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Ask HN: Do you meditate?

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21–30 of 71 posts

Re: Ask HN: Do you meditate?

#21
post #12

I pray for the same reason the late C.S. Lewis prayed: "I pray because I can’t help myself. I pray because I’m helpless. I pray because the need flows out of me all the time, waking and sleeping. It doesn’t change God, it changes me." - CS Lewis I know it might tick some people off that I mention prayer in a thread about meditation, but I respect a person's right to believe whatever they want. All I ask is they respe…

I think there's a bit of crossover with prayer so it wouldn't be fair to give you flak because of the association. For example, if you're reciting a typical prayer, e.g the Our Father, you're focusing your mind on one thing. To dedicate to the prayer, you can't just shut other thoughts out, you must acknowledge and return to the prayer. I can some of the same benefits. In free flow prayer, I guess you're also acknowledging thoughts as they come and focusing on doing that. These may be thoughts that come from deep-seated emotions, perhaps thoughts that you typically wouldn't or couldn't discuss with others.

I don't practice meditation religiously, nor do am I dedicated to prayer, but I have done both and both have been therapeutic.

It seems wrong to find fault in what you're doing because of your beliefs when the process is essentially very similar, if not the same.

Re: Ask HN: Do you meditate?

#22
Yes. I used to do Zazen with not much luck until I switched to Anapanasati meditation, completely blew my mind. Most of the Buddhist texts started to make more sense. Jhanic states and so on. With proper meditation technique I went from 15 minutes to sitting for an hour, easy, effortlessly. Mediation was pretty life changing for me.

Re: Ask HN: Do you meditate?

#23

I don't know if it's proper meditation, but right after waking up I sit on the floor and repeat for 20 minutes: “Watch your thoughts, they become words; watch your words, they become actions; watch your actions, they become habits; watch your habits, they become character; watch your character, for it becomes your destiny.” It's like a mantra. I'm not even sure about the original source of this quote. It may sound a…

Just curious: how do you know it helps you focus? Sorry if it sounds demeaning, but it's easy to convince ourselves if not careful. Have you tried measuring it in some way?

Re: Ask HN: Do you meditate?

#25
post #21
post #12

I pray for the same reason the late C.S. Lewis prayed: "I pray because I can’t help myself. I pray because I’m helpless. I pray because the need flows out of me all the time, waking and sleeping. It doesn’t change God, it changes me." - CS Lewis I know it might tick some people off that I mention prayer in a thread about meditation, but I respect a person's right to believe whatever they want. All I ask is they respe…

I think there's a bit of crossover with prayer so it wouldn't be fair to give you flak because of the association. For example, if you're reciting a typical prayer, e.g the Our Father, you're focusing your mind on one thing. To dedicate to the prayer, you can't just shut other thoughts out, you must acknowledge and return to the prayer. I can some of the same benefits. In free flow prayer, I guess you're also acknowl…

I know Christianity is a very touchy subject for many people. It's easy to find lots of examples of the gulf between orthodoxy and orthopraxy in many people's lives. But I'm not so much interested in where a person is at in their lives, as much as I'm interested in the delta - the change - over time.

Prayer, over time, changes me. I need to change.

C.S. Lewis was a hero of mine. An Atheist for a good chunk of his life, he became a Christian and went on to write a lot of great stuff. The fact that he and J.R.R. Tolkien were friends is pretty cool too :)

Re: Ask HN: Do you meditate?

#26
Yes. It's a reminder that there's a non-conceptual aspect to life—a way to be that doesn't involve categorizing or evaluating, just acting and experiencing. 'Body scan' meditation and breath watching are both great for this. It's like some deeper, unseen part of mind chooses at any given point whether to exist as that voice in your head, or your physical body. For me, exercising ambition and over-focusing on intellectual pursuits for too long made it so that I was pretty much exclusively identifying with the 'voice in my head.' It sounds like I'm describing some inexact fluffy sort of thing, but I have something very definite in mind with this description: my subjective experience is starkly different based on whether I'm in the physical or mental 'mode.' And this is not a special insight of my own; their are plenty of ancient and modern treatments of the problem of thinking you are your thoughts.

And, I'm pretty sure that understanding how to move between these modes is a key aspect to cultivating 'flow' in programming (or other activities).

I'm still relatively new to meditation (about 1.5 months regularly; over a year reading about it and doing it occasionally), but I've reaped definite benefits from the time I've put in. It feels like the descriptions in 'Flatland' of discovering there's a new dimension that you can move in: without meditating it was like I was constrained to endlessly following up whatever thoughts I started up, and now I'm getting better at simply stepping aside when I can see it's no longer productive.

This has been especially important for me since I'd had an injury related to using mouse/keyboard so that it became impossible to 'get out of my head' while using the computer—was in the polar opposite of 'flow' whenever on the computer. I spent a couple years like that, in one sense relieved since I understood rationally that I wasn't damaging myself at the computer anymore—but still having a terrible time at the computer because of past experiences with it. There were a number of things that went into improving this, but things didn't start reaallly getting good again until I started meditating. The feeling is like learning an instrument though: I can see myself slowly becoming capable of making music—but it takes time.

I don't think I'm really all that much of a special case though. People are in their heads in an unpleasant way while coding because any number of things causes them anxiety: anything from finding yet another bug in your code to general unease from a built up habit of assessing your supposedly innate capacity as a programmer. If you have no concerns, you just act: it's just the code and the problem you're working on, everything else disappears, time disappears. If you can do it with the breath, you can do it with code.

edit: for typos, expanded a couple parts.

Re: Ask HN: Do you meditate?

#27

i do non secular meditation. each session takes around 10-15 minutes at regular time intervals; dawn, noon, afternoon, sunset, and night, which also serves as a tiny yoga exercise. i'm also obligated to eat something (a date or full meal) at each interval. these are what people refer to today as muslim prayers. since i started doing this everyday, i became less addicted to work. after each exercise i look forward to…

When I meditate I often combine it with tiny yoga exercises - not formal yoga poses, but just stretching and going where my body wants to stretch. What's funny is that I often find myself in a position similar to Muslim prayer (or, if one were observing from the outside they might think that is what I was engaged in).

[edit] I bring this up because whether engaged secular-ly or not there is something very grounding about the experience.

Re: Ask HN: Do you meditate?

#28
post #12

I pray for the same reason the late C.S. Lewis prayed: "I pray because I can’t help myself. I pray because I’m helpless. I pray because the need flows out of me all the time, waking and sleeping. It doesn’t change God, it changes me." - CS Lewis I know it might tick some people off that I mention prayer in a thread about meditation, but I respect a person's right to believe whatever they want. All I ask is they respe…

I'm personally big on the Serenity Prayer:

  God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change;
  courage to change the things I can;
  and wisdom to know the difference.
Total atheist, so maybe I should replace the word "God" with "Brain" or something.

Re: Ask HN: Do you meditate?

#30
post #13

I tend to meditate for 4+ hours per day, while writing code. I start feeling mentally scattered if I miss more than a day or two.

Not sure if this is the same as meditating. I experience sometimes similar states when really engaging with a research topic. But I would describe it more as a state of "flow" i.e.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flow_(psychology)

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