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Comment by vitro | Hacker News Reader

Meditate as much as you can. Being in the present moment lets you notice your thought patterns and impulses that you act on and puts you back in control. Art of letting go. You don't loose anything if you are not on a Facebook for a week. You don't loose anything by leaving your phone home for a day. Water still flows and birds still sing. When was the last time you saw the sun setting or felt the wind in your face, mind empty, being the sun and wind? When was the last time you really tasted your food? I am speaking to you! Just relax for a while, world will continue spinning without you thinking about it. We all are just a drops of water falling from the heron's beak.

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The main problem with, and reason why I don't leave my phone at home, is fear of missing an emergency call.

A few months ago I bought a Nokia 105. It was $25 on Amazon.

It makes phone calls and text messages. The battery lasts almost a month. My wife can call me in an emergency. I wired up a few work outage alerts with IFTTT. That's about it.

The best part about it is that it leaves me alone. When I turn my smartphone back on, it's incredible to see the barrage of worthless notifications that would have distracted me throughout the day. I no longer check my phone aimlessly because there's nothing to do.

I wrote about it here: https://medium.com/@LastZactionHero/quitting-the-smartphone-...

I agree with this suggestion. I have not regretted having both a smart phone a dumb phone I can use when I want to untether but also still be contactable in emergencies.

Set all potential emergency numbers to be important. Set your phone to no interrupts except for those contacts. If your phone doesn't make a noise, don't touch it.

If you're not blue-light staff it does not seem like a rational fear. Smartphones has made us all control freaks. I think we need to practice giving up control.

Spending a night somewhere without light pollution really helps.

This gets asked all the time everywhere but I have to ask again, how do you get started?

I've tried a million different apps (even got a Headspace subscription for a while), read Mindfulness in Plain English along with a tonne of other guides on it but it just never seems to click for me.

One thing is important - being regular. Like with cleaning the teeth, it is not enough to do it once a week.

Just start doing it, perhaps every morning, dedicate 15 minutes of each day to the meditation.

By doing it alone from the start is difficult. That's where sangha - a group of persons who practice meditation - comes to play. Others will help you and it is also easier to get up and meditate if you know that others come as well.

Another tricky think is to get rid of your expectations. You may have many ideas what meditation should bring to you, just abandon them all and let meditation surprise yourself.

My teacher always likened meditation to the soil dissolved in the glass of water - put soil in the water and shake it. Now just put the glass on the table and let it sit there for a while. After some time all the soil sinks to the bottom and above that you have clear water.

Same goes with your mind and that's also an explanation, why it is necessary to be regular - your everyday activities just mix the soil with the water and you tend to loose the clarity.

Just repeat and repeat.

It is a wonderful activity.

I like your comment, but I gotta scratch my grammar Nazi itch. It's lose, not loose, unless you can tighten anything by having Facebook or your phone.

But to add on to what you've said. Meditation is great can help you lose mundane, petty worries and live in the moment, as opposed to the could've beens.

> it's lose, not loose

> It can help you lose mundane, petty worries

So, you're saying you haven't been meditating enough?

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