Permission to Suck
kadavy.net
Permission to Suck
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Re: Permission to Suck
#2Many branches of meditation are based on the idea that there is no way to suck at meditating. Simply observe the thoughts arise and fade away.
If you are trying to succeed at meditating you are working against your self.
Re: Permission to Suck
#3No! Meditation is not about thinking about nothing! It's about focusing on your breath. Think only about breathing.
That sounds boring but manageable. 'Thinking about nothing' seems impossible and stupid at the same time; people who do the disservice of saying that should be slapped.
The point of meditation is to learn how to control your thoughts, specifically in being able to realize that your are choosing your current train of thought, and that you can switch it at any time. If you are stuck worrying, or being sad, or unable to see the richness in something, it's most likely because you can't properly focus on the only thing you'll ever have in life: this moment.
Re: Permission to Suck
#4No! Meditation is not about thinking about nothing! It's about focusing on your breath. Think only about breathing. That sounds boring but manageable. 'Thinking about nothing' seems impossible and stupid at the same time; people who do the disservice of saying that should be slapped. The point of meditation is to learn how to control your thoughts, specifically in being able to realize that your are choosing your cur…
There are many goals to meditation. Sometimes it starts with focusing on your breath. Sometimes it's in the form of chanting. Depends on the school of thought, the individual, the goal (if you have one). It's not valid to say "No!" as though what he's proposing is wrong.
Re: Permission to Suck
#5No! Meditation is not about thinking about nothing! It's about focusing on your breath. Think only about breathing. That sounds boring but manageable. 'Thinking about nothing' seems impossible and stupid at the same time; people who do the disservice of saying that should be slapped. The point of meditation is to learn how to control your thoughts, specifically in being able to realize that your are choosing your cur…
Hehe, I was just describing what my friend said about meditating. I did, in fact, tell her that it wasn't really about thinking about "nothing." Talking about the specifics of meditation wasn't really my aim here :)
Re: Permission to Suck
#6No! Meditation is not about thinking about nothing! It's about focusing on your breath. Think only about breathing. That sounds boring but manageable. 'Thinking about nothing' seems impossible and stupid at the same time; people who do the disservice of saying that should be slapped. The point of meditation is to learn how to control your thoughts, specifically in being able to realize that your are choosing your cur…
There are many goals to meditation. Sometimes it starts with focusing on your breath. Sometimes it's in the form of chanting. Depends on the school of thought, the individual, the goal (if you have one). It's not valid to say "No!" as though what he's proposing is wrong.
No!
While you & the author are technically right, batgaijin is saying that it's bad advice for beginners to be told "think of nothing".
Re: Permission to Suck
#7I found this out on my own in some sense, but I still have trouble putting it into practice.
I was taking guitar lessons and I would always be afraid to bring in side tunes I had been working on because I thought they were terrible (and they are) but it's tough to give yourself permission to suck when doing nothing hurts a lot less.
Re: Permission to Suck
#8I found this out on my own in some sense, but I still have trouble putting it into practice. I was taking guitar lessons and I would always be afraid to bring in side tunes I had been working on because I thought they were terrible (and they are) but it's tough to give yourself permission to suck when doing nothing hurts a lot less.
I've been playing guitar for 13 years, and I still am not very good.
A breakthrough for me though, was when I stopped obsessing over getting every note right, and instead focused on strumming the right chords. Then, I found playing much more enjoyable, and it was easier to play whole songs and sing.
Once I got that down, I was able to move on to more complex things. Like many things, it helps to embrace your suckage with musical instruments.
Re: Permission to Suck
#9This is where my startup failed -- We made the decision to work in a new technology (then another!) but I was afraid of writing code I was less than proud of.
I then proceeded to learn what I could of best practices, spending far too long experimenting with the language and far too little actually doing. In the end, we ended up with two half-baked infrastructures in two different languages and reached the trough of disillusionment before anything we could show to be disillusioned about!
It's something that I've learned in other parts of my life, especially through writing, but have never quite managed in coding. The primary tenet of National Novel Writing Month is that to finish a rough draft of a long fiction work, you must, starter to professional, give yourself permission to suck, to write something you know is sometimes horrible. You do this so that you have a canvas to fix during editing, to find nuggets that you love, and can revise, and can work with.
Intellectually, I know this about programming as well, but I always have this twinge of guilt when implementing it, and go back to my old ways. The irony is that in larger projects, this can be a useful quality. Having someone on the team that can go back and look at the code, showing exactly where we need to improve before we ship is useful. In solo projects it is often disaster.
At least for me. :)
Re: Permission to Suck
#10No! Meditation is not about thinking about nothing! It's about focusing on your breath. Think only about breathing. That sounds boring but manageable. 'Thinking about nothing' seems impossible and stupid at the same time; people who do the disservice of saying that should be slapped. The point of meditation is to learn how to control your thoughts, specifically in being able to realize that your are choosing your cur…
Agreed. That's how I was trained, at least. Although the end goal is to quiet your mind and gain more control over it, to think of one thing instead of a bunch of crabs on a string scuttling everywhere. So you could sort of sum of the end goal of a quiet mind as "think of nothing" but the one current thing...I'd definitely prefer other wording.