As soon as you get the chance sit down in front of the Sun wherever your at and breathe 🧘♀️ release all tension into the sun ☀️ clean your soul with mediating and praying 🙏🏾
Meditation is for losers
If you can't say something nice, don't say anything at all. Be constructive, if you choose to criticize.
I got into a really consistent meditation schedule when I was water fasting. Definitely planning to get back into it TONIGHT. Things that help me:
Using an app. I love insight timer. I start with 5 minute increments and increase my time as I feel I need to (eventually I want to meditate 30mins a day twice a day).
Visualizing my meditation so I don't feel like I'm just sitting doing "nothing". I picture myself in a bubble in the air over a landscape, or (this is more helpful since my mind tends to race when I've fallen out of the groove) picturing myself looking over a balcony and watching cars drive past below. The cars are like my thoughts, always there, always going. If I find I've left the balcony and am on top of one of the cars, I put myself back on the balcony and let the car go on it's way.
Not expecting my mind to be "empty." Whether it's a quiet meditation, or if I just alotted myself an amount of time to go through my thoughts and let them roam, it is good and it is progress. I do not have to have a perfect routine as long as I set aside the time for myself and my mental.
Journaling. I try to take my journal everywhere with me and journal as soon as things come up. I journal before and/or after my meditation. I'll journal at work on my lunch breaks if something comes up. I'll journal before bed and/or after waking up. Get the thoughts out. And acknowledge them.
I'm obviously joking. My avatar is a meditating buddah. I treat my cuddling sessions as meditation. I've been meditating for ten years.
@MCcuddles2 haha, a fellow loser! Why'd you start meditating? What helps you?
Ooooo, @RaeLew I love your comment ! I was just recently talking with @CuddlyKitKat about meditating and reccomnded an app called head space, I believe it was. I will check out insight timer. Also love the idea of keeping a journal on hand!
@RaeLew I use insighttimer as well. I've been using it for ten years, to log my meditation times. Here is a humble brag of my stats 😁
@MCcuddles2 - If losing myself in the practice of meditation makes me a loser, then I happily accept that title.
Breathing exercises which reduces my anxiety if i do it regularly %100
@Nature_Lover_ I think I tried headspace once. I didn't hate it, but it seemed like they were really quick to want me to sign up for a paid service and I wasn't feeling it that much. But I've been using Insight timer for a while now. It's free and more my vibe. They have some paid features on there too that I fully plan on taking advantage of soon. Free is nice and a big reason why I stuck with them, but I also know that people need support, and it's benefited me so much so far that I want to see how much IT's paid services will help.
@MCcuddles2 bows
@NicoSnuggs Me too!
I suppose “loser” in this context is a positive, much like the once-popular American television show The Biggest Loser. As the Buddha himself once said, “meditation brings wisdom; lack of meditation leaves ignorance. Know well what brings you forward and what holds you back”.
Or, mediation is for people who want to become losers. Losers of ego.
@RaeLew you mentioned you don't want to feel like you're doing nothing.
That sounds like a growth edge worth leaning into. Let your self do nothing and see what that is like. If you absolutely need something, then just focus on the movement of your breath.
@MCcuddles2 I do think making time to just "do nothing" is important. But I'm growing out of hustle culture and for a lot of people, the thought of doing nothing/not working towards anything/not having a distraction is not a good feeling.
I saw a YT video where a guy talked about setting aside 30mins-1HR once to just sit with yourself and literally do nothing, engage in nothing, have no distractions. Just be with yourself. Haha, it's still in the plans to do, but I have yet to do so ^_^
@RaeLew you can always start with just a minute. Or even 30 secs. Small but consistent steps are the key.
I don’t know if meditation is important. Some people find it helpful. Some do not. For some folks it’s downright detrimental to their mental health, something not often talked about.
There is no magic bullet, no one size fits all of anything.
There is a misconception that one must meditate for specific lengths of time on a daily basis for a long time but research has found that as little as 15 minutes a day five days a week produced measurable beneficial shifts in brainwave activity. I happen to know about this because the person who did the study is a friend.
Do whatever boosts your mood or makes you calm.
My question to ypu, and your worldview in general @Babichev is that science has only recently studied meditation. However, as the study has shown it has real life benefits.
Buddhism has known this for more than 2500 years, from documented human experience.
But, from the way you see the world, before a study was done, you would have denied that mediation had any benefit, because science hadn't verified it.
Just because something hasn't been scientifically verified doesn't mean that it doesn't exist. Science is a relatively new field, compare to the wealth of documented human experience. Just because science hasn't studied something yet doesn't mean that it is made up or has little practical value.
That's the difference between knowledge and wisdom.
"My question to ypu, and your worldview in general @Babichev is that science has only recently studied meditation. However, as the study has shown it has real life benefits."
That wasn't a question. In fact, I can't find a question anywhere in your comment. What is your question?
"But, from the way you see the world, before a study was done, you would have denied that mediation had any benefit, because science hadn't verified it."
Please show me where I said that.
" Just because science hasn't studied something yet doesn't mean that it is made up or has little practical value."
Do you know what a Straw Man argument is? It's when someone puts up an argument that no one has made and then knocks it down. It's a logical fallacy, something to be avoided. What you just did there is a straw man argument because no one has made that point.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Straw_man
"That's the difference between knowledge and wisdom."
That was a non sequitur. I don't know whether you know the difference between knowledge and wisdom but it appears you don't know what is a question, a straw man argument, or a non sequitur.
I would respectfully request that you stick to what I've actually said and stop projecting your erroneous ideas onto me.
When an ism stakes a claim to anything my bullfeces meter spikes severely.
I was admittedly at a happy hour and a tad drunk last night so I may have read deeper into the post than it was intended and my response was in line with my happy hour state.
Anyway, scientists studying meditation, while ignoring documented human experience are like a socially awkward nerd claiming to be relationship expert, because they have ran a few small experiments.
I encourage everyone to burn 🔥 peer reviewed papers and focus on nothing
"I was admittedly at a happy hour and a tad drunk last night so I may have read deeper into the post than it was intended and my response was in line with my happy hour state."
I wondered whether you were sober. Thanks for confirming my suspicions.
"Anyway, scientists studying meditation, while ignoring documented human experience are like a socially awkward nerd claiming to be relationship expert, because they have ran a few small experiments."
You obviously don't understand much about science or how research is done. Research often starts with observation and then experiments are designed to test a hypothesis. In the case of my friend, until he did his study, most research was done with people who meditated at least an hour a day for years. After one of his non-traditional students mentioned that after meditating for only about six weeks she noticed a decrease in her symptoms of depression he wondered how little one could meditate and still gain some benefit. Their study was good news, really, because they demonstrated that as little as 75 minutes a week could produce measurable benefit. That potentially makes meditation more accessible to people who might be discouraged thinking they have to do much longer sessions over an extended period of time to derive benefit.
The only reason I mention that it's not for everyone is that many people try and fail at it and then think badly of themselves. For those who try it and find that it worsens symptoms of depression or anxiety for them, they need to know that's not their fault. It's rare but it's been known to trigger psychotic episodes in some people. If the people around them don't know this, the situation could be handled poorly and that's happened sometimes at meditation retreats.
"I encourage everyone to burn 🔥 peer reviewed papers and focus on nothing"
The Dalai Lama, a great proponent of meditation, would disagree. He is very interested in science and research. Carl Sagan once interviewed him for an hour. In this segment on science and religion, Sagan asks the Dalai Lama if science were to contradict the doctrines of a religion, what should be done? The Dalai Lama's answer was that if science were to contradict a doctrine of Buddhism, then Buddhism would need to change.
Not to say anyone is wrong or right, but I do know as a survivor of two major surgeries that have saved my life (each lasting 14 hours) and several months of recuperation following that that breathing techniques are incorporated as therapy. The first mention of this is the day prior to surgery where you are initially taught by a therapist. Following the surgery they work with you and teach you until you are discharged. This is done for physical and mental well being. Part of this is closing your eyes and focusing solely on your breathing.
Now these are healthcare professionals and they never call it meditation, but I think it is. HOWEVER, they do say it doesn’t help everyone. So it is not necessarily a scientific fact that it works, but it apparently helps some. I can say it was useful for me to an extent.
A lot of my comments are tongue in cheek. I don't disagree with the proposition that we change our minds when presented with evidence.
My main point is that the universe is extremely complex. Living things even more-so. Science is a tool. Good for quantifying things on a very granular scale.
What science isn't good at is looking at things holistically. It can eventually, but nature of reality and interconnected systems is complex, and will take a long time to build the granular information into holistic models that can give us profound insights.
For example, maybe the study quantifies the minimum amount of meditation required to acquire some benefit. That's great.
But here are some questions.
Has the study been peer-reviewed? Has it been published? Can it be independently replicated, and if it can, has it?
How does the study quantify benefit? Does it define benefit as improvement on self-reported psychological surveys? Has it considered things like changes in immune system, or changes in epigenetic expression, or changes in physiological markers like blood pressure and resting heart rates? Has the study tracked more subtle things like regulation of thoughts, emotional response to triggering stimuli, ability to think a little longer than usual before acting? Has it quantified the affect on neuroplasticity? Neuroplasticity of what? Myriad of connections of the motor cortex,(just neurological subsystem, out of a host of exhaustively many)? Has it defined different neuro-physical markers that improve with meditations, like density of synaptic connections or decreased activation of the amygdala (trauma, memory processing center, in so many words) in response to pre-conditioned stressors? Does the study use FMRI studies, or maybe just MRI? Does it use EEG readings, surface level or maybe more invasive? Does it employ machine learning to find patterns in the EEG data? Can it quantify more subjective things like feelings of increased connection with people, or other living things? Can it quantify small changes that may lead to the overview effect, which results in a realization the Earth is an interconnected ecosystem (often reported by Astronauts and historical mystics alike)? Can it quantify how being in better control of your thoughts has effects on the ability of your body to heal itself?
I could keep going. I can assure, I probably understand the scientific process more than most.
Going back to my point, I don't deny that that study quantified some miniscule benefit of one type of meditation. That's great.
However, people who have meditated over the last few millennia, or more recently people like myself, have experienced the immense holistic benefits of meditation, in ways that are complex. Studies will come quantify different aspects of these benefits, and I welcome them and accept them if they challenge some long held incorrect belief. However, I don't need to wait for these thousands of studies to happen to intuitively understand the profound ways it has benefitted me and others. I can understand through direct experience, something much too complex for granular studies.
Lastly, I will give you another example where science fails in the face of complex reality. I have built neural networks. Neural networks train themselves and become black boxes, where they are doing extremely complex things that produce accurate real world results, and humans simply don't have the capacity to understand how the neural network is doing what it is doing, because the order of complexity of the mathematical models begin to approach the order of complexity of synaptic connections (hence, a neural network). We call this phenomenon unexplainable AI.
https://mindmatters.ai/2020/02/unexplainability-and-incomprehensibility-of-ai/
"For decades, AI projects relied on human expertise, distilled by knowledge engineers. They were both explicitly designed and easily understood by people. For example, expert systems, frequently based on decision trees, are perfect models of human decision making and so are naturally understandable by both developers and end-users. With a paradigm shift in the leading AI methodology over the last decade to machine learning systems based on Deep Neural Networks (DNN), this natural ease of understanding got sacrificed. The current systems are seen as “black boxes” (not to be confused with AI boxing [1, 2]), opaque to human understanding but extremely capable both with respect to results and the learning of new domains. As long as Big Data and Huge Compute are available, zero human knowledge is required [3] to achieve superhuman [4] performance."
To connect all this back to our conversation:
"There is a misconception that one must meditate for specific lengths of time on a daily basis for a long time but research has found that as little as 15 minutes a day five days a week produced measurable beneficial shifts in brainwave activity. I happen to know about this because the person who did the study is a friend."
I'm happy that the study quantifies the minimum threshold for one very granular effect of a specific amount of meditation. This does not mean that there may be an even smaller amount of meditation that has benefits in areas not measured in the study. It also doesn't mean that hours of meditation may be even more beneficial in a myriad of complex ways.
Finally, the weather is getting quite cold, I'm going to throw some more scientific papers into my fireplace.
"Has the study been peer-reviewed? Has it been published? Can it be independently replicated, and if it can, has it?"
Yes, yes, and yes it could be replicated but I doubt anyone has done that specific study, people usually don't. However, there have been other studies done demonstrating benefit from even less meditation. I haven't looked them up, just heard an interview on the subject a couple of years ago. However, if you want the text of this study, here it is, full text available. It was published in the journal Psychological Science.
https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.998.4288&rep=rep1&type=pdf
None of this is to suggest one should or should not do more or less. It just demonstrates that amount of time doesn't have to be a barrier. And that study showed a specific benefit that I would call a long-term benefit - it shifted the participants' brainwaves away from brainwaves associated with anxiety and more towards ones associated with being calm and alert. (Don't ask me to elaborate, brainwaves are not my area of expertise. That's my lay interpretation.) I mean, one can sit down and practice mindfulness for two minutes and calm oneself in the moment. If the person doing that feels they derive benefit from that, it's a benefit in the here and now. This was looking at an overall benefit that lasted beyond the immediate.
I'd compare it to exercise. If I'm feeling sluggish, taking a single walk around the block may perk me up immediately. That single walk won't have much long term effect, though. However, if I start making a practice of regular brisk walking then the cumulative effect reaches beyond that immediate, short-term effect and can have an overall effect on mood, heart health, etc.
One doesn't have to know about or understand the science to enjoy the benefits. However, that's an area of interest of mine and I've even been involved in a (completely unrelated) study using meditation with older adults.
Here's what meditation does for me:
It doesn't make me calm, it makes me anxious and fearful because I choose to deal with issues I'm having I would otherwise. This is escalated with phsycedelics (I do two high doeses of shrooms twice a year (not to just get fucked up)). There's this preconceived notion that meditating clears your mind, but the definition is very subjective I think. I'm going through grief, my family is going through grief and we're trying to make sense of it all. Some how, this consumer definition of meditation is clarity and I suppose this is the end game, but nobody talks about the mid game. I thought I was over grief and pretty much everything until the first time I got into a sensory deprivation tank for sixty minutes.
Y'all can keep going back-and-forth about meditation, but until you've actually gone into isolation and are just floating in thick salt water where you can hear blood passing through your arteries, you're just posting links.
That's New Age Bullsh@t.
@markdtenrten
Which comment are you referring to?
Im personally not a fan of meditation, its too much pressure to have to clear my mind and I have really extreme ADHD and anxiety. I prefer doing fun and relaxing things rather than meditation.
When we connect within our higher self and ignore the things around us.. not finding other ways to heal” we then have an activation of our DNA that extends Past regular boundaries. Only mediation’ Exercise and Eating healthy is the power in connecting within the body which is the way to true evolvement. 🙏🏾
-Shalome