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Comment by tmoravec | Hacker News Reader

The article literally starts with this: "It is sold as a force that can help us cope with the ravages of capitalism..."

For a more meaningful discussion of mindfulness, I recommend the "Mind The Mindfulness Hype" episode of The Psychology Podcast [1] . They dig into what the scientific method has to say to mindfulness, what studies have been made and what is missing, and what benefits can be realistically expected. And what's over the top hype.

[1] https://www.scottbarrykaufman.com/podcast/mind-the-mindfulne...

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Thank you for this link, the episode shows very well what is the state of scientific research on mindfulness and meditation, and gets us more curious about the mind itself.

Sam Harris regularly claims that it reduces the half life of emotions such as rage.

I personally find that a 'deterministic' view of life achieves that for me.

For whatever reason when I meditate I can only leverage it as a relaxation tool, as opposed to witnessing my thoughts occur, which I think is somewhat 'mindfulness'.

I've struggled to get very much out of mindfulness (primarily via Sam Harris) but this 'half-life of an emotion' thing is one of the bits that has worked.

The best example I've experienced was being in an argument with my wife about something or other that had gotten heated to the point I was getting angry. But then I got a phone call from someone at one of my clients - I immediately had to be a different person for that call. Once it had finished I came back to my wife and felt like I entirely had the _choice_ as to whether I would be angry again. I was, in fact, almost certainly treading an automatic path down which I _would have_ made myself angry to continue from where we were. Instead, the obviousness of this was so apparent that I didn't - because it suddenly felt artificial.

What Sam Harris teaches in his meditation app is not 'mindfulness' as commonly understood, i.e. in the vein of Vipassana or even MBSR. It's more like his own lite version of Dzogchen practices.

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