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That is meditation.

psychphysic 4y ago
I think the overlap between meditation and reflection is significant but hardly total. Listening to your mind is reflection, but meditation usually involves broader mental activities including ignoring your transient thoughts and focusing thoughts.
- haswell 4y ago
  Mindfulness meditation involves the opposite of ignoring thoughts, and instead trains you to be aware of each thought as it comes and goes but to avoid identifying with it or getting lost in the thought. Ignoring/suppressing thought is one of the biggest misconceptions many people have when first going into mindfulness practice, myself included. There are other forms of meditation/concentration practice, but the practice recognized to be widely beneficial is Mindfulness/Vipassana/“Seeing things as they are”.
  - mcbuilder 4y ago
    Yeah I grew up doing Transcendental Meditation, the instruction was that any effort was too much effort. It took me so long to grasp this concept, but eventually it clicked. It's a hard concept to convey, because lots of things can come popping up. You can even have some of your brain working overtime while you're sort of sitting outside of that and observing it, so it's like your effortlessly observing your effort if that makes sense, eventually that brain will shut up but only if you leave it alone. :)
  - psychphysic 4y ago
    > There are other forms of meditation/concentration practice, but the practice recognized to be widely beneficial is Mindfulness/Vipassana/“Seeing things as they are”. It's mental to me how territorial people become about this stuff! Yoga, martial arts even vegetarianism! Everyone insists everyone else is doing it wrong and they get control of what the phrase means.
    - haswell 4y ago
      I definitely don’t mean to sound territorial! My comment was based on the fact that mindfulness meditation is the form that has shown the most promising positive outcomes in numerous studies and most likely to produce helpful results. My mindset was closer to what it would be if we were having a discussion about fruits and vegetables and someone extolled the virtues of eating corn and iceberg lettuce. The underlying point is that not all forms of practice have been shown to produce the effect that most people tend to look for. This isn’t to say that other approaches are invalid for their intended purpose. If your goal is to improve your health through better eating, starting with corn and iceberg lettuce might be better than some alternatives (like eating pizza every night), but nutritionists would be quick to point out that there are options that are far healthier and will give you much more value. I don’t think using other forms of meditation is doing it wrong at all. I do think choosing a path without understanding it and how it differs from other paths is less ideal, though, and for a practice that involves the investment of significant time and focus, understanding the landscape seems rather important going in. https://www.apa.org/topics/mindfulness/meditation https://www.apa.org/topics/mindfulness/meditation
cptaj 4y ago
Not even that. Simply being bored... good, old fashioned bored with nothing to do, no feeds to check; a lot of us are missing this part of the human experience these days. We constantly distract ourselves and I think we're missing a crucial part of the ideation/inspiration process.

That is meditation.

I think the overlap between meditation and reflection is significant but hardly total. Listening to your mind is reflection, but meditation usually involves broader mental activities including ignoring your transient thoughts and focusing thoughts.

haswell 4y ago
Mindfulness meditation involves the opposite of ignoring thoughts, and instead trains you to be aware of each thought as it comes and goes but to avoid identifying with it or getting lost in the thought. Ignoring/suppressing thought is one of the biggest misconceptions many people have when first going into mindfulness practice, myself included. There are other forms of meditation/concentration practice, but the practice recognized to be widely beneficial is Mindfulness/Vipassana/“Seeing things as they are”.
- mcbuilder 4y ago
  Yeah I grew up doing Transcendental Meditation, the instruction was that any effort was too much effort. It took me so long to grasp this concept, but eventually it clicked. It's a hard concept to convey, because lots of things can come popping up. You can even have some of your brain working overtime while you're sort of sitting outside of that and observing it, so it's like your effortlessly observing your effort if that makes sense, eventually that brain will shut up but only if you leave it alone. :)
- psychphysic 4y ago
  > There are other forms of meditation/concentration practice, but the practice recognized to be widely beneficial is Mindfulness/Vipassana/“Seeing things as they are”. It's mental to me how territorial people become about this stuff! Yoga, martial arts even vegetarianism! Everyone insists everyone else is doing it wrong and they get control of what the phrase means.
  - haswell 4y ago
    I definitely don’t mean to sound territorial! My comment was based on the fact that mindfulness meditation is the form that has shown the most promising positive outcomes in numerous studies and most likely to produce helpful results. My mindset was closer to what it would be if we were having a discussion about fruits and vegetables and someone extolled the virtues of eating corn and iceberg lettuce. The underlying point is that not all forms of practice have been shown to produce the effect that most people tend to look for. This isn’t to say that other approaches are invalid for their intended purpose. If your goal is to improve your health through better eating, starting with corn and iceberg lettuce might be better than some alternatives (like eating pizza every night), but nutritionists would be quick to point out that there are options that are far healthier and will give you much more value. I don’t think using other forms of meditation is doing it wrong at all. I do think choosing a path without understanding it and how it differs from other paths is less ideal, though, and for a practice that involves the investment of significant time and focus, understanding the landscape seems rather important going in. https://www.apa.org/topics/mindfulness/meditation https://www.apa.org/topics/mindfulness/meditation

cptaj 4y ago

Not even that. Simply being bored... good, old fashioned bored with nothing to do, no feeds to check; a lot of us are missing this part of the human experience these days. We constantly distract ourselves and I think we're missing a crucial part of the ideation/inspiration process.