Ask HN: What exactly is a mindfulness meditation?

You are mistaking focus for meditation. As in, to "meditate on something." Certainly, meditation training involves focusing on something, but that is not the goal. (See "barking at the finger").

The first goal is to use attention to notice why attention fails to stay focused. You realize you involuntarily experience thoughts arising and pulling you from what you are focusing on. Eventually, you become aware of the ceaseless, rootless, seemingly causeless stream of thoughts that you've been calling your "inner self" this whole time. At this point you are experiencing the "Movie theater effect" described in other replies.

So, stage one is "So what". Stage two is "Holy shit I'm always distracted". At stage two you start to feel relaxation as you detach from the feelings that those thoughts cause. Because those thoughts don't feel like really "yours" anymore.

You can stop here and read "waking up" a few times to get a better diagnosis of the problem with this pathway to enlightenment.

I'll try to summarize:

Stage 3 is ... Nothing, really. There is no "you" there is only these stream of thoughts, and the thoughts about those thoughts, and etc etc. You could have seen this without all this focus-on-breath business.

Or so I'm told. I'm at stage 2, and stage 3 makes sense to me in terms of physics, but it is difficult to push back the fog of self-delusion.

Hmh; so, generally, the retreat is called something like "Ignatian Spiritual Exercises". I did it in Poland, my home country & language, so don't have data for any other country/language, but I'd say maybe try contacting your Friendly Local Jesuit Priest (tm) ;) As to books, I bought a few after my most recent retreat, but haven't really tried reading any one yet :P Um, there's the original book by St. Ignatius, but it's from a very different time and mentality, so be warned; the priests themselves emphasize this disclaimer often, and they certainly refined the method over the few centuries; though some quotes were timeless enough that they're still used verbatim. I guess you could maybe also try researching the topic on the internet, but I have no idea if you'll be able to easily find anything not aimed at advertising to the faithful and emphasizing this aspect. That said, now that I think, if you'd be able to find some actual materials for Jesuit priests (if such even exist - but again, try asking your friendly neighborhood Jesuit maybe?), those could be interesting; I seem to have found the guys very down to earth, and they clearly had psychological and pedagogical background - at least those leading the retreat. I don't feel they would try to be hiding anything, just probably assuming nobody sane is interested in studying the stuff if not assigned to be a retreat leader. Again, assuming such materials actually exist outside seminary lecture notes. But given that IIUC every (Caholic) priest is mandated to undergo the Exercises during their education, I would guess literature like that might exist. But you might find more if you try to research yourself vs. me randomly speculating any more, given that I don't seem to really care too much about that as of now :P

If you're serious you won't try to learn from web postings or even books or gurus.

You'll find an organization that has been teaching meditation for decades or longer with good results, and commit to their introductory training. Only such a group has the integrity and intelligence to help you untie your specific knots at specific moments in your journey.

If you need justification or a mental model, think of it this way: the mind presents itself as a series of often-mutually reinforcing emotions and concepts, based in limbic and associational networks of the brain. Meditation is training that decouples associations and valuations, to avoid vicious feedback cycles driving most thinking and feeling. It is hard, hard, work to reprogram yourself, but it's also natural: if you just don't feed the feedback or practice the reaction, then the reinforcement decays, and you discover you can experience sensations instead of emotional reactions and assessments. That can seem relatively (though briefly) liberating. You will find yourself more capable of changing your mind, and more interested in having a true sense of the world than in promoting your personal perspective/agenda/emotional-crisis.

Meditation will not make you more likable or marketable or powerful. If you want something out of it, you will get nowhere. It may destabilize your personality and your relationships, to the extent they depend on mutual "interests" that decay with meditation.

If you want to be alive, do it. Practice until you can at least go to a 10-day retreat. Daily/hourly meditation may be calming, but you won't experience the depths of your mind until it's all you do, every day, for more days than you can count.

To live is more important than success, work, education, or marriage (but perhaps not kids).

What prevents you having a direct real experience of God (call it what you will) is the crap that goes on in your mind. An analogy is to think of God as pure silence and the incessant mind chatter as constant noise. You need to remove the noise to hear the silence. The problem is doing that ain't easy.

The purpose of the external world is for you to do your karma. You can only be born if you have karma to fulfill. From that you gain experience and grow. But it is a meaningless distraction. The path of the return to God is about mastering what happens between your ears. The external world doesn't actually matter, it is an imposed regimen.

My own experience.

I started out with meditation after reading how it was integral in hindu philosophy. I subscribed to the 'think nothing' path of meditation. The focus on your breath or on an 'Om' chant is just a pathway to get to that state of mindfulness. As background, I consider myself as someone who has a decent amount of control over my mind (It's probably just my ego). However when I tried to start thinking nothing, I found it incredibly hard to do. I try to suppress all the thoughts in my mind and actually think nothing, something keeps creeping in.

After a few weeks of practice I began to get there, actively suppressing my conscious thoughts for a few minutes at a time. That's when the senses hypersensitivity began to kick in. I began to hear every bird, every small sound and every smell in the vicinity. I meditate outside so sometimes I'd feel a small ant crawling near my arm, or a small insect sit on my neck. Since I had my eyes closed, visual stimuli were technically already blocked out, but I still sometimes saw phantom images or these fractal patterns from the light leaking through my eyelids. Suppressing these and stopping thinking about these were another level of effort that took weeks.

One other thing I noticed is how time sort of lost meaning. Sometimes I'd stop meditating to find that 25 minutes had passed, sometimes I'd find I barely did 7.

I'm by no means any expert at doing this for myself. Everytime I had a break and stopped meditating for a few days or weeks (when I was on vacation or such), it took weeks to get back to the state I was. If I meditate for like 25 minutes, it's like only 12-14 minutes I'm really in the deepest state. The rest of the time I'm trying to get back there since something has distracted me.

I honestly don't know what it does for me. I do feel next level refreshed after a longish session, even better than the best sleep ever. Honestly, the thing that keeps me going on this is my ego that I can't even control my own mind. I actually try to ignore all commercial forms of meditation training and try out stuff on my own. That way I don't really have the need to validate it as a 'scam' or as 'worthy'.

Just my personal 2 cents.