Ask HN: What exactly is a mindfulness meditation?

It’s westernization of Buddhist tradition, but with removing anything actually religious, because westerners are afraid of religion.

In my experience, mindfulness meditation is a form of exercise for your brain. You are increasing your brain's capacity to control, move, and manipulate your thoughts and mental processes, analogous to how weight training might allow you to increase your capacity to control, move, or manipulate heavy external objects.

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.

Yes, but who decides the standard here?

I am distracted 5 times a minute. Is it good enough or should I continue practicing?

And in the end - why is this a bad thing, to be distracted? If it’s in our nature in the first place?

I’m not being sarcastic - I truly want to know the deep answers from someone knowledgeable, but didn’t find any answers yet.

You decide what you are comfortable with :) however in general we can roughly decide if someone is struggling or not.

There are no "right and deep answers" for questions like this.

I can't say much about mindfulness meditation specifically, but I've been practicing Catholic (specifically, Iesuit) meditation weekly for over a year now. Also, after my first experiences with it I talked with a friend who tried some non-Christian meditation a few times (can't recall if specifically Buddhist or "secular") - he seemed to say there are apparently a lot of similarities between those (but I didn't explore the topic further, or whether they have common historical roots or not). So, can at least try throwing in a few thoughts being kinda practitioner.

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.