Ask HN: Do you meditate?

Interesting quote—I like it.

The 'Second Thoughts' definition is useful because it is the exact opposite of what you do in meditation.

I think it would be valid to say that meditation is training in understanding what it really means to 'do nothing,' and that when you area REALLY doing nothing—everything is great.

I see it like this: verbal/rational thought (typically involving the concept of yourself) arises in order to figure out how to change some aspect of your situation; with meditation you learn to understand "everything is okay, at least for the next 20 minutes," and thoughts melt away, you smell things and hear things and temperature becomes present, etc. Movies, books, people, food—you name it, can all be super rich and interesting when you are just doing this non-thinking, understanding there's nothing to do, letting life speak instead of talking over it.

I think of it as training in discerning when you are 'talking over' your experience versus JUST experiencing.

If you want some more, I wrote this very short story to exemplify how it is to be caught in the '2-dimensional plane' of believing that various forms of thought are your only possible 'actions,' while it's true that an utterly simple third dimension exists. https://medium.com/@westoncb/don-t-worry-631ce63934c1 That story describes less informed ways of getting oneself to stop thinking. It's sort of like you are waving your hands wildly all the time and you'd like to stop, so you keep trying different types of hand waving in order to stop it—whereas what you really want is to just not do it, but you have to figure that out!

If you're interested in trying it, and you've had any issues with mental health, and you're a complete beginner, I'd strongly recommend this book: http://www.amazon.com/Full-Catastrophe-Living-Wisdom-Illness...

I meditate, but only for 2 to 5 minutes at a time. When I do it much longer than that, vaguely-bad things happen. (It would take a long time to explain. Suffice to say that I am chronically ill, and if I were healthier, I could probably meditate longer without these vague negative consequences.)

Usually I set a timer (about which more below) for 2 minutes, then right after that, 2 minutes more. If I ever "flunk" a meditation session, I take that as a strong sign that my mind is not working as well as it should be, and I try to fix that. It is also a sign that more meditation is needed on that day.

"Flunking" a meditation session means I got distracted and forgot that I was supposed to be meditating. For example, recently, some of my neighbors were having an animated conversation in the courtyard of my apartment building, and I was feeling lonely, so I went out there to participate. When I returned to my computer (I meditate in front of my computer) there was a some text on my screen put there by my meditation timer (which I wrote, in Emacs Lisp) which is how I became aware that I had flunked a meditation session.

More detail: at the scheduled end of a meditation session, an Emacs timer inserts "Timer finished: meditation " into an Emacs buffer visiting a file that serves as a record of my meditation sessions. (Emacs also automatically inserts the time and duration of every session into this file.) Since at the end of a meditation session, I am in the habit of adding the letter "s" (for "success") to the text, the presence of an instance of "Timer finished: meditation " not followed by "s" was a sure sign that I had flunked the session.

I've been doing these short meditation sessions with my "timer" written in Emacs Lisp since Jan 2008. I do not do them regularly -- only when I remember to do so, which (a quick look at my files reveals) was on 7 of the last 30 days.

I do not have unequivocal evidence that meditation does me any good. The main reasons I keep at it is that so many other people report good effects and the my understanding of some studies on "mindfulness-based stress reduction" (which BTW found effects from very short meditation sessions).

Yes. I do a lot of different ways of it though, whatever strikes my mood. Much of it is the many variations in chinese martial arts:

(either no music, or mild music, like rain patter, nothing w/ lyrics)

I find meditation is a lot about your breath, so you can do all of these either with normal breathing or these variations:

1) n/n*2/x breathing. (i'm only at n=3 atm) 2) full lung & empty lung variations (this link does a decent job explaining : http://www.yogaindailylife.org/esystem/yoga/en/020200/exerci... )

The different types of mediation i do are:

1) moving: Tai Chi

2) standing: holding ball (from tai chi)

3) sitting : Grand Circle of Heaven (found this link which explains it well : http://ymaa.com/articles/martial-grand-circulation) (imagine the energy flow in a circle though your body as you breath)

4)(This one i think i made up on my own) : any of the above while having having pink noise playing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZXtimhT-ff4

I learned to meditate in my late teens (I'm 68 now), to fight depression and low self esteem. It was very hard for me to meditate, and I still sometimes have trouble getting into a meditative state. But I usually spend 20-30 minutes meditating during the day, or before bed. It helps me clear any depression I feel. No idea how or why it works, but for me it is very helpful.