concentrate better. This should lead to better grades, better performance at work, better pay. 2. enjoy life more because one is more present during one's life.
Focus is only the method (one of many), not the goal. In (eg) vipassana meditation, the goal is "to see things as they really are."
> meditation is “doing nothing”. Okay, but then again there’s nothing special about it, we all do it from time to time.
Meditation is not "doing nothing," it's actually a very active process. If anything it's more like the practice of intentionally thinking nothing. This is not as easy as it sounds.
One of the early meditation exercises is to sit quietly and count to ten slowly (perhaps one count for each breath, and each breath taking a ~5 second inhale, ~7 second exhale). When you notice your mind drift to something else, refocus on the counting and start over at zero. The goal is not really to reach ten (if you do, start over at zero). The purpose of the exercise is to realize how noisy our internal thoughts and feelings are, to practice observing them, letting them go, and refocusing on your focal point (counting or breath, etc).
There's nothing special about running, we might find ourselves doing it from time to time. But then why do people jog? Meditation is similar. It's an exercise.
And to further emphasize doing vs thinking: meditation has very little to do with what we're physically doing. You can meditate while walking, driving, or doing any activity. (It's just harder to do because there are more distractions.)
> just sit peacefully and observe your thoughts. Then again, aren’t we doing it anyway on a regular basis without introducing a word for it?
We are not, typically, observing our own thoughts. We're thinking thoughts, and feeling our feelings, but not actively observing them. But meditation is not just observing thoughts, but also letting them go without attaching to them. Letting every seed of a thought float away without taking root.
> Can you please share your own personal specific definition — what exactly is a meditation for you?
Meditation (to me) is the practice of letting go of thoughts. By doing this enough times, we strengthen the process so it becomes automatic. The goal is so we can observe our own thoughts and feelings, and everything around us, from a more calm and clear point of view. "To see things as they really are." It also has other benefits.
To be concrete: after waking up I set a timer (anywhere from 1-40 minutes depending on what I need) and sit quietly with my eyes closed (or sometimes open). I focus on my breath and all the sensations around me: the sound of the fan, the tension and release of muscles, etc. When a thought pops up, I let it pass by without judgment or attachment and return my focus to my breath. When the timer goes off, I'll continue meditating for a few minutes if my mind is really restless.
After meditating I'm typically in a calm, collected state, ready to start my day. Throughout the day, when I remember, I'll return to that state of awareness (of everything inside and around me) and meditate for a few moments during whatever I'm doing. After meditating regularly for a few months, I find this process will happen throughout the day without forethought (just automatically out of nowhere). When something happens that triggers an emotional reaction in me, I'll see the emotion as though it's a button I could choose to press or not.
I know you don't like analogies, but meditation is like you're following a toddler walking down a path. The toddler wanders every which way, following whatever whims. Each time it leaves the path, you gently and without judgement pick it up and return it to the path. It doesn't matter how many times you do this, the toddler will always leave the path. The goal is not to teach the toddler to stay on the path. The goal is not to keep the toddler on the path. The goal is to strengthen your arms so you can return the toddler without effort. This is the practice of meditation.
If... "I want to quite my mind." Good luck with that! Trying to quite the mind just makes it louder. Or even worse, throwing trash in the closet until it piles up and you're living a lie and going crazy. Our minds, considering that you are a human too, is not meant to be quite. It's more like a tool that evolved to sense and experience abstractions. Have a bunch of stuff in your mind? Too much to handle? Sit down, do nothing, feel everything and cry it out. Why? From my finite observation, sitting down, doing nothing, feeling everything and crying it out, is to allow you to slowly and gently follow the threads of thoughts, memories, and emotions, to find the mental kinks within yourself and be able to come to terms and integrate it into your being. Sometimes it's joyful, other times you will enter to dark places that will give you the temptation of getting up and doing something about it. Don't. We know what it feels like. It hurts, bad. But you must sit still and feel it out. That rash decision will only make things more painful. As long as you practice sitting down, doing nothing, feeling everything and crying it out, the mind doesn't become something you fight to shut up, but instead something you roll with.
"I want to be more mindful." Why? Do you have a disciplined mind that can be concentrated to a single point? What good will it do to let it run wild without knowing how to get a grip on it in the first place. What will you do when you are diving down the pit of psychosis at 50000 mph? Can you snap out of the signs that lead there? Like the warping of the visual field? The spiral into vexing confusion that blurs the senses? Western new age hip plastic spirituality messed up bad trying to make mindfulness/vipassana meditation as the gateway to everlasting inner peace where the gods/daemons/demons/buddhas/devi/[whatever higher or lower dimensional beings here] fart the scent of flowers upon our noses and everything is all well and fine until you circle back to the beginning, again and again and again, and again. And again. And maybe this app that told you that you meditated for 20 minutes and gave you an award badge like a treat to a dog for doing so well. Then the thought pops up if you are even doing mindfulness properly, and another, and another, and another. You wanted to be mindful, you ended up confused instead. How about doing the exact opposite? Concentrate on that pen right next to you. With your entire being. Then come back to mindfulness. You'll notice single pointed concentration and mindfulness leads to the same place. But samadhi meditation is easier to practice for someone that didn't grow up with Southern Buddhism. Since it's only relaxed concentration. But it builds the necessary skill of being able to tug the leash when the mind is running too loose.
In simple terms from this fleeting being tapping away, meditation is the practice of bringing our identification aspect of ourselves beyond our minds and back into our senses to have an observation without an attachment to the preconceived notions that come up and layer upon our direct experience. Thoughts and concepts are a There-ness within the Is-ness of what we are experiencing here and now. Meditation is to strengthen this mode of awareness.
Disclaimer. I'm not a certified anything. Just a practitioner. Never met any of my teachers beyond the books and talks they created. Mindfulness meditation isn't for everyone, you want inner peace go do something else that won't make you deal/play with the worms in your mind on solo mode with a manual with a bunch of holes in it.
Peace and Love
Anyway since you asked for personal experience, in my experience it's a nuanced thing.
- It's you being able to be aware, being able to reflect, and being able to re-calibrate on the way you do things.
- It's you being able to pause every once in a while and take a perspective. It sounds woo-woo but it's simply you taking a moment to really fucking gauge where you are right now based on your past and where you're fucking heading to.
- It's you being able to put yourself in perspective. This is you being one in seven billion people on earth, on a tiny pale blue dot of a planet across the universe, yet smaller than you is billions of organisms, atoms, and quantum stuff.
- It's you being able to check yourself in terms of politics, religion, faith, science. Do you find yourself in a sweet spot, or do you find yourself polarized, or do you find yourself biased, what shaped your beliefs right now, what beliefs are you not questioning, what beliefs are you questioning too much.
- It's you being able to tolerate and forgive yourself and other people to a degree (not on everything). It's you being able to let some things slide, and let things just the way they are.
- It's you being able to discern how you respond to something, how you think of it, how you feel it, how you experience it.
- It's cheesy. Not everyone will take you seriously when you talk about it. Other people are deep in it and very serious about it, other people are light about it and just chill about it. Other people have different terms of it.
- It's probably a sham. What makes one a 'guru' anyway? Haha. What's the product here? Are you being sold into a product or a service? Sales is about emotions and emotional stuff tend to sell. Peace of mind sells. Sex sells (mind you, even pickup gurus teach meditation). Happiness sells. Being a grounded alpha male sells. Being a holy person sells. Being something else sells. Experiencing something else sells.
So there you have it. I say define it as you wish and go on with your life. As someone else said (they say it's bruce lee, but whatever).. Absorb what is useful, discard what is useless and add what is specifically your own.
It seems you might think it’s woo-woo / hand-wavey, which isn’t uncommon in the west.
It’s also not for everyone. my partner has severe anxiety and has never been able to successfully get into meditation. She’s found some success with Metta (loving kindness) but can’t sit in a breathing meditation. That’s okay, it’s something I would never pressure her on. People are just different.
For me, without meditation, my emotions and thoughts get out of control, like an animal’s. I jump to 10 things a minute. I get lost in thought and don’t even realize it. I have no emotional regulation if I feel anger or sadness, it’s like sadness just happens to me. I find it to be a very weird, out of control, and animalistic feeling.
For my personal experience, meditation at its lowest description is like exercise for the mind, and at its highest description is a consistent way of accessing a higher state of being.
Exercise - you’re working your muscles on a regular basis by walking, but without focus you make little progress. For me, if I don’t meditate regularly I find I lose control of my mind 5-10 times a minute. That means I can lose focus, am less happy, and have weak emotional regulation - it’s only when I don’t meditate or sleep that it’s even possible I’d be angry at someone or (horrible thought) consider yelling at my kids. If I’m mindful that kind of emotional reactivity is just not possible. Had a shitty father so that one is important to me.
State of being - meditation can consistently offer the insights psychedelics give you a glimpse into, but on a sustained basis and in a more true form. Many people in the west get into meditation by way of psychedelics and a desire to understand their state of being. It can be as elevated as the annoying diatribe of a college freshman who just did shrooms for the first time, but reliable, consistent, and more true.
Until meditation, I didn’t even realize emotions are physical embodiments (heart racing, shallow breath, pinched shoulders, etc) and last no more than 60 seconds. It’s my rumination and thought that creates moods, which can last for hours or even days. Mindfulness is a helpful way to ensure an emotions is felt fully but doesn’t last more than a minute, so you don’t make bad decisions.
There are many benefits of meditation, ranging from the corporate co-opting of it as “stress relief” to the Buddhist idea that “the mind is everything. What you think you become.”
It is very hard to describe without doing it, just like a runner’s high doesn’t make sense if all one does is walk. These are a few personal experiences that I hope are helpful.
Sam Harris’s “Waking Up” app is a great place to start. Do the trial for 30 days. He’s brilliant and the best entry point I’ve found for westerners who think meditation is too woo-woo.
In the case of mindfulness,"mindfulness meditation" is just a tool to train being mindful. So basically you train being in a mindful state and cultivate the trait of mindfulness. When training mindfulness via meditation, we often use the breath as an anchor, because it is easy to focus on. You could also just focus on a pebble in front of you for example.
The concept of mindfulness has been known in eastern cultures with contemplative traditions and particularly in Buddhism for at least 2500 years. Fostering the ability to be mindful is sometimes also referred to as "the heart of Buddhist meditation".
The interest in the concept has only really sparked in the western world in the second half of the 20th century. During the 1960s and 1970s, the concept was introduced to the western world because of inter-cultural exchanges due to Buddhist monks being forced to leave Tibet and choosing to emigrate to western countries.
One of the early enthusiasts, who saw the potential of mindfulness in a medical context is Jon Kabat-Zinn. He initially studied mindfulness to find an alternative method in treating patients with the primary application being intended as a treatment for chronic pain disorders and stress in clinical populations
There is no general agreement on how to characterise mindfulness and no singular, clear definition of mindfulness but rather a plethora of constructs and operationalisations are used throughout the available research, which is why there is so much confusion around what it is.
Kabat-Zinn suggests mindfulness is "cultivating our ability to pay attention in the present moment as we suspend our judging, or at least, as we become aware of how much judging is usually going on within us", which is a widely used conceptualisation.
Another interesting model is the Two-Component Model by Bishop et al. 2004
According to Bishop, mindfulness consists of the components, Self- Regulation of Attention and Orientation to Experience and is a psychological process developed through practice. Bishop et al. hypothesise that mindfulness is more of a state than a trait, arguing it can only subsist, while an individual focuses their attention on the present.
Self-regulation of attention is described as a metacognitive skill. Bishop et al. postulate it is comprised of three elements:
- vigilance, which describes the ability to maintain attention over a more extended period, - attention switching, the ability to deliberately change the focus of attention, - and inhibition of elaborative processing, which is the ability to suppress cognitions.
Orientation of experience is described as a quality of awareness, in which a person is open, curious and non-judgemental towards what they are experiencing in the present moment.
Yes, it is all bullshit.
But to a lot of people it's meaningful bullshit. Your mileage may vary.
Guided relaxation exercises? Sure. And if having someone to guide you relax helps, whether you pay them or not, sure if you feel it helps.
Regulating your breathing and relaxing your muscles can calm you down. And perhaps that relaxed state will help you think. But that's it, nothing more.