I use fishing for the same purposes. Helps me concentrate on just that activity and get my mind off work-related stuff. Every time after a fishing trip I feel really rested, although might be tired a bit physically.
If You're Too Busy to Meditate, Read This
111–120 of 221 posts
Re: If You're Too Busy to Meditate, Read This
#112The misconception about meditation is that it requires one to give up everything and sit silently. This is not true in its entirety as it depends on how one interprets the word "meditation". The meditation does not necessarily require you to give up one thing for the sake of another. The goal of the meditation is to "be in awareness" and you can achieve this same goal by being alert and aware with any activity your f…
> The misconception about meditation is that it requires one to give up everything and sit silently. This is not true in its entirety as it depends on how one interprets the word "meditation".
That's right. There are prayer or mantra techniques that could be practiced anywhere, any time. In the Indian culture, there are people who say their mantra (sometimes silently, with no external sound or movement of the tongue) when they go about their daily business. In Orthodox cultures in Eastern Europe, there are people saying the Prayer of the Heart, again, during their daily routine (often silently, without any external sign of the practice).
There are also techniques of focusing your mind on various psycho-physiological aspects (breathing, various "energy centers", etc), but those may be a little harder to do while engaged in your normal routine.
There are also ways of maintaining a meditation-like, or "prayerful", state of mind and feeling during normal activities. This may require some prior experience.
In any case, yes, meditation does not mandate sitting down either on a chair or cross-legged, with eyes closed. Some techniques may actually require that posture, but others don't. It depends.
Re: If You're Too Busy to Meditate, Read This
#113Wait. Wait wait wait. > Research shows that an ability to resist urges will improve your relationships, increase your dependability, and raise your performance... Great. Yes. Impulse control is key. Delayed gratification is part of how we define higher intelligence. Meditation has what do with this, exactly? > How [does meditation help]? By increasing your capacity to resist distracting urges. This entire article is…
Meditation is the focused practice of resisting distraction. Have you ever tried sitting still for 15-30 minutes, doing nothing but breathing? Distractions come easily in this state. Sometimes it's your thoughts. Other times, it's very hard to resist the urge to get up and start moving. In order to successfully meditate, you need to deal with a wide variety of distractions and other obstacles.
How do you know that resisting distraction while meditating makes it easier for you to resist urges otherwise? Maybe we actually have a finite store of urge-resistance to go through each day, and spending it on meditation actually makes things worse.
I'm not saying that's true, but I think GP's point is that we should really have some kind of evidence that meditation helps with this, rather than simply assuming that it helps because it makes you practice it.
Re: If You're Too Busy to Meditate, Read This
#114Earlier quoted context omitted.
I am here to tell you the placebo effect is nearly impossible to spot from the inside out. Your brain is just not wired to pierce the veil of selection bias without a lot of effort. You are saying, "Doing X made me feel good." But I am saying that nearly anything in that X spot might do the same. It's just the way the human mind works. In testing out Piracetam on myself I've been especially aware of this, because eve…
Placebo effect has no meaning in this context. Placebo effects are caused by mind rather than a substance. In this case, the entire treatment is in the mind. There are many, many, many studies on the benefits and effects of meditation. If you haven't found any, it's because you are not looking.
"Placebo effect has no meaning in this context. Placebo effects are caused by mind rather than a substance. In this case, the entire treatment is in the mind."
If you're a dualist, then okay. But I'm not. And since the mot compelling evidence of the effect of meditation so far presented involves structural changes to the brain, I think you just talked yourself out of a case.
"There are many, many, many studies on the benefits and effects of meditation. If you haven't found any, it's because you are not looking."
Within the context of improving your ability to withstand distraction? Most everything linked here is almost invariably about structural alterations which are surely significant, but not tied to any specific effect.
Re: If You're Too Busy to Meditate, Read This
#115I highly recommend to take a 10 days retreat in a Vipassana[1] meditation center. I know that 10 days is a lot to ask but in my opinion is well worth the effort. I've been there twice in the past three years. I thought that I understood everything the first time. Boy, was I wrong. [1] http://www.dhamma.org/
If those rules don't creep you out, then I don't know what does: http://www.dhamma.org/en/code.shtml No talking, no outside contact, no other forms of practice. This is not a healthy environment unless you know very well what to expect and are sure you really, really want this. It sounds very cultish to me, even though I do know somebody who goes on Vipassana retreats regularly and seems to benefit a lot. Those retre…
Cults have rules like that to cut you out of your old life, but in this case I think it's a legitimate desire to eliminate ALL distraction. I did one of their retreats many years ago and concluded that the changes in my internal life that could only happen in such an environment.
For example, after a few days my internal monologue petered out and for the first time I realized that a good portion of my mental activity was normally devoted to thinking about things I was going to say later on. Once I was out of the habit of talking all the time, I stopped cooking up little quips and observations about everything and really felt an expansion of non-verbal thinking.
So, although I had my doubts about the place going in, I left feeling that 10 days of intense internal focus was the only possible way to reach the insights I'd had, and that I was glad I'd done it. The months afterwards (while I kept up the practice, before I got "too busy"), were the most contented of my life.
Re: If You're Too Busy to Meditate, Read This
#116The misconception about meditation is that it requires one to give up everything and sit silently. This is not true in its entirety as it depends on how one interprets the word "meditation". The meditation does not necessarily require you to give up one thing for the sake of another. The goal of the meditation is to "be in awareness" and you can achieve this same goal by being alert and aware with any activity your f…
Sorry, this is hard for me to understand. You seem to be saying--and I apologize if I misinterpret you--that it is better to focus on dishwashing than to use otherwise idle mental time to plan one's future. Is that really the case? What gains could one expect from focusing on dishwashing, only to take time away from some other activity to plan one's future?
Yes and no. It could be that there's a misunderstanding of what meditation is, or is good for.
Sometimes it's best to use your time to actually practice your football skills, go out on the field and play; or else spend that time planning the next game, doing strategy and stuff like that.
But other times it's best to go to the gym and lift weights. That may seem like a waste of time for a football player, but it actually makes him stronger, so he gets better results in the game - because he engaged in a seemingly unrelated activity. Strangely enough. ;)
Same with washing dishes. Sometimes you use that time to draw plans for the future, advance the theoretical side for the projects you're working on ("play actual football with your team mates in the field"). Other times it's best to use those moments to meditate ("lift weights at the gym"). Both are useful, and in fact it's best if you practice both, at different times.
Re: If You're Too Busy to Meditate, Read This
#117I'm into the basic practice of mindfulness since years. I read research papers about it every month and also train people in mindfulness skills. Here is the essence of what I learned. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sspY43lxqhE&list=UUh-TdJw...
Re: If You're Too Busy to Meditate, Read This
#118Earlier quoted context omitted.
> But you also claim that taking a period of time in a day to train oneself to resist distractions does not lead to a more focused mindset throughout the day. I think most of us who have practiced meditation (and actually put real effort in, rather than reflecting on other thoughts during the practice) would disagree. Not to put too fine a point on this, because I'm not trying t pick a fight here, but... Homeopaths w…
Here's a study... http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/m/pubmed/22363278/?i=10&from... It may have been mentioned already, I just did a simple pubmed search. I would guess that exercise would have some of the same benefits, especially if it's exercise that one forces oneself to do, rather than just a fun activity. I don't have a study for that hypothesis though.
So that's a good start. Is that all we have? I see some credible studies on pubmed (and plenty of studies with all the markers of being useless, some outright mentioning "CAM"-friendly goals in the abstract), but most of them involve things like mindfulness meditation as a method of improving performance on X, where X is some sort of motor-coordination task.
What the study you cited suggests interesting research could be done. My big question is that is any sort of hard focus activity of the same quality as meditation?
Re: If You're Too Busy to Meditate, Read This
#119Earlier quoted context omitted.
Meditation is the focused practice of resisting distraction. Have you ever tried sitting still for 15-30 minutes, doing nothing but breathing? Distractions come easily in this state. Sometimes it's your thoughts. Other times, it's very hard to resist the urge to get up and start moving. In order to successfully meditate, you need to deal with a wide variety of distractions and other obstacles.
> Meditation is the focused practice of resisting distraction. Are we defining it this way? Because this does not jive with my experience of meditation, focusing, or resisting distraction. > Have you ever tried sitting still for 15-30 minutes, doing nothing but breathing? Yes. As a matter of fact, meditation was part of a martial arts practice I participated in for 2 years. In all that time I tried very hard to do th…
Are you familiar with the 10,000 Hour Rule? It says that the mastery of any skill requires 10k hours of deliberate practice of that skill. Meditation is the act of deliberately practicing and developing one's ability to resist distraction.
The hypothesis is as simple as "Telling jokes is a good way to become funny". Would you demand empirical evidence to support that claim as well? It might be difficult to find research to back it up, as it's so obvious that no one took the time to do a study.
There's no guarantee that meditation will work for you, just like some people might tell a lot of jokes and not get any funnier. If someone was forced to tell jokes like you were forced to meditate, they probably wouldn't like it either. But the value of the meditation seems to be obvious - if you want to get better at resisting distraction, then sit down and practice resisting distraction.
Re: If You're Too Busy to Meditate, Read This
#120Focus on your breath going in and out. Every time you have a thought or an urge, notice it and bring yourself back to your breath. From what I've heard so far, meditation is based on focusing on your body in order to quiet your mind. Are there other schools/techniques?
The techniques are so numerous!
There are many techniques that use pure visualization - all in your mind. There are mantra (or prayer) techniques, that require repeating a certain formula, either out loud or silently (in your mind). There are devotional techniques where the practitioner is worshiping an image or a symbol of a deity (the deity itself being a metaphor of some aspect of consciousness states). There are the dancing dervishes. Goes on and on.