21–30 of 101 posts
This totally rewired my brain and I had to go to therapy. There I was recommended mindfulness meditation.
It really helped me a lot to get rid of racing thoughts and finally get some sleep and general peace of mind.
From an outsider's perspective, it just seems like a way to replicate daily prayers. I'll stick with the Rosary thanks.
One part of mindfulness meditation is deliberate practice at directed focus, and that practice improves your ability to think about what you want to think about rather than what your mind wanders to. There's another common practice where you actually intentionally practice allowing your mind to wander, and consciously choose to dismiss those thoughts.
I see mindfulness meditation as orthogonal to actual prayer, a little axe-sharpening that improves not only my prayer life but my general thought processes as well. If I only have time for one and not the other, obviously prayer is more important.
[0] For people who don't know, the Rosary is a series of meditations on different aspects of the lives of Jesus and Mary and the ministry of Jesus, in the form of an easily-memorized sequence of rote prayers. The rote nature of the prayers allows the person saying the rosary to use the brain's fuzzy focus to think about each aspect in turn. In total it consists of the Apostle's Creed, 6 "Our Father"s, 53 "Hail Mary"s, 6 "Glory Be"s, and one "Hail Holy Queen", taking between 10 minutes (if you're in a rush) and 20 minutes (if you're sleepy).
This makes the assumption that our priority is to change/fix things. I'm usually of this mindset too, but there's something to the argument of accepting what is and being calm and present to the moment. We can't really know which approach is best, because we can't A/B test human life. Who knows... perhaps if everyone were calm and peaceful, much would change without activism.
Mindfulness does not imply you should not get angry at injustice, for example, but that you might want to observe that emotion arising and understand what you're actually angry about and why before you act. Sometimes you'll catch yourself being manipulated, or you'll realize you're angry about the wrong thing, or lashing out at the wrong person or entity.
As such I think the author would have done much better to focus on why mindfulness is not about inaction, and should not be used as an excuse for inaction. If someone wants to focus only inwards, that's got nothing to do with mindfulness, and in fact if they use mindfulness as an excuse for that, they are failing at being mindful if they're not mindful that it is just an excuse.
Mindfulness certainly can make some people more ready to accept life as it is, but the point then is that suffering for the sake of suffering is pretty irrational - if you can find a way to accept your current situation, then that is good. But accepting it does not mean you can not want to change it. But you should be aware of why, not just blindly fight for something that might not make you or others any happier.
I do think you're right that if everyone were calm and peaceful much would change without activism, but I also don't think mindfulness means no activism. Different activism, perhaps.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
That is also the goal of religion. Tell your worries to god in silence and peace, then wait and be patient for God to fix it.
That is so simplified that it is more wrong than right. I don't know of any mainstream religion that encourages waiting for god to fix things.
There we go. The authors biased and naive opinion of mindfulness is just that. His opinion. Without any awareness of itself. What happens when we have nothing to think about but thoughts? We lose ourselves in the content of thought without seeing them for what they really are. Human says "my thoughts", yet believes himself to be the content of the thoughts, the seemingly very important thoughts that start with "I" an…
> mindfulness is just that. His opinion.
Except, it's not labeled as opinion. At this point I just consider the entirely of The Guardian an an opinion piece.
Anyone who actually knows what mindfulness is can immediately see that they're building the biggest strawman ever with the sole purpose of forcing anti capitalist agenda down our throats.
Remember this: It used to be that news were facts and you formulated an opinion on them. Now the news is opinion and you're trying to figure out what the facts were.
Anything has pros and cons, even if they are not obvious at a first glance. Doesn't mean there is an obscure element to it.
How is staying blind to what you're actually thinking good in any way? All it does is make us a reactionary creature, which is exactly what you need to be to burn a whole society to the ground.
Thanks Guardian, this is exactly what we need. More violence, more escalation, more rash decisions. Journalism 2019 - and they ask for your donations.
Anyone doing meditation probably knows that those thoughts will come back, meditation is not exactly a "full stress-relief" like lifting weights, doing intense exercise,ranting,sex,etc.Arguably the deepest fears/stress don't go away depending on the severity, in which case, again, meditation is not to blame for ameliorating a troubled mind.
Feels like the author is just mad there's less "activism" because of meditation.Clearly upset about the fact that her wishes don't get attention while people get on better with their lives thanks to some "neat tricks" we've learned about our brain.
"Mindfulness" is really the most subjective thing ever, and it's rather hard for one to develop a technique to set their minds straight on their objective during the day.Looks like some people think this "life-style" is overrated just because they can't do it themselves.Obviously being a journalist/intaking a lot of news daily will make you more stressed than not,which makes it harder to "cope".
From Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Th%C3%ADch_Qu%E1%BA%A3ng_%C4%9...)
"Đức calmly sat down in the traditional Buddhist meditative lotus position on the cushion. A colleague emptied the contents of the petrol container over Đức's head. Đức rotated a string of wooden prayer beads and recited the words Nam mô A Di Đà Phật ("Homage to Amitābha Buddha") before striking a match and dropping it on himself."
"Photographs of his self-immolation were circulated widely across the world and brought attention to the policies of the Diệm government. John F. Kennedy said in reference to a photograph of Đức on fire, "No news picture in history has generated so much emotion around the world as that one.""