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Not that I'm any sort of expert in mindfulness, but I like to relate the concept via a few analogies. The first is that for dieting, one strategy is to be mindf

Not that I'm any sort of expert in mindfulness, but I like to relate the concept via a few analogies. The first is that for dieting, one strategy is to be mindful of your satiety. Pause between bites and feel if you are full. Another is for training. Exercise is good, but to train effectively, you have to pay attention to how your body feels, not just to prevent injuries and know when to rest, but also while training, so that you make sure every movement is actually influencing your body the way you want. With mindfulness, you place the focus of introspection on your mind: what emotions are you feeling? Why do you feel that way? Have you lost focus? When attempting to learn are you keeping your mind active? It's sort of like "situational awareness" turned inward, or honing your mind to make deliberate practice even more effective. "An intellectual is someone whose mind watches itself."

dominotw 12y ago
Right. I think I get the basic idea of it. What bothers is me is who is this 'other me' telling me what to do. Is the 'other me' the real me, if not why can't I figure out myself when to stop eating why do I need another overbearing character watching my every move and telling me what to do. It is quite disconcerting that we have taken this kind of dualistic thinking to be the norm and assumed that thats how things are and that we are doomed to live in a perpetual conflict within ourselves. We have made great scientific discoveries and have spent enormous amounts of energy in learning how the world works. But we have spent so little time on studying ourselves as to why we behave in certain way. All we have come up with so far are conflict inducing strategies like mindfulness.
- Delmania 12y ago
  Mindfulness is taking advantage of the fact that humans are conscious of their consciousness, and using that to overcome our instincts. For example, the human brain, if left alone will tend to go towards negative situations. I think (keyword: think) that's because we want to avoid bad feelings, so we replay those events in our mind to figure out what happened and how we can avoid those bad feelings in the future. Feelings, after all, are a response to a situation, so if we have a bad feeling, it means we did something wrong. However, studies have shown that such behavior has negative impacts on you (bad feelings reduce your immune system, etc), so mindfulness is avoiding that trap. As for your original question, you can't figure out when to stop eating because humans largely disregard instinct. Obesity has many causes.
- ssdfsdf 12y ago
  The goal of mindfulness, in the traditions I have read. Is ultimately to understand that the act of watching is no different from the thoughts being watched. It is by doing the watching that one realizes over time that there is no watcher. This leads into the idea that if there is no watcher, you/I must be the thoughts themselves. If we are the thoughts themselves, then we are the words, we are the sound waves in the air. We are the patterns in the sand, the correlations in neuronal firing, there is no distinction between inside and outside, you and I, this thing and that thing. The way something reacts is no different from what a thing is. A lot of things that appear to be bunkum are in fact bunkum. But some things which appear to be bunkum are in fact profound truth.
- Falling3 12y ago
  I come at mindfulness from a Buddhist perspective and I'm certainly not qualified to speak at any length on the topic. With that said, it should be a conflict abating - not inducing. There are no separate 'yous', but the processes that make you up can often be conflicting (I don't think anyone would dispute that). And mindfulness should be a way of reconciling and dealing with that.
- Jtsummers 12y ago
  We have habits, unconscious things we do, learned on our own or from others. We eat when we get stressed, but it's not deliberate. (Or whatever it is for you.) We have to change the way we've wired our minds to break these behaviors. So if you find yourself constantly knocking yourself down (in self-effacing jokes, internal monologue, whatever), you need to become aware of your action, and deliberately alter your behavior until it sticks. If you eat too much, you have to be aware of yourself at the dinner table, and learn to push things away or ask for a to-go box. Eventually these deliberate changes will (hopefully) stick and become the new, desired, habits and behaviors. So it's not two yous. It's one you, but one part is conscious and one part is unconscious (or non-deliberate, habit-based, instinct-based, etc.). The objective is to bring yourself to awareness of your actions, recognize that you are doing something, perhaps actually understand why, and then change it.
- jmcmichael 12y ago
  What has happened to me the more I meditate is the discovery of these two basic ways of interacting with the world. The first stance feels very familiar, it is the me that spends most of its time: 1) judging the present, e.g. "How does the present moment live up to my expectations of it? How can I change the present moment to meet my goals or aversions?"; 2) expecting the future, e.g. planning or fantasizing "What will I do if X happens? I must have X by Y or I won't be happy."; 3) replaying episodes from the past, e.g. "I wish I had/hadn't done X. I wish Y had/hadn't done X to me. When I had X I really felt great." 4) reacting to and getting caught up in emotions - anger, fear, desire, aversion, etc. After meditating, a categorically different stance towards reality becomes available: that of non-judgmental pure awareness. That part of you that is the awareness before all the other stuff begins, the awareness from which all the other stuff emerges. One way to tell the first stance from the second is the presence of judgement. If you're judging then you're not experiencing pure awareness. That's how you know that your experience, that of "another overbearing character watching my every move and telling me what to do" is not what people seek with meditation - it's merely another form that ego takes: judgement of oneself instead of judgement of others or of the present moment. That kind of duality is just the ego showing just one of its multitudes of forms. The more you meditate, the more time you fall into nonjudgmental awareness of the present moment, and act from that perspective instead of the other ego-directed perspectives. The great contemplative traditions have written extensively on these matters - the difficulty is finding a tradition or teacher that fits one's learning style and cultural context. I would not look to science for a fundamental understanding of these things, as these are subjective matters which science is ill-equipped to address (that's not to say science can show us the very real objective effects of the subject process of meditation).
- corysama 12y ago
  AFAICT, standard human behavior is a lot more multiprocess and conflicted than most of us would like to think about. Framing the situation as "Steering your emotions is like steering and elephant." is a lot more realistic and useful than a (extreme example) monoistic approach like "Why did you eat that dessert? Are you lying to me about being on a diet? Or, do you not understand how diets work? Well, which one is it?" The reality is a third option: your foreground process knows you need to lose weight, but some background process has the conflicting goal of eating high-calorie food. The good news is that with practice, your foreground process can learn to recognize these conflicts as they are forming and gently steer them to a non-conflicting state before they get out of control. So, the end result is conflict reduction, not conflict induction.

dominotw 12y ago

Right. I think I get the basic idea of it. What bothers is me is who is this 'other me' telling me what to do. Is the 'other me' the real me, if not why can't I figure out myself when to stop eating why do I need another overbearing character watching my every move and telling me what to do. It is quite disconcerting that we have taken this kind of dualistic thinking to be the norm and assumed that thats how things are and that we are doomed to live in a perpetual conflict within ourselves. We have made great scientific discoveries and have spent enormous amounts of energy in learning how the world works. But we have spent so little time on studying ourselves as to why we behave in certain way. All we have come up with so far are conflict inducing strategies like mindfulness.

Delmania 12y ago
Mindfulness is taking advantage of the fact that humans are conscious of their consciousness, and using that to overcome our instincts. For example, the human brain, if left alone will tend to go towards negative situations. I think (keyword: think) that's because we want to avoid bad feelings, so we replay those events in our mind to figure out what happened and how we can avoid those bad feelings in the future. Feelings, after all, are a response to a situation, so if we have a bad feeling, it means we did something wrong. However, studies have shown that such behavior has negative impacts on you (bad feelings reduce your immune system, etc), so mindfulness is avoiding that trap. As for your original question, you can't figure out when to stop eating because humans largely disregard instinct. Obesity has many causes.
ssdfsdf 12y ago
The goal of mindfulness, in the traditions I have read. Is ultimately to understand that the act of watching is no different from the thoughts being watched. It is by doing the watching that one realizes over time that there is no watcher. This leads into the idea that if there is no watcher, you/I must be the thoughts themselves. If we are the thoughts themselves, then we are the words, we are the sound waves in the air. We are the patterns in the sand, the correlations in neuronal firing, there is no distinction between inside and outside, you and I, this thing and that thing. The way something reacts is no different from what a thing is. A lot of things that appear to be bunkum are in fact bunkum. But some things which appear to be bunkum are in fact profound truth.
Falling3 12y ago
I come at mindfulness from a Buddhist perspective and I'm certainly not qualified to speak at any length on the topic. With that said, it should be a conflict abating - not inducing. There are no separate 'yous', but the processes that make you up can often be conflicting (I don't think anyone would dispute that). And mindfulness should be a way of reconciling and dealing with that.
Jtsummers 12y ago
We have habits, unconscious things we do, learned on our own or from others. We eat when we get stressed, but it's not deliberate. (Or whatever it is for you.) We have to change the way we've wired our minds to break these behaviors. So if you find yourself constantly knocking yourself down (in self-effacing jokes, internal monologue, whatever), you need to become aware of your action, and deliberately alter your behavior until it sticks. If you eat too much, you have to be aware of yourself at the dinner table, and learn to push things away or ask for a to-go box. Eventually these deliberate changes will (hopefully) stick and become the new, desired, habits and behaviors. So it's not two yous. It's one you, but one part is conscious and one part is unconscious (or non-deliberate, habit-based, instinct-based, etc.). The objective is to bring yourself to awareness of your actions, recognize that you are doing something, perhaps actually understand why, and then change it.
jmcmichael 12y ago
What has happened to me the more I meditate is the discovery of these two basic ways of interacting with the world. The first stance feels very familiar, it is the me that spends most of its time: 1) judging the present, e.g. "How does the present moment live up to my expectations of it? How can I change the present moment to meet my goals or aversions?"; 2) expecting the future, e.g. planning or fantasizing "What will I do if X happens? I must have X by Y or I won't be happy."; 3) replaying episodes from the past, e.g. "I wish I had/hadn't done X. I wish Y had/hadn't done X to me. When I had X I really felt great." 4) reacting to and getting caught up in emotions - anger, fear, desire, aversion, etc. After meditating, a categorically different stance towards reality becomes available: that of non-judgmental pure awareness. That part of you that is the awareness before all the other stuff begins, the awareness from which all the other stuff emerges. One way to tell the first stance from the second is the presence of judgement. If you're judging then you're not experiencing pure awareness. That's how you know that your experience, that of "another overbearing character watching my every move and telling me what to do" is not what people seek with meditation - it's merely another form that ego takes: judgement of oneself instead of judgement of others or of the present moment. That kind of duality is just the ego showing just one of its multitudes of forms. The more you meditate, the more time you fall into nonjudgmental awareness of the present moment, and act from that perspective instead of the other ego-directed perspectives. The great contemplative traditions have written extensively on these matters - the difficulty is finding a tradition or teacher that fits one's learning style and cultural context. I would not look to science for a fundamental understanding of these things, as these are subjective matters which science is ill-equipped to address (that's not to say science can show us the very real objective effects of the subject process of meditation).
corysama 12y ago
AFAICT, standard human behavior is a lot more multiprocess and conflicted than most of us would like to think about. Framing the situation as "Steering your emotions is like steering and elephant." is a lot more realistic and useful than a (extreme example) monoistic approach like "Why did you eat that dessert? Are you lying to me about being on a diet? Or, do you not understand how diets work? Well, which one is it?" The reality is a third option: your foreground process knows you need to lose weight, but some background process has the conflicting goal of eating high-calorie food. The good news is that with practice, your foreground process can learn to recognize these conflicts as they are forming and gently steer them to a non-conflicting state before they get out of control. So, the end result is conflict reduction, not conflict induction.