151–160 of 214 posts
The study compared a week of health lectures and "fun outdoor stuff" to a week-long meditation retreat. This isn't meditation vs. vacation, it's meditation+vacation vs. vacation.
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Life doesn't relent. Even young, rich, beautiful people are susceptible to feelings of unsatisfactory-ness that leave them reaching for the booze and hard drugs or just feeling all around unfulfilled and miserable. Humans are built to run on a hedonic treadmill, not to be content in the moment. Meditation is a tool so that when your life scks, your boss is an ssh*le, and your personal relationships are a mess, THEN s…
Your example was extreme with the 'running them off the road' bit, but actually meditation isn't helpful unless it pushes you to that breaking point. You need to get worked up, speak your mind, start the argument, quit your job when things get too bad. Life isn't a float on the lazy river. Feelings of anger and pain exist for a reason. Thats why meditation, as it's sold, is bullsh*t. You're describing an alternative…
The distinction is that you work on "meta-cognitive awareness". You try to avoid getting swept up in the narrative thought stream if possible. So here goes from my own experience (doesn't work 100% of the time).
without mindful awareness Guy cuts me off -> "WTF is that guy doing? What a moron! Someone always has to mess with me! Look at how smug he is. I want to jam his nose into the back of his head"
with Guy cuts me off -> "WTF is that guy doing? Woah feeling that anger. I can feel it right in my chest and kind of a warm feeling in my face and arms. Hmm interesting. I wonder if he is rushing to the hospital or to some emergency. Just like me, I've accidentally cut someone off before. Oh well what's on the radio"
It helps you build more mature mental models. Mental models are useful but often wrong. Mindfulness can help you question your own mental models and take things less personally. Tons of reputable studies will back up mindfulness and meditation as a standalone or complementary tool for stress, anxiety, depression, and pain. Medication still plays a very important role.
Edit: Upvote to you for bringing up a good point. It is very hard to sort out the bull*hit in the meditation community. There is an awful lot of tradition, psudo-science, and plain old snobbery in this community. Anyone that gets involved should start with the basics and avoid as much of the spiritual hype as possible.
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Do you drink coffee? Try 100% cutting out caffeine!
Any strategies to cut? If I don't drink my morning cup, I get bad headaches around the evening and basically stop functioning.
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Americans just don't get enough vacation time. If you only get two weeks a year, you feel compelled to cram as much in as possible. Four to six weeks is the norm in Europe, so you don't feel guilty about "wasting" a week. With that amount of vacation time, you can take several short breaks and still have time for a big summer trip.
Most professionals get more than two weeks. Two weeks of paid vacation is really minimum entry-level stuff. I walked into 3 weeks and negotiated 4 weeks for next year in my review, and I've known people who (much further in their careers) have 5 or 6. One of the problems in the tech industry specifically is a lot of the PTO schemes in the US are tied to length of service at that company. If you're jumping around ever…
Americans tend not to use all of their vacation time; professionals often end up working remotely while on vacation. There's a fear of losing your job or being overlooked for promotion. This is a largely alien concept in Europe, where job security is much stronger.
http://www.marketwatch.com/story/55-of-american-workers-dont...
They are from UCLA Mindful Awareness Research Center.
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If you think like me that NLP means NonLinear Programming, in this context it means Neuro-linguistic programming [0]: "Neuro-linguistic programming (NLP) is an approach to communication, personal development, and psychotherapy created by Richard Bandler and John Grinder in California, United States in the 1970s. NLP has since been overwhelmingly discredited scientifically, but continues to be marketed by some hypnoth…
From the referenced WP page: By the end of 1980, the collaboration between Bandler and Grinder ended. [...] In July 1996 and January 1997, Bandler instituted a further two civil actions against Grinder and his company, numerous other prominent figures in NLP and 200 further initially unnamed persons. [...] On this matter Stollznow (2010) comments, "[i]ronically, Bandler and Grinder feuded in the 1980s over trademark…
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Americans just don't get enough vacation time. If you only get two weeks a year, you feel compelled to cram as much in as possible. Four to six weeks is the norm in Europe, so you don't feel guilty about "wasting" a week. With that amount of vacation time, you can take several short breaks and still have time for a big summer trip.
Most professionals get more than two weeks. Two weeks of paid vacation is really minimum entry-level stuff. I walked into 3 weeks and negotiated 4 weeks for next year in my review, and I've known people who (much further in their careers) have 5 or 6. One of the problems in the tech industry specifically is a lot of the PTO schemes in the US are tied to length of service at that company. If you're jumping around ever…
In my corner of Canada in the oil industry, vacation days are often based on age and job level. When I turned 30 they automatically gave me additional 1 week. I have 4 weeks plus 2 weeks of "flex days". Flex days are meant for one or two days off at a time, can't use 3 or more flex days back-to-back.
EDIT: Also it is standard for women to get 1 year for maternity leave at a reduced salary.
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That falsely assumes that meditation's only effect is to make you emotionally more durable. One of the interesting effects is that when you become more durable, and able to endure, you're also able to make better decisions. You can "zoom out" and perceive options that were invisible before. Sometimes this means the often painful realization that you are the asshole, and need to change. But other times this means seei…
I'm fond of meditation. I just dispute the idea that in a world full of injustices, that meditation is the path to happiness. We need a bunch of extreme anger and indignation to change the world.
Also -- I believe Buddhism does not apply negative connotations to 'indignation' as opposed to raw anger, i.e. I don't think it is classified as a negative state of mind to be dissolved.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Engaged_Buddhism [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effective_altruism
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Do you drink coffee? Try 100% cutting out caffeine!
One thing I like to do is with anything addicting/I deem as necessary, every now and then I cut it out of my life for a duration. It helps increase my independence by avoiding decisions based on what I misbelieve are necessary. I'm not sure if it's applicable to all, just something that I feel helps me a lot.
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Do you drink coffee? Try 100% cutting out caffeine!
Any strategies to cut? If I don't drink my morning cup, I get bad headaches around the evening and basically stop functioning.