Meditation: Weekly Discussion August 02, 2021 |
- Weekly Discussion August 02, 2021
- Stop. Overselling. Meditation.
- Don’t feel bad for not meditating every day
- Why is the meditation method the Buddha taught so wildly different from what we're taught today?
- Don't let thoughts dictate how you feel.
- In my aloneness, I sit.
- My meditation skills are deteriorating
- Medication or Meditation? What’s the "right way" to treat depression?
- brain damage stopping mindfulness and meditation. what do I do? sos
- is it okay to meditate lying down
- I need help
- Does Images appear from bright white Dot while meditating ?
- Planning an 8 week daily meditation schedule with friends and family
- How could you follow your natural breath?
- What is does judgment mean?
- Lasciare andare..
- Fixing short temper
- Advice on how to meditate to help with physical tension.
- Will I still make progress if I were to drop from 45 min/day to 20min/day?
- What spiritual bliss is
- Falling asleep and even dreaming during meditation. Help! How can I avoid this?
- how long should you stick with a meditation style? how did you choose your technique?
- What does it mean to serve and be useful in this world?
| Weekly Discussion August 02, 2021 Posted: 02 Aug 2021 04:00 AM PDT This is a reoccurring thread for questions relating to your practice and discussion around your experiences. Questions Ask questions relating to your practice, the theory of meditation, various traditions and lineages of thought, or practical tips. If you're new, please read our [FAQ](https://www.reddit.com/r/Meditation/wiki/faq) before posting, as it contains a wealth of information that all of us should come back to occasionally. Discussion Also use this thread for a more free-form discussion of your experiences and other tidbits that might not warrant their own full post. Use this space to connect with the /r/meditation community, it won't be heavily moderated. [link] [comments] |
| Stop. Overselling. Meditation. Posted: 02 Aug 2021 10:35 AM PDT Phrases like "miracle drug" and "life Changing" gets thrown around so much on the internet and that's pretty much all i noticed getting into meditation so when the "quiet mind" or the "reduced negative emotions" inevitably didnt show up, i lost a lot of motivation to be consistent with meditation. I think meditation will peak in popularity when people set people's expectations right beforehand, for example if i had heard the realistic and researched benefits such as better sleep, increased patience etc i think i would of been able to keep up the practice as i wouldn't be constantly looking for a perfect, clear mind or that "intense joy" and so on.. TL;DR: telling people meditation will do something for them that it won't, is one of the biggest things stopping people from creating a serious habbit with the practice. Edit: Wow this post is going crazy. I want to state this was typed in a slightly dampened mood so it kind of reads negatively towards meditation, i still absolutely love meditation and think it can help me and you 100%. After reading some inspiring replies, i realize i just need more Patience with it. Reddits cool.<3 [link] [comments] |
| Don’t feel bad for not meditating every day Posted: 02 Aug 2021 07:59 PM PDT Meditation is called a practice for a reason. You need to practice it like you practice any sport or activity in order to get better at it. And sure you may improve faster if you practice it every day, but it is absolutely not necessary. Please don't feel bad for missing days of meditation here and there, as it's the overall self improvement that's important, and that comes regardless of how much you're meditating. Just a friendly reminder. Peace, my friends❤️ [link] [comments] |
| Why is the meditation method the Buddha taught so wildly different from what we're taught today? Posted: 02 Aug 2021 05:48 AM PDT I'm currently reading the book "In The Buddha's Words" by Bhikkhu Bodhi and I was caught completely by surprise when I read the Buddha's actual instructions on mindfulness meditation. After thinking about it I have 3 main questions:
Here's the passage from the book:
There's no mention of keeping attention around the nose or on the stomach. There's no mention of only observing bodily sensations. The Buddha said to experience the breath throughout the whole body and to relax the body with every breath. So keep a general awareness of the breath and the body during meditation and keep relaxing into deeper states. What are your thoughts on this? Edit: u/nowisdomnoattainment provided a good answer to my questions, here it is:
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| Don't let thoughts dictate how you feel. Posted: 02 Aug 2021 02:38 AM PDT Thoughts alone can't influence how you feel, but if you have a thought and you believe it, you will immediately start to feel different, depending on what type of thought it was (positive or negative). Literally, the instant you identify with any particular thought, you take on it's particular shape. For example, if you identify with a sad thought you will instantly start experiencing sadness and so on. Identifying with thoughts is actually what causes people to be jealous, angry, greedy and all those other unpleasant things, but if a thought comes and you don't identify with it then it has no impact on you, because you don't believe what it's saying. The only power it has is the one you give it through identifying with it. Basically what thoughts want is your attention, it's like food to them (not literally, of course) ; the more food (attention) you give a thought the more it grows and has power over you. We have more than 3000 thoughts a day and most of those thoughts are repetitive mostly because whenever they come you give them good reception, meaning you give them attention. It's like feeding pigeons, if you feed them they'll keep coming because you're giving them what they want. So stop feeding your thoughts with attention and they won't disturb you. The key is to just just watch the mind, without following any of the thoughts that come and go. Following every thought you have during the day is not only a waste of energy but it could also lead to you actually getting sick (through stress).
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| Posted: 02 Aug 2021 06:11 PM PDT Winds pass by, I sit. Birds fly by, I sit. Memories say hi, I sit. In my aloneness, I sit. [link] [comments] |
| My meditation skills are deteriorating Posted: 03 Aug 2021 01:18 AM PDT I had a gap of 2-3 months in my meditation practice due to Covid 19. Last week, I decided I would restart my practice. I have been try to meditate but my chatter box mind just won't shut up. It has become so worse that my brain does not even pay attention to the instructor's voice during the guided meditation. Life in general seems to be going downhill as I am unable to motivate myself to concentrate/ focus on tasks. [link] [comments] |
| Medication or Meditation? What’s the "right way" to treat depression? Posted: 02 Aug 2021 06:34 AM PDT At 5:36 this morning, I woke up to the sound of the garbage truck clanging. It was particularly loud because, mercifully, it rained last night and so I had every window in the house open so I could smell the wet grass and listen to the crickets chirp. I rather like to be woken up by the garbage truck. It means that you have two more hours to sleep before the alarm goes off. But this morning, I did something miraculous: I threw off the covers and put my feet on the floor. Not impressed? Well, what if I told you that I'd spent every day the last month or so struggling to get out of bed by 9:30? Or that I'd spent two entire weekends completely unable to get out of bed at all? Yup, I'm battling a major depressive episode. The very next thing I did after my feet hit the floor was pop a pill in my mouth. I'm back on medication, something I used to be vehemently opposed to. I used to think that the way to treat my depression was to live more mindfully. To change my life such that I no longer needed medication. Now, obviously, my opinion has changed. Here's how I arrived at that decision. Medication without MeditationI was on the very same medication about five years ago. I started taking it at the, let's say, strong urging of my girlfriend at the time after she witnessed first hand one of these weekends in bed.And it helped. I remember going to work the first day after taking it and realizing, to my surprise, that I could breathe fully. I wasn't so much surprised that I could breathe fully, I was more surprised that I hadn't been all these years. I was able to work. I was more productive. I was able to enjoy the weekends. But, over time, it stopped working. You see, I was still drinking every day. I wasn't exercising. I wasn't eating well. I was in a stressful job that I hated. And then I traded that for running a business, an even more stressful job that I grew to hate. And I was in the wrong relationship for me. And I was mostly blind to all those facts. Things got worse. That relationship ended in spectacular fashion. That business came to the brink of failure. The lifestyle I was living became more and more unhealthy until it reached a fever pitch.And I made the decision to stop taking the medication, cold turkey. Which, by the way, is something you should never do. I remember when I was detoxing from it, all I could do was lay on the floor in a dark room with an ice pack over my face. It feels like you're getting tazered behind the eyes every few seconds. They call them brain zaps. Fun. I resolved to do whatever I had to do to change the way I was living, to be more mindful of my condition and change my behavior accordingly. I decided to trade medication for meditation. Meditation without MedicationI quit drinking. I quit smoking. I fixed my financial life. I turned my business around. I started exercising, eating right. Walks, nature. Time with friends. And yes, meditation every morning (I'm coming up on two years now). Every single thing someone would tell you to do to manage your mental health with behavioral changes, I did. Or at least tried. And that, too, worked for a while. I had a period of maybe six months where I was the happiest I'd ever been. But the effects of my more mindful lifestyle wore off, just like the medication did. My full-time job was managing my mental health. Literally, I spent hours and hours a day, every day making sure that I checked all of the boxes. Wake up, meditate, eat, journal, creative work, go for a walk, lunch, go for a run...on and on. And sometimes I was still depressed. But it was more pernicious than that. When I got depressed, I viewed that as a personal failure. I thought I wasn't working hard enough. Or, I didn't do something right. Was it that sugar I ate? Do I need to add a second mediation session? Move cardio to first thing in the morning? When I was on the meditation without medication program, and I found myself depressed, the only solution was to work harder. And, as you probably know if you were interested enough to read this far, it's really hard to do those things when you're depressed. It's damn near impossible to do those things if you can't get out of bed in the morning. I knew medication would help with that. But there's still that stigma that comes with it. I didn't want to resign myself to the fact that I might need medication. That I might be a person with a problem meditation couldn't fix. I ended up in the same place I found myself when I was on the medication the first time - burned out. And blaming myself for it. And that brings us up to the present day. And my weekends in bed. Medication and MeditationIt's clear to me now that you can take medication and chase it down with Jack Daniels and still be depressed. It's clear to me now that you can stop taking the medication, live like a Buddhist monk and still be depressed. I think the best strategy for treating recurrent episodes of major depression might be something like the Obama-era Energy Policy: All of the Above. Here's a list of the most efficacious treatments for depression that we know about:
The list goes on from there. But the point stands. If the symptoms are severe enough, you might need to do all of these things. You may not have the option of choosing one set or the other. And you might do all of those things and still be depressed. I hadn't written a word in the better part of 10 days. Probably because the medication is throwing off my mojo. Or perhaps, I'm less anxious and therefore less compelled to achieve and therefore less likely to hammer out words when I don't feel like it. But, last night, I got an email from a reader. And he said this, "Some distant stranger is better for the words you've written."And that really got to me. So, if you're reading this, do whatever you have to do to live the life you want. And fuck what anybody else thinks about it. Don't try to cram yourself into some box of what someone else thinks is the "right way" to treat what ails you. Because here's some insight about depression that applies to life more broadly: Maybe you never "beat" it. Maybe you build a life that's meaningful enough to sustain you through it.But, somewhat paradoxically, what's meaningful to me is trying to beat depression, by medication, meditation, by any means necessary and talking about those successes and failures openly. What is it for you? [link] [comments] |
| brain damage stopping mindfulness and meditation. what do I do? sos Posted: 02 Aug 2021 08:17 PM PDT I used to meditate everyday. I unfortunately suffered brain damage from either my past , at said time current, psychosis or sertraline overdose. I woke up the day after the OD with 100x more anxiety then usual and a blurry, glitchy and chaotic cognition. I tried meditating that day and closed my eyes but instead of meeting peace I started forgetting what i was thinking about, seeing weird chaotic fruitions of my imagination, and having my thoughts trail off into an unconsciously thought of trail of nonsense, like random words. its been a year. my memory is betterish now, but everything else still stands. the anxiety is a bit better as im on another, different, med. is there any hope for me? any advice or styles of meditation you think might work? wisdom needed. thank you. [link] [comments] |
| is it okay to meditate lying down Posted: 02 Aug 2021 12:51 PM PDT So when I first started meditating, i was able to sit. Unfortunately, for whatever reason, i'm unable to concentrate when i sit while meditating unless i do it immediately after waking up I started lying down (it doesn't make me fall asleep though because I sleep on my side and I meditate laying down on my back) and it feels better because I'm not constantly thinking about my body hurting but i'm not sure if i'm meditating "wrong" Does anyone else get distracted if they sit while meditating? [link] [comments] |
| Posted: 02 Aug 2021 01:21 PM PDT How do you meditate and keep your focus. I try to meditate but after a while(not that long) something pops into my head like a song and then I cant focus. I'm new to this so I would love to hear what you have to say. [link] [comments] |
| Does Images appear from bright white Dot while meditating ? Posted: 02 Aug 2021 10:59 PM PDT What if you keep focusing on the bright white dot that appears sometimes ? Last time during my dream wake state (right after the dream) i would see images appear when i keep focus on on bright dots. Was wondering if it also works the same during meditation :) [link] [comments] |
| Planning an 8 week daily meditation schedule with friends and family Posted: 02 Aug 2021 11:54 AM PDT I'm planning an 8 week meditation schedule to do with my loved ones every day, hopefully, for 8 weeks. Most of my peers are either new to meditation, or kind of new, meaning they haven't had much experience meditating. I had the idea of using a popular guide that was easy to find, Headspace: Guide to Meditation on Netflix (all of them use Netflix). Which alternative is better:
(1) seems coherent because it could serve as an introduction and give us many tools and techniques in the start of the 8 weeks, so that they can choose which to use in the upcoming weeks. On the other hand, the (2) might give the ones that are just getting introduced to meditation, or the ones not yet convinced, a little structure: reducing their choices, making it "easier" to just sit and meditate and avoid demotivation related with "choice overload" or "overchoice"1 . Which method would be better? If you think there's a better series or content that could be used to introduce my peers that would also be really useful. Thank you very much! --- 1. For example in Iyengar, S., & Lepper, M. (2000). When choice is demotivating: Can one desire too much of a good thing? Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 79, 995-1006..pdf), or the Wikipedia page [link] [comments] |
| How could you follow your natural breath? Posted: 02 Aug 2021 12:57 PM PDT Without intentionally breathing in-out, how on earth do you follow your breath? [link] [comments] |
| Posted: 02 Aug 2021 02:16 PM PDT One of techniques is observing external environment but i heard it must be non-judgmental What does it mean exactly? [link] [comments] |
| Posted: 02 Aug 2021 04:19 PM PDT «Lasciare andare, non significa dare ragione o torto a quello che è stato, significa riportare nuovamente la consapevolezza nel presente. Comprendere, che staccarsi dal passato, è necessario per vivere bene il presente. Nel lasciar andare ritrovi la pace. Quando non ti aggrappi a nulla sei libero di volare ovunque...» [link] [comments] |
| Posted: 02 Aug 2021 11:51 AM PDT I have noticed recently that I tend to have a very short temper and would like to fix it. What strategies could I employ to do so? [link] [comments] |
| Advice on how to meditate to help with physical tension. Posted: 02 Aug 2021 02:09 PM PDT Hello! I do a lot of physical exercise mostly focused on my legs ( work, hobbies and I have to walk a lot everyday). I meditate often as well and tried to explore ways (while meditating) to release this tension but I'm having some difficulties 😅 I've been having a lot of tension on my legs, I always do streches and yoga and they help a lot. But I still have a lot of physical tension that builds up on my legs and hips. So I wanted to know if there is a specific type of meditation that can help or If anyone could point me to the right direction or give me a more technical explanation on what to do during my meditations I would be very grateful! Cheers! [link] [comments] |
| Will I still make progress if I were to drop from 45 min/day to 20min/day? Posted: 02 Aug 2021 02:06 PM PDT For some background, I've been meditating a total of 45 minutes per day for about the last 3 months. I usually break it up into 2-3 sessions throughout the day when I have time. I have noticed amazing effects over time, like a significant reduction in anxiety and I have been more present in day-to-day life. In about 2 weeks, I go back to college. I am anticipating it will be much more difficult to reach 45 minutes of meditation every day given that I have a roommate and will have much less time due to schoolwork, etc. I really want to keep making progress and am a little scared that if I cut down on my daily time I will regress. My question is, if I cut down from 45 mins and start doing about 20 mins or so per day, will I still make progress (albeit slower)? Will I simply maintain my current "level"? Any responses are greatly appreciated! Thank you! [link] [comments] |
| Posted: 02 Aug 2021 06:50 AM PDT It is the gladness that you have in your heart when you realise that the exam you missed was just a dream and that your life is unaffected by that anxiety your mind was playing for itself. Spiritual bliss is knowing everything is alright, just as it is. [link] [comments] |
| Falling asleep and even dreaming during meditation. Help! How can I avoid this? Posted: 02 Aug 2021 08:28 AM PDT I have been an on-and-off meditator for a year or so. I have resumed my consistent practice over the past two or three weeks, and I have a recurrent issue of falling asleep and even dreaming during meditation. Over the course of a fifteen minute meditation, I will "come to" and realize that my head is down, so I pull it back up, only to fall asleep again. I do feel more "relaxed" after meditation, but I suspect that is because I am actually just taking a nap during my meditation session. Is this normal? How can I avoid this? [link] [comments] |
| how long should you stick with a meditation style? how did you choose your technique? Posted: 02 Aug 2021 03:39 AM PDT Hello all! I am relatively new to meditating. I found this great app (insight timer), but there are many different styles, focal points, and options. Initially, I focused on mindfulness but then got curious and tried a different meditation every session. At the moment, I thought it was beneficial, but now I'm starting to feel a little scattered. I'm thinking of starting Vipassana for a while and moving on to Kundalini. Just curious what your thoughts are and if you have any suggestions on how long one should stick with a technique before trying something else. How did you choose your technique? [link] [comments] |
| What does it mean to serve and be useful in this world? Posted: 02 Aug 2021 07:52 AM PDT |
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