Ask HN: What exactly is a mindfulness meditation?

To be aware of the present moment: the sounds, the slight movement of air against your skin, how the floor feels against your feet and so on.

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.

It's about training your mind's executive control/function. You learn to focus on one thing and allow others to pass through your awareness without them being overly distracting/disturbing.

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.

This thread is hilarious.

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.

Meditation is a broad term encompassing many different practices and traditions (as you know). From my own experience, meditation is a means to understand (and more importantly *experience*) that what I consider a 'self' doesn't exist (from a first person perspective). It's an illusion created by my own mind via perpetual thought imagery, constant inner dialogue/self talk that is propagating and clinging to a fabricated image of who I am.

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 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.

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.