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How Meditation Changes the Brain and Body

well.blogs.nytimes.com

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Re: How Meditation Changes the Brain and Body

#21

Post by LunaSea »

personjerry wrote: post #17
LunaSea wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> interpretations of the world are all in our head I don't think most people are stressed because of "interpretations" of the world rather than very real problems like paying the bills and terrible working conditions.

From my understanding, our minds are are not literally filled with things in the real world (for they would not fit) but are instead filled with "thoughts" which "refer" to real things. But my "thought" of peanut butter, for example, might have significantly different "connotations" for me than for someone with an allergy to peanut butter. So what I'm saying is, these "thoughts" and what they "connote" to the individ…

So how would you alter your thought of a real problem if it seems legitimate to worry about it?

Re: How Meditation Changes the Brain and Body

#22

Post by visarga »

glossyscr wrote: post #20

Meditation is a work-around only. As written in another post: I started one month ago and then I was frequently meditating with Headspace (which is awesome btw). While meditation helped me to go through hard times it never solved the underlying problem. It's like taking painkillers without addressing the real cause. I solved the real underlying problem few days ago and I feel like god again.

> I started one month ago

If I started programming one month ago and I couldn't yet get a high paying job or have a brand new app that is surging on the App Store, would that be a failure? I have been practicing meditation for 25 years and, even though I was earnest, it took me more than 7 years to achieve a state of perfect tranquility. I still have anxious moments in day-to-day life but I mitigate those with meditation. It's like washing your body to keep it clean.

Re: How Meditation Changes the Brain and Body

#23

Post by agumonkey »

glossyscr wrote: post #20

Meditation is a work-around only. As written in another post: I started one month ago and then I was frequently meditating with Headspace (which is awesome btw). While meditation helped me to go through hard times it never solved the underlying problem. It's like taking painkillers without addressing the real cause. I solved the real underlying problem few days ago and I feel like god again.

It already a big steps if it avoid you going off road too much and manage to 'feel' functioning.

Re: How Meditation Changes the Brain and Body

#24

Post by noja »

glossyscr wrote: post #20

Meditation is a work-around only. As written in another post: I started one month ago and then I was frequently meditating with Headspace (which is awesome btw). While meditation helped me to go through hard times it never solved the underlying problem. It's like taking painkillers without addressing the real cause. I solved the real underlying problem few days ago and I feel like god again.

I thought the idea of meditation was to give you the calmness and clarity of mind that would enable you to solve the underlying problem?

What was your underlying problem?

Re: How Meditation Changes the Brain and Body

#25

Post by visarga »

glossyscr wrote: post #2

First time I meditated was one month ago. 20 Minutes. It was a pain, doing nothing, just breathing, keeping focus on your breath and body. I was suffering every second, doing nothing, having no thoughts, no mind wandering. It was so hard and awfully boring. Once finished I went back to my Macbook welcoming me with an open Facebook tab from my last session. My first thought: I didn't do that shit for 20 minutes to be…

> I was suffering every second,

Do you realize you are probably suffering every minute even when you don't have to sit quietly? It is enough to be away from the rich source of distraction and immediately a kind of anxiety appears, making you seek the next stimulus. Is it ok to live with such a constant need to be fed with this stream of data?

Re: How Meditation Changes the Brain and Body

#26

Post by mbrock »

erdojo wrote: post #18

There is also a growing body of evidence that for some people mindfulness and meditation can cause intense and lasting anxiety and exacerbate depression. (Just one of several recent stories on the subject: http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2016/jan/23/is-mindf... ) That has been my experience. I've done meditation retreats and the like. I do find it slows down my mind, but can also surface things that frankly I…

I'm very interested in it, I've done it quite a bit, and I've been to several retreats... and I also get tired of the way people go around recommending it willy-nilly.

I don't recommend stuff like that to people, because in most cases it's presumptuous. I don't know what your mind is like, I don't know what's going to happen when you use any particular method, I don't have a wide experience with teaching meditation, I'm just some guy living my own life the best I can manage it...

There's a lot of the same effect as with people who recently started running, or recently started some particular diet, or whatever it may be... for some reason that thing fit into their ideas and lifestyle, and it coincided with a hockey stick point in their satisfaction, or something, and they feel the urge to recommend—for benevolent reasons, since they just want other people to get that satisfaction, too.

There's a difference because meditation, in the most taught forms, is very intimate, as you describe. Its "subject matter" is basically the entire life of the mind, emotions, thoughts, memories, everything, so unless your psyche is squeaky clean like Mr Flanders (who in that one episode of course turned out to have some heavily repressed traumas), meditation is not going to be a nice walk in the park.

Almost everybody who starts doing it finds that they for some reason can't do it as often or as much as they'd like to... it's often unclear why... but could it have to do with the fact that you're sitting down in utter silence and facing like everything at once? And it's kind of intense, and sometimes very painful?

Then there's also the whole "happiness" aspect of the hype & marketing, where everybody imagines that the ideal to aspire for is a happy, smiling, Thich Nhat Hanh type, or something, and all the rhetoric becomes infused with this naive optimism, everybody knows this caricature. So then if you sit down and you find that you actually feel very lonely, or very confused, or very anxious, very angry, very horny, or very whatever... then what? "Just breathe, let it all go..." Ugh!

Sorry, I'm just ranting. For me it's one of these situations when you're very interested in something but the way other people advocate it makes you just cringe.

Re: How Meditation Changes the Brain and Body

#27

Post by jmckib »

erdojo wrote: post #18

There is also a growing body of evidence that for some people mindfulness and meditation can cause intense and lasting anxiety and exacerbate depression. (Just one of several recent stories on the subject: http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2016/jan/23/is-mindf... ) That has been my experience. I've done meditation retreats and the like. I do find it slows down my mind, but can also surface things that frankly I…

How does mindfulness meditation surface unpleasant memories for you? When I do mindfulness meditation, I often have thoughts occurring, but they're exactly the same sort of thoughts I usually have when I'm spacing out. It doesn't surface anything that I don't already tend to think about. Of course, I don't have any traumatic memories. Could you describe what happens in your head?

Re: How Meditation Changes the Brain and Body

#28

Post by mkesper »

LunaSea wrote: post #16
personjerry wrote: post #14

For those of you who consider meditation a bunch of mumbo-jumbo, I get it, for I felt (and sometimes still feel) the same way. But let me try to phrase meditation in the terms I understand it as. We often find ourselves in stressful or difficult situations, we are constantly bombarded by external worries, and we think it is difficult to deal with our problems. However, no matter how big external issues are, the way t…

> interpretations of the world are all in our head I don't think most people are stressed because of "interpretations" of the world rather than very real problems like paying the bills and terrible working conditions.

The "trick" is to not let these things overwhelm you. __Worrying__ about your bills doesn't make you able to pay them! In fact it may actually paralyze you.

Re: How Meditation Changes the Brain and Body

#29

Post by b6 »

glossyscr wrote: post #20

Meditation is a work-around only. As written in another post: I started one month ago and then I was frequently meditating with Headspace (which is awesome btw). While meditation helped me to go through hard times it never solved the underlying problem. It's like taking painkillers without addressing the real cause. I solved the real underlying problem few days ago and I feel like god again.

When you're little, your parents tell you not to touch the stove, that it will hurt, and the words go in your ears and you understand what they mean, sort of. You understand it conceptually. But of course you touch the stove and get burned. After that, having connected the action with suffering through direct experience, you have very little desire to touch the stove again. Those thoughts just don't arise, or don't have much pull.

Buddhists say we're still touching stoves every day because we haven't connected cause and effect through experience. That's the point of this kind of meditation, to gain insight into important facts about reality that we might already conceptually accept, but have not yet experienced. When you experience these things, you are redoing the plumbing in the basement of your mind.

So the point really is to attack the roots of the problem. It's not to relax, it's to understand what is going on.

Re: How Meditation Changes the Brain and Body

#30

Post by ggreer »

Tharkun wrote: post #7

If you're looking for a low-entry start to meditation, Headspace is a great little app. It starts off easy, with 10 10 minute guided sessions.

I also think guided meditations are very useful for beginners. The best sessions I've found (at any price) are from the UCLA Mindful Awareness Research Center.[1] There's no phone app or payment required. All of their guided meditations are released as MP3 files.

1. http://marc.ucla.edu/body.cfm?id=22

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