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If You're Too Busy to Meditate, Read This

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Re: If You're Too Busy to Meditate, Read This

#151

Post by MattGrommes »

agumonkey wrote: post #106
mck- wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Never be embarrassed. I do it all the time ;) I'd be walking home from work, focussing hard not to walk. Just staring blindly ahead, allowing auto-pilot to take me home, and focus on every sensation of every muscle in every part of my body. Then again, this was in Hong Kong, where you see groups of oldies doing Taichi and what-not in every corner of the city. I still do it occasionally here in Vancouver, the city of…

In-house the game is to be as stealth as possible while doing any kind of chore. Ninja mode, or 'do not wake women at night' mode. Just moving a cup (even worse, a metallic object) from A to B becomes a challenge, but when you drop the cup on the table without any sound you feel like a magician.

That's cool, I do the same and hadn't considered that others would too. :) I always cringed when my wife and kids crash around making a racket doing everything but I realized they were just making normal noise and my perception was warped from trying to do everything silently.

Re: If You're Too Busy to Meditate, Read This

#152

Post by jdc »

KirinDave wrote: post #8

Wait. 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…

Right, I'm pretty sold on meditation having benefits, but this "practice resisting" mechanism seems like a flippant guess. Then there's the "willpower is a finite resource" studies argue that the opposite effect is more likely for people merely restraining themselves.

Re: If You're Too Busy to Meditate, Read This

#153

Post by kylebrown »

hollerith wrote: post #148
kylebrown wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On what to do physically, my recommendation is to use mediation beads (aka mala beads). 6-count breathing (6 on each inhale and exhale) and move one bead each breath. With the standard 108-beads, you start at the mala and it takes about 20 minutes to reach the end (you feel your fingers reach the mala again). For the mental aspect, a good starting point is the audio session Alan Watts Teaches Mediation. http://www.yo…

Beads, eh? I wrote an Emacs command to notify me when my meditation period has ended.

I suppose that would work. Press a key on each breath, and use a script to alert after 108 keystrokes.

Re: If You're Too Busy to Meditate, Read This

#154

Post by starpilot »

prawks wrote: post #131
up_and_up wrote: post #127

In my opinion, Meditation and Mindfullness are not the same thing. Meditation is a state, where the mind is completely silent, the breath slows waaaay down, the heartbeat slows waaaay down. Slowly ever so slowly, some bliss starts to bubble up from within. It is the climax of one pointed attention. Few people who say they "meditate" are reaching that point since it requires years of sincere effort. In Yoga, meditatio…

If one were looking to get into Meditation, what is a good way of going about it? Preferably a DIY way if possible, but if a class is really the way to go that's okay. When you say years of sincere effort, are you talking devoting a full-time job's worth of time, or just keeping a routine? I've been interested in meditation for a while, but it seems whenever I try and dig around I get completely lost in literature an…

I've read maybe a dozen books on vipassana meditation (the type usually posted to HN), zen, and mindfulness. The two best practical books on meditation I've read are:

1. The Miracle of Mindfulness, Thich Nhat Hanh

2. Mindfulness in Plain English, Bhante Gunaratana. This one is free online, though the paid copy is a bit more edited for clarity.

My primary guide is 1. It's concise and provides just the right amount of breathing exercises to help me focus while I "sit." 2 is more comprehensive but I've found it a bit too scattered, with too many tools to help with breathing that I go in circles attempting different ones. Most people I think employ a couple and ignore the rest. 1 is much better written and just a more cohesive book than 2 IMO, but they're both great books and either one alone works well as a guide to meditating.

Re: If You're Too Busy to Meditate, Read This

#155

Post by hollerith »

eof wrote: post #57
KirinDave wrote: post #8

Wait. 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…

Article is not wrong about this. It is hard to measure what meditation is doing on a subjective level, which is very specific and easy to talk about amongst people who have spent even an hour meditating. The key here, which for you might be a leap of faith, is that when one tries to simply focus on their breath (or the dishes), completely without our permission thoughts continue to pop into our head. The 'natural' th…

>Anyone who has spent say, >3 hours of their life meditating will recognize it as a fact that meditation strengthens your will.

I've spent hundreds of hours meditating over the last 40 years, and it is far from apparent to me that it strengthened my will.

Re: If You're Too Busy to Meditate, Read This

#156

Post by kylek »

hollerith wrote: post #148
kylebrown wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On what to do physically, my recommendation is to use mediation beads (aka mala beads). 6-count breathing (6 on each inhale and exhale) and move one bead each breath. With the standard 108-beads, you start at the mala and it takes about 20 minutes to reach the end (you feel your fingers reach the mala again). For the mental aspect, a good starting point is the audio session Alan Watts Teaches Mediation. http://www.yo…

Beads, eh? I wrote an Emacs command to notify me when my meditation period has ended.

Oh yeah! Good ol' C-x M-c M-beads...

(... http://xkcd.com/378/ )

Re: If You're Too Busy to Meditate, Read This

#157

Post by hollerith »

kylebrown wrote: post #153
hollerith wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Beads, eh? I wrote an Emacs command to notify me when my meditation period has ended.

I suppose that would work. Press a key on each breath, and use a script to alert after 108 keystrokes.

I don't go in for doing the same thing over and over like some Buddhists like to do.

It's just a timer, which I set for 3 to 5 minutes. When the timer reaches 0, (part of) a particular song plays. (And a record is made of the start and end times of the meditation session.)

In the rare case that I am doing something other than meditating when that song plays, I know I got so distracted that I did not even notice I got distracted -- which I take as a sign that I have an unusually pressing need for meditation that day.

Re: If You're Too Busy to Meditate, Read This

#158

Post by TeMPOraL »

chc wrote: post #104
jemfinch wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Let's phrase it another way: Is it good to make decisions about your future while 60% of your brainpower is focused on cleaning dishes? You'll do both things more efficiently if you give them your all rather than having your attention constantly flit between them. Imagine if, while programming, you had to switch between projects every five minutes. You'd never get anything done! Yet we expect our brains to perform we…

> Is it good to make decisions about your future while 60% of your brainpower is focused on cleaning dishes?

Brain doesn't work like that. You can actually do stuff in parallel without performance penalty as long as the tasks you are doing use different types of mental resources. I find it easy to wash dishes well while simultaneously planning my future / thinking about whatever. Quite often the thinking I do while washing dishes or in the shower is much better in quality than the thinking at my desk or near the whiteboard.

Re: If You're Too Busy to Meditate, Read This

#159

Post by driverdan »

mtts wrote: post #126
driverdan wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is exactly how I lift weights / exercise, with complete focus and mindfulness. While working out it is all I think about. I put on headphones with fast, heavy music and focus on the exercise I'm doing at that moment. I don't think about email in my inbox, I don't think about the errands I need to run, I don't talk to the other people around me. I think about my muscles contracting. I think about the extra 5 lbs…

Weight lifting could be mindfulness, but only if you don't "put on headphones with fast, heavy music". Those headphones are a distraction.

They aren't because they help shut out the outside world. I don't focus on the music, the music helps me focus on my lifts.

Re: If You're Too Busy to Meditate, Read This

#160

Post by prostoalex »

prawks wrote: post #131
up_and_up wrote: post #127

In my opinion, Meditation and Mindfullness are not the same thing. Meditation is a state, where the mind is completely silent, the breath slows waaaay down, the heartbeat slows waaaay down. Slowly ever so slowly, some bliss starts to bubble up from within. It is the climax of one pointed attention. Few people who say they "meditate" are reaching that point since it requires years of sincere effort. In Yoga, meditatio…

If one were looking to get into Meditation, what is a good way of going about it? Preferably a DIY way if possible, but if a class is really the way to go that's okay. When you say years of sincere effort, are you talking devoting a full-time job's worth of time, or just keeping a routine? I've been interested in meditation for a while, but it seems whenever I try and dig around I get completely lost in literature an…

Mindfulness to Go: How to Meditate While You're On the Move is practical and written with Western reader in mind.
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