It's remarkable that I so often lapse in my meditation practice when it's such a short time commitment and so consistently improves my mood. I tell myself that morning yoga is enough or a walking meditation while taking the dog out is enough - I do those every day without fail. But they're not the same as seated breath work.
Why do other mood improvement habits seem more approachable, like making a cup of tea or exercise or a shower, while sitting and breathing seems harder?
For me during meditation, many thoughts arise. Often they are things I am troubled or anxious about. If I am doing something else, I have a ready-made distraction from those thoughts. But if I'm just sitting, I actually have to be present for them. It's much harder to build a habit where the short-term payoff is negative.
You might try making it part of a broader routine. Lately (and unusually for me) I've been struggling with sleep. So I've explicitly adopted a bedtime routine that gets me to wind down. As part of that, I light a big candle when I start the routine. Then the last thing I do before blowing out the candle getting into bed is to sit down by the candle and use it as a medication focus. This way I feel like I'm getting the sitting for "free" in that I don't have to expend any willpower to make it happen; there are other positive associations that serve as the reward.
http://files.howtolivewiki.com/.meditation_2015/transcripts/... This came out of an attempt to strip the core meditation techniques down to completely remove the mysticism, and adjust the practice cycle for long-term solo practitioners who are agnostic or atheist and can't lean on concepts like "The Buddha" or "Lord Shiva" (although I myself am Hindu.)
The critical innovation is doing ten minute rounds of different practices, so no practice is held for very long. This seems to help a ton with "mind wanders" and surprisingly doesn't seem to impair overall progress at all. If anything the rotation of practices seems to improve overall concentration and keeps people from hallucinating because they've been staring at a blank wall for six hours!
> who are agnostic or atheist and can't lean on concepts like "The Buddha" or "Lord Shiva" (although I myself am Hindu.)
Whoever can accept the Gödel's incompleteness theorems and still use math, doesn't mind games, simulations and usage of different dimensionalities and topologies, also can practice both visual and sensory imagination - is perfectly capable of believing in Buddha, Shiva, whoever and whatever for the duration of the exercise if they chose to. Blieving in a diety with certain characteristics, an embodiment of certain archetypes/feelings/intentions during the practice can do night-and-day difference in efficiency and precision of intentional nervous system regulation.
Going from a card carrying atheist(youth..gah!) to a more sensible agnostic to dipping my toes into faith again has been interesting. A covid revival and immersion.
Spirituality + Meditation/Mindfulness + Religion is definitely more colourful..trippy. I don’t know why. Can’t articulate.
The only downside is the random fanatic, but I guess they exist amongst the atheists too.
The poverty of imagination that marks spirituality without religion is debilitating to sustaining any kind of life long practice. Happily, the flavor of religion of my birth family affords me all the pagan goodness and room to explore freely. Life is good now. Better..rather.
I've read at least three books on meditation and worked with a variety of apps, recordings, etc, and as these are all created for a western audience I've never seen anything mystical or religious in any of them. Anything by Jon Kabat-Zinn should be pretty free of religiosity for example , as his goal was to promote mindfulness within a medical setting.
Yeah, the distinction may be that this is an “enlightenment driven” program —- an hour a day for ten years, coupled to therapy. Most of the enlightenment driven work out there is relatively religious and spends a lot of time on faith in lineage etc. This was an experiment to skip all that and just work the core practices very very hard and results are pretty good over seven or eight years.
I should have clarified that in the earlier post. I should also note that I’m not a dharma teacher by trade: I do that as a hobby, mostly I run a tech company. I teach out of respect for my own teacher but am not making “a thing” of it.
Which I think keeps me honest: zero money changes hands etc.
For what it's worth, the "faith in lineage" stuff doesn't require magical thinking and is pretty helpful. The downside of it from my perspective is it's just a lot of stuff to learn and a bit complicated to maintain in a Western cultural context. Plenty of people are making progress with more stripped-down approaches that rhyme better with the scientific worldview.
It's more like "adopting the view that this will work," because doing that works. It's a pragmatic argument, in practice. Dogma certainly creeps in when you get away from practice into politics, but "bias" isn't a concern in awakening. It's all about what works.
> Welcome to that there meditation class. I’m Vinay. This is intended as a private recording (and transcript) so please don’t stick it on YouTube. I will pass it around to people who should have a copy.
I guess this technically wasn't stuck on YouTube...
The restriction was useful in 2015 because we were still testing the system. Now it's had 7 years to settle in and we've come to think it's pretty much safe as long as people don't ignore the therapy requirement.
I've heard meditation described as "motionless ju-jitsu with yourself". In the absence of any obstacle, the only opponent is you, but by definition you are equal in strength to yourself. So meditation can devolve into a heated evenly-matched contest of wills, which is extremely draining.
It certainly shouldn't. Your aim is just to keep bringing your attention back to the object of attention. Each time you do that is a success, so feel pleased with yourself at that point.
Fighting is a bad habit that will send you down a blind alleyway in meditation. There should be no striving, no effort, just gentle persistence.
Oh man I love that description! It makes me think how exercise is like a contest against physical limits, which are knowable. Hard work leads to heavier lifts or longer runs. But when you kick your own ass in meditation, the limits are more ambiguous and progress isn't so linear.
The stillness, I think. With adhd, that's my challenge anyway. The mind does not shut off, and 5 minutes can feel like forever. Even thinking about it makes me squirm. But I took a yoga class once that did breathwork, and with guidance, I found the ability to focus my entire attention on my breath; the action and the feeling of it.
It's one of the preparation methods: if you have too many thoughts focus on your breath, if you're addicted to pleasures focus on disguisting things, and so on. What happens if you just ignore your thoughts, if you watch them like images in a boring movie? Thoughts compel you to follow them, but you dont have to.
I find this problem with the vast majority of practices, and annoying, particularly with those that work. If I read a book or listen to a podcast that touches on the practice I'll pick it back up, then it will gradually fade out over time.
This is true even of really low-effort things, like box breathing, or drinking a glass of cold water on waking.
I think habits are just hard to maintain as an individual, and historically we've leaned on communities to keep us on-track. The best workaround I've found is to subscribe to podcasts that regularly touch on the practices to keep them within my awareness, but that's far from perfect.
Concentration meditation. I used to do it as much as possible. Every day. Sometimes 2, 3, 6 times. I was kinda nuts. But my practice was strong.
Vipassana + concentration. My practice was extremely erratic.
Vipassana. Just vipassana. That's what I do now. My practice is very consistent. Haven't missed a day in a decade.
I think it's because vipassana is more compatible with the rest of my life than concentration. So there's no big transition. I'm basically doing vipassana, in varying degrees, all the time.
Not the OP, but some schools of buddhism, e.g. gelungs, describe two types of meditation: static and dynamic (my own terminology). The static one is sitting still and sharpening your focus. The end goal is the state when your mind naturally snaps into this fully attentive state - samadhi. But that's a weak result, and dynamic meditation is ability to retain this state no matter what you're doing or even thinking. That's vipassana. There are decent books about the history of buddhism and dzogchen that explain this better.
In my experience there are only 2 things that you can do with your awareness. They go by various names, are described various ways, depending on the tradition. But ya, just the 2.
>Why do other mood improvement habits seem more approachable, like making a cup of tea or exercise or a shower, while sitting and breathing seems harder?
The Feedback loop is longer and impact more subtle so you don't correlate the effects with the action as strongly
I don't meditate but I have learned to control and suppress hiccups and there may be a connection.
The way I do it is still very relaxed and focus on a point that is somewhere in front of my forehead, and have very regular, simple breathing, without forcing it. It takes less than a minute of this for the hiccup to go away. I think the trick is to think about nothing instead of thinking about the hiccup.
Why do other mood improvement habits seem more approachable, like making a cup of tea or exercise or a shower, while sitting and breathing seems harder?