Hacker News Reader

Comment by chimen | Hacker News Reader

Would love to be able to meditate. My brain just goes all over the place and it feels like I'm wasting my time.

This is common misconception about mindfulness meditation. The goal of mindfulness meditation is not to quiet mind(though this happens with practice). It's to learn how to notice when your mind is unquiet.

So when you notice your mind wandering this is mindfulness. Imagine you're coding all day long, and then you have this moment where you notice that you're not paying attention to coding, but instead thinking about what it would be like to be a ninja. You might have been thinking about being a ninja for 5-10 minutes before you realized it. But this moment when you realize, oh hey I was thinking about something other that what I thought I was thinking about is a moment of mindfulness. And this is what you're practicing.

So when you notice your mind wandering, be happy, this is a moment of mindfulness. Your mind was probably wandering for a while before you realized it, but this moment is the moment you realized it.

What would mindful meditation be like then? Setting aside a moment to remind yourself to notice?

I'm not sure about mindfulness meditation specifically or what exactly that even refers to, but some people use a mindfulness bell that is rung randomly a few times a day for exactly that purpose. One old form of mindfulness practice is to use breath changing from in to out or out to in as moments of mindfulness. See Centering in Zen Flesh Zen Bones translated by Paul Reps (from a document predating Buddhism):

https://shivayashiva.wordpress.com/2014/01/12/centering-prac...

There is also a kind of meditation practice called "just note gone" where the idea is to start giving absense of stimulation a distinct notice (by noticing when something you had been perceiving is no longer there). I think most sit down and meditate practices tend to focus on that kind of thing (feeling the absense of stimulation as a distinct thing) via different methods.

Most common forms of meditation are mindfulness meditations.

A common form of meditation is focusing on your breath. This meditation is composed of two parts, trying to pay attention to breath, and noticing when your mind wanders.

Most people think the most important portion of that exercise is focusing on breath. But in truth it's the second part, the noticing.. The first part is growing your attention, but the second part is practicing your mindfulness.

For mindful meditation, that's not necessarily a bad thing... just focus on catching the thoughts and letting them go. I have a highly productive ADD so a voice recorder really helped with this step (record the idea to clear my mind). It can be helpful to start mindful meditation by listening to music or looking at a mostly static scene (nature, city, picture, whatever - no TV).

From there, maybe experiment with silent meditation. I got there by focusing on successively simple stimuli (city -> picture -> mental picture -> simple shapes -> dot -> nothing).

I agree with the other commenters, that's really part of the process. You do get better at it. Mind drifts... back to the breath, it wanders... back to the breath.

It, quite literally, is practice.

I don't use an app, but I know a few people that have had some success with them.

I would highly recommend a guided meditation app such as https://www.headspace.com/

Best decision I've made this year

Insight Timer is also nice, and free.

That's fine, returning to the attempt is a big part of it. You don't just start blanking out for a half-hour, it's like a muscle that has to be exercised, or a skill that improves with repetition. Just set a timer on your phone for 5min, it's hard to get mad about wasting 5min.

That's kind of what it is when you start. It's like working a muscle, you have to start with really light weights or you just get exhausted and discouraged. Like, start with a timer set for two minutes and work your way up one minute at a time.

I felt the same way for a long time. It's like trying to train a cat to sit and stay.

You might want to check out the book, The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle. The free Headspace meditations are also a good lightweight introduction IMO.

You don’t need an app, a timer, or anything whatsoever; that’s the point:

Follow your breath, count each breath from 1-10, repeat.

Start over if you lose count.

Continue for 2-200 minutes.

You’re meditating.

If you need more help try the Urban Dharma podcast, Kusala is a great guy.

Thank you

It definitely felt like that for me as well in the beginning but sticking with it helped me get better at it :)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com