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Comment by badpun | Hacker News Reader

I've had very similar thoughts about mindfullness. Mindfullness tells you to observe your fears and other feelings and see that they come and go, while it does not focus at all on whether and to what degree they are actual valid and important. Feelings are often signals from your subconsciousness, which is trying to tell that something. Of course, a lot of the time these signals can be BS or blown out of proportions - but effectively ignoring them via mindfullness is not a good approach in my opinion.

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> while it does not focus at all on whether and to what degree they are actual valid and important

That hasn't been my understanding at all. The idea is to observe the feelings and name them so they no longer hold uncontrollable emotional sway over you, but rather you can recognize them for what they are, judge their validity, and act on them rationally and maturely rather than out of unexamined emotionality.

It's a kind of version of "if it's mentionable it's manageable" -- mindfulness turns "unmentioned" vague feelings into "mentioned" feelings you're now aware of and can deal with.

Mindfulness doesn't distinguish between what's valid or not -- it allows you to recognize things in the first place, then it's your own job to make those distinctions later.

There is a lot of confusion here as well as in the article

>Mindfullness tells you to observe your fears and other feelings

>but effectively ignoring them

How is observing equals ignoring? Observing allows you to detach and not take things too closely and as a consequence to act more "easily" if you choose consciously rather than unconsciously.

I'm in that boat too. Before meditation, I used to practice self-hypnosis and at the beginning, I thought they were similar. But self hypnosis helps you change your thoughts, when meditation is simply acknowledgement of thoughts, which feels useless to me.

In a sense, meditation seems very shallow, it's the very first step. Then come the techniques of self-hypnosis which lead to change and the real self-help. I don't think that acceptation is enough to make your life better, just a little less miserable.

>when meditation is simply acknowledgement of thoughts, which feels useless to me.

I would say you clearly have not meditated enough :)

Thank you, who doesn't like a condescendent comment...

I would reply you have no idea how much you're leaving on the table by meditating instead of using auto-hypnosis.

The same coping mechanism is being used in NLP. I have a feeling it's just a way of dealing with an environment which isn't healthy for the human being. It would be better to adjust the environment.

> It would be better to adjust the environment.

Adjusting the environment is much more difficult and, in many cases, simply impossible.

To paraphrase an old folk tale, what is easier: making the entire land-surface of the Earth easier to walk on, or just putting shoes on one's feet?

Sure, but fixing the bigger problems, such as stress in the workplace, would have many more benefits.

Ans as far as the analogy goes, it might be hard to fix the entire surface of the earth, but that's a strawman, because we have plenty of urbanised and indoor areas where you don't need shoes.

What's the easiest? To cover the entire earth in asphalt, or make all cars be 4wd?

I think it's more like the stress in the workplace (for example) is caused by two things. Greedy or power hungry people deliberately harming others (for example) and then other people over reacting to this but also to just the normal shit you have to deal with anyway. So the mindfulness is to deal with the over reaction but ethics and morality are needed to deal with the action. You need both, seems to be the criticism that some people are making about having mindfulness without some ethical framework like Buddhism.

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