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The Problem of Mindfulness
51–60 of 161 posts
Re: The Problem of Mindfulness
#52I think mindfulness is a useful tool. From there one needs a framework from which to operate on what it provides. Psychology for example. Though personally I like rationality as a pop-culture-esque pairing better. https://www.lesswrong.com/rationality
Re: The Problem of Mindfulness
#53While there are a lot of truths in this article, there's also a thread of misconception running through it, embodied most prominently in the line "Without some ownership of one’s feelings and thoughts, it is difficult to take responsibility for them." Mindfulness is about creating space between you and your thoughts, not ignoring or discounting them. It allows you to look at them subjectively, rather than being carri…
> allows you to look at them subjectively
I think you meant, "objectively"?
Re: The Problem of Mindfulness
#54Re: The Problem of Mindfulness
#55That's not awakening, that's going to sleep. Dare to be human, to have desires, to have a will. Don't just "accept" the world, shape it. You have an eternity to be nothing, be something now.
One could say there are plenty of people on earth who practiced mindfulness, had feelings and shaped the world.
I suppose they hadn't had enough practice then.
Re: The Problem of Mindfulness
#56"With its promises of assisting everyone with anything and everything, the mistake of the mindfulness movement is to present its impersonal mode of awareness as a superior or universally useful one"
It's difficult for me to imagine a person that would not benefit from taking a break from the non-stop stream of thoughts and the overidentification that comes with it.
Re: The Problem of Mindfulness
#57This seems extremely anecdotal and biased against newcomers to mindfulness. Basically it doesn't sit right with the author and doesn't sit right with some Buddhists. That's not a great argument against it.
Re: The Problem of Mindfulness
#58the thing that rubs me the wrong way about mindfulness is how it sits neatly between secularism, spirituality and obsessive self-improvement, it's exactly the sort of thing "high performers" who are full of themselves are drawn to. No value commitments, little meaningful connection to the real world, it's the sort of replacement for religiousness you expect to find in a tech mecca, which is of course where it has bee…
> A few years ago it was reading [Marcus Aurelius] and the stoics
Well, Stoicism turns out to be difficult.
Re: The Problem of Mindfulness
#59I've had very similar thoughts about mindfullness. Mindfullness tells you to observe your fears and other feelings and see that they come and go, while it does not focus at all on whether and to what degree they are actual valid and important. Feelings are often signals from your subconsciousness, which is trying to tell that something. Of course, a lot of the time these signals can be BS or blown out of proportions…
I'm in that boat too. Before meditation, I used to practice self-hypnosis and at the beginning, I thought they were similar. But self hypnosis helps you change your thoughts, when meditation is simply acknowledgement of thoughts, which feels useless to me.
In a sense, meditation seems very shallow, it's the very first step. Then come the techniques of self-hypnosis which lead to change and the real self-help. I don't think that acceptation is enough to make your life better, just a little less miserable.
Re: The Problem of Mindfulness
#60It’s mystifying how something so simple can be turned into something so complicated. Just pay attention, that’s confusing now?