Ask HN: Do you meditate? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Do you meditate?

60 pointsmattbettinson65 comments

Why? What benefits has it brought to your work and life?

For those considering trying meditation, yes it's great for stress reduction but there are also benefits that are not obvious until you try it:

- If you sit long enough you'll not just be relaxed, but also feel another mode of consciousness as the waves of your thinking quiet down. It's nothing mystical but it's pretty unique to meditation. For me it takes about 15 minutes to get that point.

- Just like regular excercise actual changes your body, regular meditation actually changes your mind over time. So there are really two levels of benefit. Extending the analogy, If someone starts jogging for a week they might say "I already feel great", which is true but is actually only the start of the benefits that come with months more of training. It sounds strange but it's pretty easy to try and find out.

I don't know if it's proper meditation, but right after waking up I sit on the floor and repeat for 20 minutes:

“Watch your thoughts, they become words; watch your words, they become actions; watch your actions, they become habits; watch your habits, they become character; watch your character, for it becomes your destiny.”

It's like a mantra. I'm not even sure about the original source of this quote. It may sound a crazy thing to do, but it helps me focus throughout the day.

I believe the quote is from The Upanishads

It was recently used in the film The Iron Lady http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=nMs3HrxGRgk

Just curious: how do you know it helps you focus? Sorry if it sounds demeaning, but it's easy to convince ourselves if not careful. Have you tried measuring it in some way?

I can feel my thoughts slowing. I can't tell if I'm more productive, but I can certainly feel an effect [And strongly suspect it helps.]

You're not demeaning and raise a very good point! It's a daily practice tailored to my weaknesses. There's no physical benefit in itself to it. I think the key to a successful life lies in self-discipline, which must be practiced and reminded of every day.

Let me quote Admiral William H. McRaven:

> "If you make your bed every morning you will have accomplished the first task of the day. It will give you a small sense of pride and it will encourage you to do another task and another and another.

By the end of the day, that one task completed will have turned into many tasks completed. Making your bed will also reinforce the fact that little things in life matter.

If you can’t do the little things right, you will never do the big things right.

And, if by chance you have a miserable day, you will come home to a bed that is made—that you made—and a made bed gives you encouragement that tomorrow will be better." – http://goo.gl/IxK2p5

Meditation is bed making for my mind. It's an incredible speech and I highly recommend it.

It's difficult to measure its effects because I started this routine as part of a complete change of lifestyle. However, I definitely get more work done now than 2, 3 years ago. It's not about being delusional, but embracing your own potential.

It's originally from Mahatma Ghandi: http://www.goodreads.com/quotes/50584-your-beliefs-become-yo...

While he might have said it, I don't believe he invented it: http://quoteinvestigator.com/2013/01/10/watch-your-thoughts/

That said, I'm not sure it matters for the purpose :)

I pray for the same reason the late C.S. Lewis prayed:

  "I pray because I can’t help myself. I pray because I’m 
  helpless. I pray because the need flows out of me all
  the time, waking and sleeping. It doesn’t change God,
  it changes me." - CS Lewis

I know it might tick some people off that I mention prayer in a thread about meditation, but I respect a person's right to believe whatever they want. All I ask is they respect my right to believe whatever I want.

Is praying (categorically) similar meditation though? I thought praying would be more equivalent to personal introspection time (ie. writing a journal/ diary, or just simply sit back and thinking about your day). It's definitely a great thing to be doing, but I didn't think it was quite the same as meditation.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meditation#Christianity

I think there's a bit of crossover with prayer so it wouldn't be fair to give you flak because of the association. For example, if you're reciting a typical prayer, e.g the Our Father, you're focusing your mind on one thing. To dedicate to the prayer, you can't just shut other thoughts out, you must acknowledge and return to the prayer. I can some of the same benefits. In free flow prayer, I guess you're also acknowledging thoughts as they come and focusing on doing that. These may be thoughts that come from deep-seated emotions, perhaps thoughts that you typically wouldn't or couldn't discuss with others.

I don't practice meditation religiously, nor do am I dedicated to prayer, but I have done both and both have been therapeutic.

It seems wrong to find fault in what you're doing because of your beliefs when the process is essentially very similar, if not the same.

I know Christianity is a very touchy subject for many people. It's easy to find lots of examples of the gulf between orthodoxy and orthopraxy in many people's lives. But I'm not so much interested in where a person is at in their lives, as much as I'm interested in the delta - the change - over time.

Prayer, over time, changes me. I need to change.

C.S. Lewis was a hero of mine. An Atheist for a good chunk of his life, he became a Christian and went on to write a lot of great stuff. The fact that he and J.R.R. Tolkien were friends is pretty cool too :)

G K Chesterton was also a convert (edit: to Catholicism) and extremely prolific writer, be sure to check out his work if you haven't had a chance yet. I re-read Manalive every year or so.

The Hail Mary and, by extension, the Rosary, are often considered "meditative prayer" because the Hail Mary is so short that its recitation becomes muscle memory after only a short while.

I'm personally big on the Serenity Prayer:

  God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change;
  courage to change the things I can;
  and wisdom to know the difference.

Total atheist, so maybe I should replace the word "God" with "Brain" or something.

You could quote Epictetus instead. He talks quite a bit about that http://classics.mit.edu/Epictetus/epicench.html

Or, the tldr; version, i.e. the Serenity Prayer. :)

Wow great quote. I think it would be narrow minded to not consider prayer a form of meditation. I know people who would describe a wide array of nontraditional activities as "meditation" as well: skiing, playing an instrument, driving, weight lifting, yard work. Surely prayer has a place too.

> weight lifting

I don't know too much about Crossfit but the impression I've always had is that it's the polar opposite of careful, mindful, "correct" lifting.

The problem here is the equivalence between weight lifting and crossfit. Within weightlifting and powerlifting circles crossfit is perceived as an abomination and something that should be killed. The main issue here is the culture surrounding the crossfit movement, which is what you've already observed. Note that I've said nothing about crossfit as an idea in and itself.

And to the point about weightlifting being a form of meditation - it absolutely is.

Just as a thought exercise - think of a some restriction you have had. Be it going to bed early, getting up early, drinking less, eating less, doing something, etc. That's the temptation with breaking form - it's usually super easy to break your form and that's the thing you have to mindfully control. Repeating cues and having that mind-body connection. That really trains your focus.

Then you have the burden of lifting the weight when you can no longer see or think. Every set, every rep you have to do something incredibly pointless - it has no immediate effects, no one is forcing you and the only reason is because you want to. But that thing is incredibly hard and the alternative is just not doing it. I'm sure you've been faced with a tough decision or choice that you must make and you wanted to just not make it. At a point lifting is choosing to face that decision over and over and over again - it's not just a physical exercise it becomes a huge mental exercise as well.

Everyone has that story when you didn't see what weight you put on the bar and you just made a 10% PR when you've been struggling with the previous weight for months.

Usually when being at your maximum when performing an exercise(squat, deadlift, sprinting, etc.) all extraneous thoughts disappear, you focus is on the movement, your thoughts become a tad slower, and your will is tested all the time. There's a very similar sensation when meditating and I've felt that also when focusing on a problem or riding a bike. Also the shouting and getting angry is a mix of getting your body ready and focusing at the task at hand - a bit similar to the chants or music during meditation(not really a fan of that tbh but some people swear by it - ambiguous on purpose). Sometimes when warming up or just during submaximal sets, thoughts just come and go and you are definitely there doing the work and thinking them and yet you're on the sidelines calm, relaxed and observing yourself and your mind.

It's a bit weird and I maybe gave a crappy description but that's my experience with lifting and meditation.

Untimed Olympic lifts are nearly the same to me as yoga. Steady concentration, form and listening to your body.

I don't know much about Crossfit besides that they co-opt a lot of Olympic lifts but add timed elements and "go until exhaustion" type of circuits. To me this is the opposite of what anyone should do, it is dangerous and form breaks down when you're tired or overwhelmed.

Yes. I do a lot of different ways of it though, whatever strikes my mood. Much of it is the many variations in chinese martial arts:

(either no music, or mild music, like rain patter, nothing w/ lyrics)

I find meditation is a lot about your breath, so you can do all of these either with normal breathing or these variations:

1) n/n*2/x breathing. (i'm only at n=3 atm) 2) full lung & empty lung variations (this link does a decent job explaining : http://www.yogaindailylife.org/esystem/yoga/en/020200/exerci... )

The different types of mediation i do are:

1) moving: Tai Chi

2) standing: holding ball (from tai chi)

3) sitting : Grand Circle of Heaven (found this link which explains it well : http://ymaa.com/articles/martial-grand-circulation) (imagine the energy flow in a circle though your body as you breath)

4)(This one i think i made up on my own) : any of the above while having having pink noise playing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZXtimhT-ff4

Yes. I used to do Zazen with not much luck until I switched to Anapanasati meditation, completely blew my mind. Most of the Buddhist texts started to make more sense. Jhanic states and so on. With proper meditation technique I went from 15 minutes to sitting for an hour, easy, effortlessly. Mediation was pretty life changing for me.

Out of curiosity, which jhani states have you reached and what specific anapanasati technique do you use (focus on breath at nostrils, breath throughout the body, kasina, etc). I'm working to achieve first Khama currently, but getting a bit stuck in access concentration.

I've used Shaila Catherine books for guidance and instructions. It's hard to say which jhanic states exactly because I practice alone with no teachers. I would guess from first to third but not for long periods of time. I have experienced piti and after that entered 'equanimity' jhanic state, subtle but alert and content concentration.

I highly recommend the book Focused and Fearless, I haven't seen such clarity on meditation anywhere else, except maybe Buddhist texts but they can be cryptic and poorly translated.

My technique is comfortable freestyle sitting (as opposite to lotus that gives me pain and takes away from concentration) and breath counting from 1 to 10 and 10 to 1 until I reach more relaxed breathing, then I switch to counting 1-1 on inhale, 1-1 on exhale, repeat until 10 and backwards, this reduced mental activity and keeps me on a) breath at nostrils and b) concentration with counting. After 15-20 minutes I usually start hitting Jhanic states with piti coming in first and then going away to enter more subtle higher absorption.

But yeah, get the above book, I am not much of a guide, I was actually lucky to hit piti within several days of Anapanasati meditation and Jhanic states within a week. I hear that some people struggle for months.

Yes, it changed the way I view the world.

Sometime during my teenage years, I started not caring about the world around me, and just tried to improving myself. Think faster, go faster, multitask, get things done. Although improving these abilities are cool, they focused my life on getting more money, getting promoted. Not really focusing on what really matters: being a better person, being happy, enjoying life.

Meditation changed my view. I try to spend more time with family. When I take out the trash I enjoy the path I am walking on, the stars in the skies, the wind.

All this sounds a bit "hippie", but I am more happy now than I was before.

I highly recommend meditation to anyone. I am meditation using the iphone/android app "headspace". It is really helpful for anyone that is beginning with meditation. It guides you through all the process.

i do non secular meditation. each session takes around 10-15 minutes at regular time intervals; dawn, noon, afternoon, sunset, and night, which also serves as a tiny yoga exercise. i'm also obligated to eat something (a date or full meal) at each interval. these are what people refer to today as muslim prayers.

since i started doing this everyday, i became less addicted to work. after each exercise i look forward to the second, and my work is now divided into the time slots in between, rather than one shift of 8 to 5. the biggest psychological impact this had on me was that material matters don't matter to me anymore, and it made sort of a minimalist.

When I meditate I often combine it with tiny yoga exercises - not formal yoga poses, but just stretching and going where my body wants to stretch. What's funny is that I often find myself in a position similar to Muslim prayer (or, if one were observing from the outside they might think that is what I was engaged in).

[edit] I bring this up because whether engaged secular-ly or not there is something very grounding about the experience.

I meditate, but only for 2 to 5 minutes at a time. When I do it much longer than that, vaguely-bad things happen. (It would take a long time to explain. Suffice to say that I am chronically ill, and if I were healthier, I could probably meditate longer without these vague negative consequences.)

Usually I set a timer (about which more below) for 2 minutes, then right after that, 2 minutes more. If I ever "flunk" a meditation session, I take that as a strong sign that my mind is not working as well as it should be, and I try to fix that. It is also a sign that more meditation is needed on that day.

"Flunking" a meditation session means I got distracted and forgot that I was supposed to be meditating. For example, recently, some of my neighbors were having an animated conversation in the courtyard of my apartment building, and I was feeling lonely, so I went out there to participate. When I returned to my computer (I meditate in front of my computer) there was a some text on my screen put there by my meditation timer (which I wrote, in Emacs Lisp) which is how I became aware that I had flunked a meditation session.

More detail: at the scheduled end of a meditation session, an Emacs timer inserts "Timer finished: meditation " into an Emacs buffer visiting a file that serves as a record of my meditation sessions. (Emacs also automatically inserts the time and duration of every session into this file.) Since at the end of a meditation session, I am in the habit of adding the letter "s" (for "success") to the text, the presence of an instance of "Timer finished: meditation " not followed by "s" was a sure sign that I had flunked the session.

I've been doing these short meditation sessions with my "timer" written in Emacs Lisp since Jan 2008. I do not do them regularly -- only when I remember to do so, which (a quick look at my files reveals) was on 7 of the last 30 days.

I do not have unequivocal evidence that meditation does me any good. The main reasons I keep at it is that so many other people report good effects and the my understanding of some studies on "mindfulness-based stress reduction" (which BTW found effects from very short meditation sessions).

Hey 392c91e8165b, I think I can relate to your 'bad things happen' when trying to meditate for more than a few minutes. You might check out this book: http://www.amazon.com/Full-Catastrophe-Living-Wisdom-Illness... Gave me some different perspectives on meditation that've helped a lot with that sort of thing (assuming it's anxiety related).

I didn't have bad things happen in the way I'm guessing you mean, but I did TM for about a year and it messed up my sleep pattern severely. I was doing 10-20 minutes twice daily, ended up sleeping poorly at night and being dead tired around 4pm. I was very worried that I'd be so tired as to fall asleep on driving home. If I meditate it's only for a few minutes and not on a regular basis.

For five years now, I've struggled against torrents of thought and anxiety. I meditated and prayed begging for some relief to no avail. About four months ago, I found Ashtanga yoga, and to say that it has changed my life is an understatement. Mentally, I have reawakened. I now think patiently and deliberately with a discipline and focus I've never experienced. A child-like enthusiasm about the world, despite its suffering and strife, relit within me: hope and faith abounds. Occasionally, of course, I still do struggle, but I struggle in peace and with confidence. The physical changes have been equally striking. I've always had poor posture, mild scoliosis, and a hip imbalance. Now, that's all gone: my posture is remarkable and effortless, and I carry a sense of self with every step. I also kick way more ass at CrossFit than ever. ;) Unlike most other yoga, Ashtanga intensely focuses on the breath as well, which has increased my aerobic capacity dramatically.

I'm of the opinion that meditation alone lacks the mind-body dynamic of Ashtanga yoga. Ashtanga trains you to stay focused, keep calm, and breathe deeply despite the intense (and sometimes painful) physical practice. The physical aspect is also a beautiful reminder that mental and physical transformation takes patience and time. Struggles with strength, endurance, and flexibility serve as a tangible marker of one's progress and the work that remains. Gauging the progress of one's mind is insidiously difficult, particularly because you're using the very thing your trying to fix to measure it! Also, if you're restless like me, the postures will keep just enough of your mind occupied to allow yourself to explore yoga's meditative aspects.

Ashtanga is my answer to David Foster Wallace's remarkable speech, "This Is Water".[0] The mind is indeed an "excellent servant", and I can proudly say that I am its master.

Fun fact: When Sri Pattabhi Jois, a great Ashtanga guru, was asked by a student asked him why he would not teach him "meditation", he is said to have replied: "mad-attention".

[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PhhC_N6Bm_s, http://www.metastatic.org/text/This%20is%20Water.pdf

My experience with meditation is that it takes just the right message or experience for it to 'click.' Some interpretations of Yoga are that it is preparation for meditation: once you learn to use your body properly, you are prepared to learn to use your mind. I tried and stopped, and tried again a few times before it clicked—worth revisiting from a different perspective after a while.

I checked out the wikipedia article for Ashtanga yoga and I'm a bit put off by the reports of frequent and somewhat severe injuries. Mind sharing your personal experience there?

I had the same fear, and thus far I've had no problems. I think most of the injuries come from teachers being too ambitious with their adjustments and students being too ambitious with their practice. Just listen to your body. I only push myself to the point of discomfort and stop when I feel pain.

I am doing meditation for a year regularly (almost every day) and did another 2 years (once or twice a week). Keeps me calm and focused. Next month, I am going to this 10-day course Vipassana Meditation: https://www.dhamma.org/en/about/vipassana. Looking forward to it.

Yes I do, usually twice a day, 15-20m. Before I leave home and when I get back from work. If it gets especially crazy at work I lock myself up in a room and mediate there for a bit too.

It's mostly a way of dealing with stress and all the inputs that you get on a day. It's a lot, of thoughts, of things, stimuli and I find that dealing with them while meditating helps me clear my mind.

It brings me greater focus since my mind isn't constantly off on twenty side-quests and helps me sleep better at night.

I tend to use the same breathing exercises in moments when I'd normally get annoyed, like a super slow moving queue at a supermarket. Helps me keep my "sunny" disposition, keeps me happier.

I did meditate a lot when I was in college and I had only shower but no bath. When I had bath I was in it for 30-60mins few times a week. It helped me to clear my mind, I guess its similar to writing blog posts for some people.

Yes, simply because I like the experience. "It feels good, man".

There is a lecture by Alan Watts where he denounces the idea of "meditating on an idea" as well as meditating for personal gain - ie benefits to work / life.

I think it's very similar to orgasm (in form and function). Yes, there are health benefits and stress benefits as a side-effect, but the experience itself should be the main draw.

[edit] Alan Watts @11:38: https://youtu.be/26971uJuQuk?t=11m38s

I learned to meditate in my late teens (I'm 68 now), to fight depression and low self esteem. It was very hard for me to meditate, and I still sometimes have trouble getting into a meditative state. But I usually spend 20-30 minutes meditating during the day, or before bed. It helps me clear any depression I feel. No idea how or why it works, but for me it is very helpful.

Yes -- I try to do tai chi style standing meditation, focusing on posture and breathing every morning after the gym. I can feel my thoughts slowing and becoming more focused, rather than the rapid jumping from idea to idea that sometimes happens otherwise.

Whenever I'm stressed, I'll close my eyes and focus thoughts inward, just to clear my head and reset my thought patterns.

how did you get started?

A friend of mine I respect had been extolling the virtues of meditation for a while. When another friend started tai chi and taught me some of the basics, it just sort of clicked. I think the idea of slowly pushing thoughts out of my head is the key, I try the same for earworms with some success.

My mind often races and I usually use some sort of high BPM music to help focus. I find meditation helps bring down clutter of thoughts in my head and gives me more control over my thoughts.

15-20 minutes of meditation before an important meeting or negotiation does wonders for me. I've experimented with an iOS app "Headspace" which was pretty decent, but the patter became a bit repetitive before my trial was over so didn't extend. I do like the Oprah/Deepak 21 day challenge guided meditation series.

I also tried my hands on Headspace but wasn't that happy about it. Are the Oprah/Deepak similarly guided?

These were a bit more useful for me. Each session has a specific mantra that Deepak explains. Oprah's part is the intro, and it is pretty pointless except so she can say she collaborated AFIACT.

Anything of this flavor comes with the obvious disclaimer. Gurus are human too, of course. In Deepak's case, there's even a documentary from his son Gotham ("Decoding Deepak") that shows that side of his father.

I started after reading the book "10% happier", it gives me happines, calmness and makes it easier to tackle everyday stuff. I have gotten a small window of opportunity from when something happens until I react that makes it possible for me to react more true to myself.

If you're interested in trying it out but don't know where to start then you might want to take a look at http://calm.com (I work there), or our mobile apps on android and ios (both called "calm").

To control stage fright before a presentation, build up courage, etc. I sometimes repeat the Litany Against Fear.

I find it does an amazing job of getting my mind to focus on the fear like it's an emotional cancer and excises it pretty effectively.

Yes, meditation is great, but I urge you not to fall for the utter crap that is called "meditation apps" -- find a cushion, or a blanket, sit your ass down and simply breathe.

Keep me calm, focus, fearless, creative, more love to people around me. Im struggling to make free mobile app for helping people to do meditation by themselves or together. Any ideas?

Yes, brief sitting meditation and running meditation every day. There's evidence of physical and mental health benefits. It seems to help bring calmness, focus, and new ideas.

Not. Not in this sense.

I attribute a lot of my ability to think clearly to meditation. I attribute a lot of my willpower to qigong. I should really do it more often.

I tend to meditate for 4+ hours per day, while writing code. I start feeling mentally scattered if I miss more than a day or two.

Not sure if this is the same as meditating. I experience sometimes similar states when really engaging with a research topic. But I would describe it more as a state of "flow" i.e.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flow_(psychology)

Meditation is basically 'flow' while just sitting. And in time, the idea is that you can extend it to any activity.

No, it's a waste or time

Yes. It's a reminder that there's a non-conceptual aspect to life—a way to be that doesn't involve categorizing or evaluating, just acting and experiencing. 'Body scan' meditation and breath watching are both great for this. It's like some deeper, unseen part of mind chooses at any given point whether to exist as that voice in your head, or your physical body. For me, exercising ambition and over-focusing on intellectual pursuits for too long made it so that I was pretty much exclusively identifying with the 'voice in my head.' It sounds like I'm describing some inexact fluffy sort of thing, but I have something very definite in mind with this description: my subjective experience is starkly different based on whether I'm in the physical or mental 'mode.' And this is not a special insight of my own; their are plenty of ancient and modern treatments of the problem of thinking you are your thoughts.

And, I'm pretty sure that understanding how to move between these modes is a key aspect to cultivating 'flow' in programming (or other activities).

I'm still relatively new to meditation (about 1.5 months regularly; over a year reading about it and doing it occasionally), but I've reaped definite benefits from the time I've put in. It feels like the descriptions in 'Flatland' of discovering there's a new dimension that you can move in: without meditating it was like I was constrained to endlessly following up whatever thoughts I started up, and now I'm getting better at simply stepping aside when I can see it's no longer productive.

This has been especially important for me since I'd had an injury related to using mouse/keyboard so that it became impossible to 'get out of my head' while using the computer—was in the polar opposite of 'flow' whenever on the computer. I spent a couple years like that, in one sense relieved since I understood rationally that I wasn't damaging myself at the computer anymore—but still having a terrible time at the computer because of past experiences with it. There were a number of things that went into improving this, but things didn't start reaallly getting good again until I started meditating. The feeling is like learning an instrument though: I can see myself slowly becoming capable of making music—but it takes time.

I don't think I'm really all that much of a special case though. People are in their heads in an unpleasant way while coding because any number of things causes them anxiety: anything from finding yet another bug in your code to general unease from a built up habit of assessing your supposedly innate capacity as a programmer. If you have no concerns, you just act: it's just the code and the problem you're working on, everything else disappears, time disappears. If you can do it with the breath, you can do it with code.

edit: for typos, expanded a couple parts.

I never really "got" meditation, so excuse for sounding tone deaf, but when you say "stepping aside when I can see it's no longer productive", do you mean thinking about your thoughts¹? Or something different, not thoughts at all?

I ask because I'm completely familiar with analyzing my own thoughts, especially when I'm having a small hypochondriac episode, and I don't understand why would meditation be necessary for that.

On the other hand, if it's not thinking about thoughts, how would you describe it?

----

¹ What Terry Pratchett describes as "Seconds Thoughts" :) http://www.goodreads.com/quotes/618907-first-thoughts-are-th...

Interesting quote—I like it.

The 'Second Thoughts' definition is useful because it is the exact opposite of what you do in meditation.

I think it would be valid to say that meditation is training in understanding what it really means to 'do nothing,' and that when you area REALLY doing nothing—everything is great.

I see it like this: verbal/rational thought (typically involving the concept of yourself) arises in order to figure out how to change some aspect of your situation; with meditation you learn to understand "everything is okay, at least for the next 20 minutes," and thoughts melt away, you smell things and hear things and temperature becomes present, etc. Movies, books, people, food—you name it, can all be super rich and interesting when you are just doing this non-thinking, understanding there's nothing to do, letting life speak instead of talking over it.

I think of it as training in discerning when you are 'talking over' your experience versus JUST experiencing.

If you want some more, I wrote this very short story to exemplify how it is to be caught in the '2-dimensional plane' of believing that various forms of thought are your only possible 'actions,' while it's true that an utterly simple third dimension exists. https://medium.com/@westoncb/don-t-worry-631ce63934c1 That story describes less informed ways of getting oneself to stop thinking. It's sort of like you are waving your hands wildly all the time and you'd like to stop, so you keep trying different types of hand waving in order to stop it—whereas what you really want is to just not do it, but you have to figure that out!

If you're interested in trying it, and you've had any issues with mental health, and you're a complete beginner, I'd strongly recommend this book: http://www.amazon.com/Full-Catastrophe-Living-Wisdom-Illness...

I can understand the idea from that story - the "second thoughts" just amplifying the problem - but I can't actually relate to it, since it simply doesn't happen to me. If anything, when I'm anxious my "second thoughts" are usually more balanced and even slightly disdainful of my anxiety episode, and can help it end faster by making me realize the silliness of my anxiety.

I also understand the problem of thinking about what I'm seeing or reading, preventing me from fully immersing myself in the story, but it's usually not a problem; I identify it, go back in the film/book, take a deep breath and it usually fixes itself easily enough.

I don't know, I think I find it hard to believe there isn't more to it. This just sounds so simple and intuitive.

Hehe: it is the most simple thing, though—nothing could be simpler, in a sense.

I think the trick is that depending on your present situation it becomes more easy/difficult to do the simple thing and, e.g., 'go back into' the film/book. Meditation is just training to do that regardless of circumstances.

edit: Also, this part is really just personal opinion: I think the other part of it is you begin to see that it's possible to be content with less than you previously believed was required (because you enter a state of contentment just by sitting each morning, even if, e.g., you don't have as much money as you'd like, or you're having relationship trouble, or you don't like your self-image—whatever.), and this starts impacting your outlook on life: you start valuing experience more and evaluations of aspects of your condition less.

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