Comment by mettamage | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mettamage | Hacker News Reader

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> Secondly, mindfulness feels, to me, like an offshoot of CBT. It appears to be very closely related to CBT in both its approach and what it helps control.

Really? When I meditate I need to turn my thoughts off. With CBT you reframe your thoughts by a process of what I'd like to call creative thinking and empiricism. So for me, it's not an offshoot of CBT, since mindfulness is not concerned with thoughts but with being mindful on whatever your object of mindfulness is (in 95% of the cases it's your body).

Also, mindfulness was ripped out of Buddhism. Mindfulness was "Buddha's" invention on top of Hinduism -- as I understand it. Hinduistic meditation focuses on concentration (note: I stand corrected if I'm wrong), whereas Buddhistic meditation shifts (eventually) towards mindfulness and depending on the tradition you have like 4+ different forms of mindfulness.

What psychologists/neuroscientists did was take these techniques out of their contexts to see if they were helpful for therapy. And apparently -- according to their studies -- they were.

I just know from personal experience how mindfulness damages me, I also know how it can heal me. I prefer to use it for healing purposes. For me, when I need to be more connected to my body and to other people I use mindfulness and loving kindness meditation (metta) as a practice. Metta makes me more connected to people and mindfulness acts as a multiplier towards that connection (since I am more aware of all my feelings). Whenever I need to code, focus and analyze more I tend to be less interested in meditation practices.

I'm noticing it's not a hoax. I've meditated 500+ hours and my baseline level of being aware of my feelings is slightly but noticeably higher. Even if I don't meditate for months.

> When I meditate I need to turn my thoughts off

Good luck with that! From my experience and the teachings I received, meditation is not about turning thoughts off (which is practically impossible) but becoming aware of them in a way that you don't get lost into them, the goal being to understand hands-on how the mind works.

> Mindfulness was "Buddha's" invention on top of Hinduism

That's completely wrong AFAICT, although I concede that the term "mindfulness" can be perceived as a lay version of "meditation", without religious or philosophical connotation.

Mindfulness meditation indeed is not about turning thoughts off.

Concentration meditation on the other hand can involve turning thoughts off. Mindfulness meditation involve a certain degree of concentration practice (e.g. the use of breath meditation - anapanasati) to maintain focus, but too much concentration is directly detrimental to mindfulness meditation.

> is not about turning thoughts off (which is practically impossible)

It depends on the person probably. I can easily shut the "loud" thoughts down, what remains is muted "flashes" of concepts in the back of the mind which almost lack vocalization. I can shut down those too, then only awareness of sensory experiences remains. I was never able to feel pure awareness of existence of self though. Maybe it's just one thing.

> When I meditate I need to turn my thoughts off.

Mindfulness meditation is very explicitly not about turning thoughts off, but about letting thoughts arise and fall away without getting caught up in it.

Concentration meditation practices do involve turning thoughts off.

That said, I also find the comparison to CBT curious.

> (in 95% of the cases it's your body).

In mindfulness meditation, while it can be your body, it is not generally nearly as dominant a focus unless you want it to be. The "baseline" tends to be mindfulness of breath (anapanasati) because it is a convenient basis for a necessary level of concentration, and while it may involve the body peripherally as where you will notice the breath, is not about the body (indeed, while mindfulness of breath is simple as a starting point, people have written 500+ pages of books just on that one subject, and that involves e.g. the selection of other meditation objects to use while practising mindfulness of breath to achieve specific effects, such as dulling distractions, and a lot of that seems to be down to draw attention away from your body, because your body is a rife source of distracting sensations).

Mindfulness of the body is a separate aspect which tends to explicitly involve letting the sensations of part of the body fill your mind and diffuse outwards until it feels like that part of your body is all there is. When you do it with sufficient concentration it produces very curious sensations. It can also be a useful practice to reduce physical pain (I've had success with it but to very varying degree) - I see that as a trick of the mind where you basically seek to "spread the pain around" mentally so that it feels like it dissolves; sharp pains feel like dull aches. Nevertheless when successful it is a very useful trick of the mind (as a skeptic it feels to me as intentionally seeking out a placebo effect, but if it works it works).

Mindfulness of mind and and mindfulness of emotion are other separate aspects, and purely disassociated from the body, though you will tend to use mindfulness of breath to bring the concentration needed for it.

Most beginners mindfulness practice tends to focus first on mindfulness of breath to attain base levels of concentration and then mindfulness of mind.

If you focus only on the body as the object of meditation, you miss out on many aspects.

"and fall away without getting caught up in it"

I'd agree that thinking of mindfulness as turning thoughts off is not quite right - but I think he means what you mean when you say "fall away". He probably thinks of letting a thought fall away and not following it as "turning it off".

Thank you for educating the discussion on what meditation is and isn't. Western culture/medicine seems to have fixated on meditation being only mindfulness which is just one facet of the journey inward.

Well, CBT is about recognising and stopping intrusive thoughts before they become too harmful. Mindfulness extends this idea to using meditation to create an environment in which it's hard for intrusive thoughts to occur.

The focus on meditation as a treatment for anxiety and depression is relatively new, the focus on reducing or eliminating intrusive thoughts isn't.

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