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Ask HN: How has meditation helped you?
31–40 of 48 posts
Re: Ask HN: How has meditation helped you?
#32Earlier quoted context omitted.
> physical pain was also reframed from negative 'pain' to simply neutral sensation. What does it mean to reframe physical pain? How reframing changed your experience of physical pain?
It means you no longer experience it as an explicitly negative experience. While physiologically the pain signals are still present, your brain's reaction to them changes. Most notably (in my experience) the change occurs when one learns to stop resisting in any fashion the experience of the pain and just accepting it is there, neutrally observing it. From an uninitiated person's standpoint, I can't say this means th…
Well said.
We've conditioned ourselves to pay close attention to pain for obvious reasons (e.g. something presents an acute threat to our survival), and we respond by escaping the sensation as quickly as we can.
With practice, we can learn to accept pain as any another sensation. If you're not afraid of death, it won't bother you at all. If (like most of us) you do, next time you stub your toe, recognize your conditioned response of trying to soothe the pain, just try leaning into it a bit. Know it won't kill you. Just take the opportunity to explore the experience and try to understand it more deeply. Remind yourself that you're not in danger, accept you can't unstub your toe (or whatever it may be), realize that the fight or flight response isn't necessary or appropriate, you can take more of your attention back from it than you gave it in the first place. It will still hurt, but you can make it much quieter, as it were.
Re: Ask HN: How has meditation helped you?
#33Earlier quoted context omitted.
> physical pain was also reframed from negative 'pain' to simply neutral sensation. What does it mean to reframe physical pain? How reframing changed your experience of physical pain?
It means you no longer experience it as an explicitly negative experience. While physiologically the pain signals are still present, your brain's reaction to them changes. Most notably (in my experience) the change occurs when one learns to stop resisting in any fashion the experience of the pain and just accepting it is there, neutrally observing it. From an uninitiated person's standpoint, I can't say this means th…
Thanks for the reply. So, if you're injured, it still hurts. But what changes is your response, mentally. You gain the ability to peacefully endure, even study, the pain because you're smarter than it? And this ability comes as a result of meditation? Can the same thing be achieved by telling someone to "suck it up" if they stub their toe?
Re: Ask HN: How has meditation helped you?
#34Can anyone here prove their claimed benefits to actually stem from mediation? Any academic study?
All the countless academic studies showing the benefits of meditation are comparing people who meditate vs. people who don't meditate with all else being equal.
What sort of methodology do you suppose can better attribute causality to a subjective experience? This is as far as the scientific method is willing to go, and the results are unanimous.
Re: Ask HN: How has meditation helped you?
#35Not much, my advice is do exercise instead, even 15 min a day will make a difference...
The mind moves before the body.
Re: Ask HN: How has meditation helped you?
#36Earlier quoted context omitted.
It means you no longer experience it as an explicitly negative experience. While physiologically the pain signals are still present, your brain's reaction to them changes. Most notably (in my experience) the change occurs when one learns to stop resisting in any fashion the experience of the pain and just accepting it is there, neutrally observing it. From an uninitiated person's standpoint, I can't say this means th…
Well said. We've conditioned ourselves to pay close attention to pain for obvious reasons (e.g. something presents an acute threat to our survival), and we respond by escaping the sensation as quickly as we can. With practice, we can learn to accept pain as any another sensation. If you're not afraid of death, it won't bother you at all. If (like most of us) you do, next time you stub your toe, recognize your conditi…
> We've conditioned ourselves to pay close attention to pain for obvious reasons ...
Have we conditioned ourselves to acknowledge pain? It seems to me that we evolved the ability to have pain, which is, by definition, a sensation that grabs your attention right away.
> If you're not afraid of death, it won't bother you at all.
Am I understanding your phrasing correctly? That, if you're not afraid of death, then physical pain won't bother you at all? I don't think that's right.
Another q: What kind of benefit/enlightenment do you achieve by leaning into the pain of a stubbed toe? Why lean in to it and pretend that you're "above the pain", instead of shouting out a swear word, complaining about it for a minute or two, and then moving on with your life?
Re: Ask HN: How has meditation helped you?
#37The biggest impact has definitely been with an increase in my self-awareness, especially in the presence of great pressure. Such an increase is not as consistently present as I want it to be, perhaps, but it's present enough to make me realize that practicing meditation, and mindfulness as a whole, helps me.
My meditation tends to be simple - wherever I am, I pretty much just take a seat, time a few deep breaths, keep my eyes closed, and either reflect with an objective in mind or just let my mind wander for 10 to 15 minutes. No mobile app, no fancy bells or whistles, nothing like that. No set schedule either, though I'm sure some sort of set schedule would be a great way to approach meditation and be more measured about meditating.
Re: Ask HN: How has meditation helped you?
#38Not much, my advice is do exercise instead, even 15 min a day will make a difference...
You can also combine them with Yoga. I find it complements the other excises like running and cycling.
Re: Ask HN: How has meditation helped you?
#39Earlier quoted context omitted.
It means you no longer experience it as an explicitly negative experience. While physiologically the pain signals are still present, your brain's reaction to them changes. Most notably (in my experience) the change occurs when one learns to stop resisting in any fashion the experience of the pain and just accepting it is there, neutrally observing it. From an uninitiated person's standpoint, I can't say this means th…
Thanks for the reply. So, if you're injured, it still hurts. But what changes is your response, mentally. You gain the ability to peacefully endure, even study, the pain because you're smarter than it? And this ability comes as a result of meditation? Can the same thing be achieved by telling someone to "suck it up" if they stub their toe?
>You gain the ability to peacefully endure, even study, the pain because you're smarter than it?
Kind of, yeah. It's something I've experimented with. The longer I focus on something painful the less it bothers me. It just sort of feels hot. But once I start to do something else with my body that agitates it, it provokes the strong response that takes my attention away immediately. I'm not that quick to take it back, or turn it down, yet. It's the revoking of ALL my attention while I'm trying to do something else makes me feel angry, like anyone being nagged with useless information at relentless volume and frequency. Nothing you can do except give it less of your attention and remember that getting angry is the exact opposite thing. It does take a lot of practice, I think.
>And this ability comes as a result of meditation?
Definitely. Meditation is the practice of training your attention, among other things.
>Can the same thing be achieved by telling someone to "suck it up" if they stub their toe?
It depends. If you said that to a stranger, they'd tell you to go to hell (more or less). If you said it to someone to whom you were the whole world, you'd create a louder pain that would drown it out. But they'd still be suffering.
Re: Ask HN: How has meditation helped you?
#40I have been doing it consistently, 10 minutes a day after waking up, longer on weekends, 15 minutes or more. I have been consistently doing it for 6+ months now. I am observing that it is helping me become mindful of my thoughts. Before, when thoughts appear in my head -- I don't take a second to say 'yes, that's my thought'. Now, when a thought, especially negative ones, come into my head -- I can observe it and ref…
Thanks for sharing. My experience, received benefits are similar to yours.
These techniques http://www.thewayofseeing.com/ helped me get meditating again. The drills I had done as a kid no longer worked, and the many variations I tried since haven't worked, for whatever reason.
I definitely encourage people to experiment, until they find something that works. Maybe it's tai chi, qi gong, hiking, the counting drills I'm doing now, sewing...