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This thread is blowing my mind, although not for the obvious reason. I’m just astounded by all the anecdotes people are mentioning here that suggest meditation

• cs2733 5y ago
  Ha! I salute your openess.
• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• avalys 5y ago
  This article might as well have said “The Shenrikki school of telekinesis is popular, but if you’re not careful while practicing you might accidentally crack the foundation of your house or give your spouse a concussion, and no one will warn you about this. ” and then a bunch of people jumped into the thread to say “Yes yes, this happened to me, and my home insurance didn’t cover it!” My reaction is: wait, what, really, this is an actual risk here?!
  • seanc 5y ago
    I forget where I heard it, but someone once said "The mind is like a boomerang. If you throw it, there is a very good chance it won't come back."
  • beaconstudios 5y ago
    if you want to continue in that vein of complete scepticism, you could just claim that all those people are experiencing a placebo effect.
• prometheus76 5y ago
  This will sound esoteric, but I feel should say it: sometimes when you are involved in a practice for which you have no context, you will open a door to things for which you have no name. You won't be able to name what you see or what you feel, and this can cause everything to come crashing down. An experienced guide can help you avoid this outcome.
• Tenoke 5y ago
  >it also signifies strong evidence that this a very powerful and effective practice I still see no reason to think it's a beneficial practice though. PCP is also powerful and effective with effects on your psyche all over the place.
• myfavoritedog 5y ago
  I applaud your current open-mindedness, although your past open-mindedness could have used a tweak. If you are serious about looking into meditation further, read Sam Harris’ book Waking Up. Sam Harris is about as far from a “woo-woo bullshit” practitioner as you can get. He was one of the leaders of the New Atheist movement, and has a PhD in neuroscience.
• logicalmind 5y ago
  I'm 40+ spent a lot of time stressed out about work, family, etc. Rather than go the medication route, I decided to try to just find ways to calm and de-stress myself. Certainly exercise works to some extent. But I also learned meditation. I'm not interested in any religious aspects of it, I don't pay any money towards it. I believe I started by reading a book on how to do it, then listened to some guided audio on what I was supposed to do. With that knowledge I was able to continue on my own. Specifically, my mind would tend to get stuck in loops of problems or worries, especially right before bed. What I really learned from doing this is that I would consciously reset my mind back to the present once it started going down these loops about the past or future. I do this for about 10-20 minutes before bed so that I can sleep without my mind racing and keeping me up. Even now I've noticed I don't have to do it as much or for as long when I do because I've learned to control my thoughts a lot better when I need to. I know meditation goes much further beyond this (as outlined in the article), but just having this level of skill is very valuable if you have this type or racing mind. I very much differentiate between meditation as a skill and meditation as a way of life. The skill part is valuable for anyone.
• kirse 5y ago
  At least for the author, it worked because he wanted it to work. "Seek and you shall find" is another spiritual principle. i.e. His faith in the process is what produced the results: I began meditating in search for a decrease in stress and anxiety. I got that... I've always found the "empty your mind" meditation quite hokey. Number one because I find that exercise is naturally meditative, and also healthy to boot. And second, in Christian prayer you are focused on something - whether God or Jesus or your cares or thankfulness, etc, and the point is the reverse - to fill your mind with what is good and holy. God has no interest in creating empty-minded self-focused people, he wants them full of thoughts of love, compassion, mercy, and others-focused on the good deeds that flow from that.
  • amanaplanacanal 5y ago
    Most meditation I'm familiar with (of the Buddhist variety) is more about focusing the attention on the meditation object than about emptying your mind. I'm certainly not familiar with all the different meditation schools though.
    • beaconstudios 5y ago
      the Soto style of zazen meditation is about emptying the mind though. I think the parent misunderstands meditation though - it's not an empty practice for the self-absorbed; it's only been repackaged that way as mindfulness.
      • kirse 5y ago
        The parent definitely does not misunderstand meditation, and is quite aware that there are two primary types - focused-attention and open-awareness - the latter of which is generally what gets packaged as mindfulness meditation these days. In fact, the parent has zero interest in becoming a fully detached and non-judgmental blob of cells regarding his thoughts, feelings, and sensations that are part of his unique human narrative and personality. Or was that too judgmental? Maybe I should just let all these HN comments float by like the Buddhists say I ought. No need to respond or draw conclusions about anything in life, ever, just let it all pass by like a bird in the wind.
• stjohnswarts 5y ago
  I love how when the west gets something and does its own interpretation that it's "watered" down as if the west can do nothing right and we're all spiritually and morally bankrupt idiots.
  • beaconstudios 5y ago
    the West has its own spiritual traditions, that the type of people who meditation is pitched towards have completely abandoned. Mindfulness and such are spiritual practices stripped of their philosophical roots and repackaged in a consumable form. If SE Asian companies were selling the Lord's Prayer as a quick de-stressing technique for busy atheist office workers, I'd say they were missing the point too.
    • dingleberry41 5y ago
      Would that make the Lord's Prayer twice repackaged (or re-gifted if you will) since it's a middle eastern practice already packaged as a consumable for the West?
      • beaconstudios 5y ago
        No it wouldn't. There's a difference between a religion spreading, and taking the bits you like and secularising them like it's some kind of feel good buffet.
    • astrange 5y ago
      Japan does sell churches as nothing more than a backdrop to get married in.
    • denton-scratch 5y ago
      > Mindfulness and such are spiritual practices stripped of their philosophical roots Mindfulness is only stripped of it's "philosophical" (read: spiritual) roots, if you strip them. Perhaps you are confusing commercialised "mindfulness" with mindfulness.
• uoaei 5y ago
  > designed to separate dissatisfied California yuppies from their money Can I ask how the generic advice of "sit for 20 minutes a day paying attention to your own attention processes" costs anything?
  • avalys 5y ago
    Are you disputing the fact that there are a very large number of people who charge money for instruction, training, retreats, etc. around the concepts of meditation and mindfulness? Are you suggesting that "sitting for 20 minutes a day paying attention to your own attention processes" will lead to the profound revelations, mental changes, existential crises, etc. described in the article and in comments posted here?
    • samat 5y ago
      20 minutes a day — unlikely. 2 hours a day for 10 years — you bet.
  • michael1999 5y ago
    The author is a professional meditation instructor, describing attending professional meditation training and conferences. Someone is paying money.
• bamboozled 5y ago
  I think it's supposed to change your personality right? For example, making one less reactive?
• Taylor_OD 5y ago
  I've got ADHD and 7 minutes of guided mediation in the mornings changed my life. I didnt believe it would when a doctor suggested it. But it did. I cant really explain it but I sure wish I knew about it earlier in my life.
  • groby_b 5y ago
    Any kind of guided meditation? Specifically focused on aspects of ADHD? And how did it change your life?
    • Taylor_OD 5y ago
      This shitty one time cost app is what I use: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.meditationoasis.Relax1 https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.meditation... Basically I went from having little to no control over racing thoughts to being able to focus much better. That is hugely helpful in work situations but also in life. I can actually give attention to people when speaking with them.
      • groby_b 5y ago
        Thanks for sharing - I'll give it a spin!
• bruja_gorda 5y ago
  It's not the meditation that is destabilising. It's the weed: > I spent my last day in Los Angeles riding on a Segway, buying legal marijuana and staring at some turtles in an on-campus pond at UCLA. What's left unsaid is that the majority of this "practice" goes hand-in-hand with "recreational" use of weed. Scare quotes because once you start reading revelatory texts under the influence, and probably meditating under the influence, the road to psychosis is just a few turns away. I've had friends who went mad reading the bible or The Eagle's Gift, or The Tenth Insight, while smoking weed. I can't explain the mechanism, but smoking weed and opening yourself up to all the enlightened bullshit of the New Age, or the Old Religions, can tear a hole in your mental health, big enough for a truck to drive through. People who believe in the supernatural are already half-mad. The weed comes along and closes the deal. Without weed, meditation is as woo-woo bullshit for California yuppies as you thought originally.
• m12k 5y ago
  It's important to set expectations. Meditation won't make you happy - and that's not the point of it. What it can do is let you be more present of mind, less prone to flights of fancy or worries. It teaches you a practice where you look into yourself and actually face what's going on in there, and gives you some gentle coping mechanisms to help lay to rest intrusive thoughts and feelings that have started "looping" in you. So the goal of becoming "enlightened" should probably be read more as "unburdened" or even "undistracted" - it's freedom to experience the moment you are in more clearly with fewer distractions and "ticks". What you do with that freedom is up to you. And it's not a state you achieve once and for all, it's something you do again and again, both to wipe the slate clean, and to train your ability to do so. It's more like taking out the trash, or daily stretches to stay limber, and less like a religious awakening (those who claim otherwise are hallucinating or having a mental breakdown like the author of the post).
• praptak 5y ago
  It is a practice that does something, by which I mean something observable via MRI. Here's a meta analysis of the papers on MRI scans of meditators' brains: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4471247/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4471247/ The cautious conclusion is that meditation is on par with being a cab driver in a large city (which also shows up on brain scans).
• Apocryphon 5y ago
  > dissatisfied California yuppies What do you think the primary demographic of HN is?
• fossuser 5y ago
  There's decent empirical evidence of an effect. It's not a huge surprise when you think about it - therapy works because of helping people change how they think. The reason it's often dismissed by skeptics is because it's often surrounded by a lot of religious woo and other nonsense so people often dismiss the entire thing. I have a pet hypothesis that it can make anxiety worse if you're not careful due to Hypervigilance (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypervigilance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypervigilance) - anxious people tend to have issues with ruminating and paying too much introspective attention to their bodies already. Most meditation rhetoric appears to be targeted to people who never introspect. Getting control over ruminating thoughts is helpful, but I've found mindfulness to be a mixed bag personally.
  • coffeecat 5y ago
    I think you're on to something! Personally, after a short amount of mindfulness meditation (perhaps about 10 hours cumulatively; never more than 30 minutes per day), I began to struggle with uncontrollable awareness of bodily sensations. My consciousness would gravitate uncontrollably toward a certain bodily sensation, and I became unable to decouple my consciousness from the sensation. The harder I'd try to focus on something and ignore the sensation, the more intense the sensation would become. This would culminate in a panic attack. The issue mostly subsided after a month or two, but it never fully went away. I've become convinced that mindfulness meditation is precisely the opposite of what an anxious, inwardly-focused person needs. If there were a way to train the mind to selectively attenuate information/signals, on the other hand, that would be very helpful.
    • fossuser 5y ago
      Yeah - that’s largely been my experience as well, and I agree.
• tyjen 5y ago
  Yes, it's surprising to people outside the retreat meditation community. If I read this blog entry prior to folding meditation practice into my daily life, I'd be equally surprised. There is a lot of commercialization and Westernized metaphysical woo-woo stuff to sift through to discover the type of meditation discussed in Upanishads, Bhagavad Gita, or Dhammapada, so the initial and superficial impression of meditation generally perceived from a Yoga class at the local strip mall or YouTube guided meditations are of different varietals. The perception being that meditation is terrific for destressing and wouldn't lead to a psychotic break. When you start to peel back the conditioning layers that define you, the sensations that reveal themselves can become destabilizing if you choose to focus on those distractions instead of allowing them to pass and refocus on the meditation object. If you're not prepared for what lies ahead and/or do not have a devoted mentor, the strands that define you and serve as identity reference points can snap leaving you with an existential crisis. Also, while many meditation retreats and programs are designed to separate yuppies from their money, the retreats I'm familiar with operate on a donation basis to remain open for everyone independent of financial status.
• cranesnake 5y ago
  Every therapist I've gone to has suggested this meditation, along with cognitive behavior therapy and medication.
  • denton-scratch 5y ago
    Health services recommend CBT because it's cheap and quick. If it works. There's no other psychological treatment as cheap as CBT.
    • agucova 5y ago
      Cognitive behavioural therapy is the most extensively studied form of therapy, with a pool of evidence supporting it's usage as a first line psychological therapy. It's not just cheap.
• throwaway34241 5y ago
  I once had an intense, drug-like experience from meditation and even have a straightforward (if speculative) explanation for what went on. Basically, one day I was curious and I decided to try the concentrate-on-your-breath exercise to see if I could go for ~30 minutes of focus (using a timer) without my mind wandering or any conscious thoughts. It was unexpectedly really, really, hard. I had to try again and again probably for 5 hours but eventually got pretty close I think. Afterwards that day, the physical world was amazing. You know how kids get excited about mundane stuff or firetrucks or dinosaurs or whatever? Everything was just intrinsically super stimulating and interesting, even just the interaction of light and shadows, etc. It was like life had some sort of "interesting" volume knob, and after eliminating the loud sounds the volume got turned up on things that were previously too quiet to hear. I'm pretty sure as a young kid I had experienced the world in this more intense way but forgot it was possible. My hypothesis is that it was kind of the opposite of burnout or shell shock - that there's some sort of internal adaptation to the level of external or internal stimuli, and just like overly stimulating/stressful environments or thoughts are known to cause people to feel numb (burnout), maybe reaching an exceptionally calm mental state can cause someone to feel whatever the opposite of numb is. The effect wore off the next day, and I didn't attempt it again because it was incredibly difficult and also time consuming. But it's left me curious about it. If enough practice would make it possible reach or maintain such a mental state with a less-than-herculean amount of effort, it seems like that would be a nice mental skill to have...
  • throwaway34241 5y ago
    Also, if it's possible to get into some profoundly different mental state after 1 day of meditation, it makes me a bit curious (and a bit concerned) about what could happen in 10 days... If anyone else has had a similar experience and could weigh in if they've found an extended course helpful that would be really appreciated. I found it very, very difficult to get to no conscious thoughts for 30 minutes, so much so that I haven't tried it again, and I'm someone who's mind is I think usually pretty quiet (I don't have a running dialog or anything like that). But the results as far as I'm concerned were not negative at all, so if there's some practical benefit to pursuing that sort of technique further I'd strongly consider it.
• Mc91 5y ago
  People have been meditating/praying/whatever for thousands of years, so it is probably helping people some how. Most of the day I working, and after that running around getting dinner, doing chores and running errands. Even if I am playing a video game I am making an effort to something. Even reading or watching a movie I am working to concentrate , watch and understand. If I go to a quiet, comfortable place and just relax for a few minutes, my brain goes from a harried state of going from one task to another to one where it can just relax. I suppose woo-woo can surround it. Maybe once a month I think to meditate, although in the past I have done it more. For myself, meditating tends to relax me if I have had a harrying, stressful day. It decreases my anxiety. It has never caused an anxiety attack or the like. If I sat down to meditate for some time, and became aware that I was very anxious, I would not think I was anxious due to meditating, as what is anxiety creating about sitting down and doing nothing (unless you have something urgent to do - then you just don't sit down and meditate)? My perception would probably be that I was already existing in a state of anxiety much of the time, and did not think about it much of the time due to the quotidian tasks that were to be performed, but now that those were not around, I could finally be made aware of the mental state I am in and do not have to push aside for something else. Perhaps a sensory deprivation tank can cause reactions in emotionally stable people, but I don't see how meditating for a few minutes/hours can. In a non meditative way I suppose logical self-reflection can be initially unpleasant for some people, meditating in a way is self-reflection on one's current natural emotional state when quotidian distractions are pushed aside, and I suppose some people who have had "bouts of mild anxiety and depression" might "meltdown" when they decide to start to come to terms with their anxiety and depression.
• suketk 5y ago
  > I just assumed this was all a bunch of wackadoo woo-woo bullshit designed to separate dissatisfied California yuppies from their money. Same! This changed when I went to Vipassana, a 10 day silent course, and saw how it was run and funded without a hint of commercialism. If you're interested, I wrote about it here: suketk.com/vipassana