5 ms·

Good stuff. Sitting still for 60-90 minutes has the purpose of eliminating the distractions from paying attention to your body. This practice also has the benef

by loceng 13y ago

Good stuff. Sitting still for 60-90 minutes has the purpose of eliminating the distractions from paying attention to your body. This practice also has the benefit of hopefully allowing the ego to settle some, and perhaps even allowing the baseline level that the ego is engaged to be less - or start towards that path anyhow. As you said, stress still maintains the same - it actually will feel potentially even more vivid, though that is likely counter-acted with the ability to process things easier. Learning other things, and doing deeper guided meditations and breath work, like yoga nidra - is a good way to lessen that. Physical movement, asanas - or yoga as a whole, meditation being a part of yoga - is a good way to help physically-caused stress and baseline stress reduce; There's a biofeedback mechanism: tight muscles tells your mind you're stressed, you being stressed tells your muscles to be tight. "Nice" little loop there.

duncancarroll 13y ago
Thanks--I will try out Yoga; other people have also told me that it has a similar effect.
- loceng 13y ago
  Feel free to reach out to me if you want help finding a style that might suit you best to start off with. :)
- funkjunky 13y ago
  my thoughts as a yoga practitioner: Yoga is, first and foremost, a meditative practice. What separates it from sitting meditation is that the "hack" it employs not only combines breath awareness, but an ACTIVE breath/body/mind awareness. By moving through asanas, still using the breath as the "guide", one's awareness becomes on breath, on muscle, on bone, on gravity, balance, and all the subtleties of the mind and body's reactions. For example, one begins to "feel" what it is like for the subconscious to instinctively tighten muscles under slight distress, and learn how to gain increasing control over these subconscious processes as one's awareness becomes ever more focused and relaxed. Another example is one learns to feel "losing their breath" when they have lost attention to it and their body, and are stressing themselves out. An interesting TED talk describes the seat of awareness as a primitive network of neurons in the brainstem and body, the network that gives one a sense of "I am" and experiences the rest of the neurological processes. http://movies.netflix.com/WiMovie/70236306?strkid=1954165956_0_0&trkid=222336&movieid=70236306 http://movies.netflix.com/WiMovie/70236306?strkid=1954165956... If true, meditation and yoga can be thought of as techniques that progressively still the later evolved "higher" thought processes, and turns one's awareness back into the experiential parts of the mind. Yoga is simply a very active and tactile meditation hack, that provides strong stimulation responses through the nerve network that one is training to become more actively connected.

by loceng 13y ago

duncancarroll 13y ago

Thanks--I will try out Yoga; other people have also told me that it has a similar effect.

loceng 13y ago
Feel free to reach out to me if you want help finding a style that might suit you best to start off with. :)
funkjunky 13y ago
my thoughts as a yoga practitioner: Yoga is, first and foremost, a meditative practice. What separates it from sitting meditation is that the "hack" it employs not only combines breath awareness, but an ACTIVE breath/body/mind awareness. By moving through asanas, still using the breath as the "guide", one's awareness becomes on breath, on muscle, on bone, on gravity, balance, and all the subtleties of the mind and body's reactions. For example, one begins to "feel" what it is like for the subconscious to instinctively tighten muscles under slight distress, and learn how to gain increasing control over these subconscious processes as one's awareness becomes ever more focused and relaxed. Another example is one learns to feel "losing their breath" when they have lost attention to it and their body, and are stressing themselves out. An interesting TED talk describes the seat of awareness as a primitive network of neurons in the brainstem and body, the network that gives one a sense of "I am" and experiences the rest of the neurological processes. http://movies.netflix.com/WiMovie/70236306?strkid=1954165956_0_0&trkid=222336&movieid=70236306 http://movies.netflix.com/WiMovie/70236306?strkid=1954165956... If true, meditation and yoga can be thought of as techniques that progressively still the later evolved "higher" thought processes, and turns one's awareness back into the experiential parts of the mind. Yoga is simply a very active and tactile meditation hack, that provides strong stimulation responses through the nerve network that one is training to become more actively connected.