31–40 of 214 posts
Proving the obvious.
But I would choose vacation over meditation any time. Seeing the world and other cultures does a lot for my mental health too.
I've been going through challenging times and have been confronted with somethings I've never had to deal with before. There are a couple of things that trigger anxiety in me on a daily basis now. I wake up in the middle of the night with little anxiety episodes. I'm unfocused at work because of what feels like underlying emotional issues. The only thing that's helped (I am trying to fix without medication) are the t…
If you're interested in understanding more about the interplay between experiences, emotions, physiology and genetics, I can strongly recommend his book, The Biology of Belief [2], and his many interviews and presentations that can be found on YouTube.
His research and writing focuses on the notion that subconscious beliefs are the major influence on our perceptions, which is why for some of us, experiences can trigger pathological health conditions like anxiety and depression, along with auto-immune illnesses and other chronic illnesses that result from chronic stress (which can include cardiovascular disease and other serious conditions).
Inspired by this book, I've had great success improving my emotional and physiological health by undertaking practices that focus on subconscious beliefs. They all seek to achieve similar results to NLP (congruence, non-reactivity, etc), but I've found these ones to be more effective:
- Self Clearing [3]
- Holotropic Breathwork [4]
- Dolores Cannon Hypnosis [5]
All this stuff draws contempt from curmudgeonly skeptics (of which I used to be the worst kind), but from painful experience I've found these techniques to be far more effective than any of the more conventional approaches I'd tried previously.
I can also recommend Stoic Philosophy [6], but for me these practices are tools and systems that enable concepts from stoicism to be implemented most effectively.
[1] https://www.heartmath.org/articles-of-the-heart/personal-dev...
[2] https://www.amazon.com/Biology-Belief-Unleashing-Consciousne...
[3] http://clearyourshit.com/self-clearing-foundations-1/
[4] http://www.holotropic.com/about.shtml
[5] http://www.dolorescannon.com/about-qhht
[6] http://fourhourworkweek.com/2009/04/13/stoicism-101-a-practi...
One thing that strikes me often with vacations of the average person is how much of a runaway it is. - Fed up with work, I need holidays. #### - Fed up with holidays, can't wait to get back to work.
I've noticed this too, some says it's a bad habit energy we've developed in our modern society, always running to the next thing, always looking to consume. It's as if there is a sense of uneasiness that comes along with stillness. Maybe we need to relearn the art of doing nothing? I've been out of full time work for a while (mostly voluntary due to travelling) and I can, after 6 months feel myself beginning to settl…
I personally find it amusing to see tools which were meant to make people see the underlying meaningless and take up monastic practice, being used as a sort of mollifying tool. Then again, I don't meditate.
Vacations are wide and broad. Normally I try to cram so much traveling, visiting, sight seeing, partying and drinking/eating into my vacation that I'm more burned out when they are over then when I started them. I often joke that I need a vacation from my vacation. I also have this habit to book my flights as close to when my job ends/starts, like take a red-eye right after work and come back the day I start work aga…
Mindfulness meditation is one of the pillars on which my life rests. If you have never done it before, realize that it's hard, especially if you fall anywhere on the ADHD spectrum, and it's just brutal for the first few weeks for anyone. As your brain becomes more still and your focus improves you'll notice your productivity improve. As the mental chatter drops you'll also notice the problems in your life, that you'v…
Hint: meditation requires a profound changes in ones assumptions about his own nature and conditioning. That's why the teaching of the Buddha has been a philosophy, not a book of asanas. Meditation is the tool to realize accuracy and correctness of Buddha's insights. To test and validate his hypothesis by yourself.
there is a good place to start: https://www.coursera.org/learn/science-of-meditation
Mindfulness meditation is one of the pillars on which my life rests. If you have never done it before, realize that it's hard, especially if you fall anywhere on the ADHD spectrum, and it's just brutal for the first few weeks for anyone. As your brain becomes more still and your focus improves you'll notice your productivity improve. As the mental chatter drops you'll also notice the problems in your life, that you'v…
How exactly do you think it has helped you? What tangible benefits have you noticed?
In broad terms, the mind slowly gets remold in a very beneficial way. It's a bit like standing in a huge, noisy crowd where you couldn't make sense of much things because everything's moving, but with such training you slowly gain some distance, like you step back and you see the crowd from slightly above/afar (while still being present) and can notice the general movement as well as (increasingly with time) details, which somehow builds a feedback loop that makes you grow calmer. Everything then trickles down from that.
Mindfulness meditation is one of the pillars on which my life rests. If you have never done it before, realize that it's hard, especially if you fall anywhere on the ADHD spectrum, and it's just brutal for the first few weeks for anyone. As your brain becomes more still and your focus improves you'll notice your productivity improve. As the mental chatter drops you'll also notice the problems in your life, that you'v…
I've been going through challenging times and have been confronted with somethings I've never had to deal with before. There are a couple of things that trigger anxiety in me on a daily basis now. I wake up in the middle of the night with little anxiety episodes. I'm unfocused at work because of what feels like underlying emotional issues. The only thing that's helped (I am trying to fix without medication) are the t…
Normally I wouldn't attack something that someone else feels is helping (even placebos can be helpful for some people), but this is the top comment.
I've been going through challenging times and have been confronted with somethings I've never had to deal with before. There are a couple of things that trigger anxiety in me on a daily basis now. I wake up in the middle of the night with little anxiety episodes. I'm unfocused at work because of what feels like underlying emotional issues. The only thing that's helped (I am trying to fix without medication) are the t…
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