Meditation on Hacker News: What are you guys experience with meditation?

I attended a 10-day Vipassana course (http://www.dhamma.org/). In my opinion, this is the easiest type of meditation to start with. There are sites for these 10-day course pretty much everywhere around the world. The course runs on a donation basis: you are fed and housed for free during the duration of the course and at the end you choose whether to donate or not.

I met a lot of very nice people in my course. Some were new (like myself) but some were experienced veterans (a couple of guys had been practicing for over 15 years) and everyone seemed so happy. The course is very difficult, both physically (you need to sit on the floor for at least 9 hours a day, and believe me you will only realize just how bad/painful this can be once you do it) and mentally (you are not allowed to talk at all during the duration of the course). But it was all more than worth it at the end.

During the actual course I became more at peace with myself and gained some important insights on my personality and some of the roots of my misery. There's a lot of philosophy behind the actual technique but the basic idea is that you are taught to be indifferent to sub-conscious sensations of 'good' and 'bad'. By no reacting to 'good' sensations, you limit your craving and hence your misery. Similarly, if you do not react to 'bad' sensations you can keep your cool, not get distracted and just be happier.

I am definitely very happy I was exposed to this technique at a young stage of my life. Even though I haven't been practicing since I took the course I am determined to make Vipassana a part of my every day life.

A couple of years ago, I was able to sit still and focus on my breathing, for upto 30 minutes at a stretch, and those days I felt more at peace with myself. It was like internal 'world peace' and harmony. Of late I haven't been able to sit still for longer than 15 minutes even when I try, but that may have a lot to do with the fact that I am in college, and constantly juggling n number of things.

These are some previous discussions that you might find useful:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=454146

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=612276

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1462178

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1471244

I've been meditating with different levels of practice for the last 7 years. I also attended a 10-day vipassana course (taught by s.n. goenka (http://dhamma.org). Recently, I've been sitting at least 30-60 minutes per day.

For the last two months, I've been sitting while wearing the NeuroSky Mindset and using it to record my brainwaves as I meditate!

The Mindset is a $200 BCI (brain-computer interface) that looks like a pair of headphones. It measures the electrical activity of your brain via 4 "dry sensors" and sends the raw 8-channel feed of your electrical brainwave activity (alpha, beta, gamma, delta, etc) wirelessly via Bluetooth to your computer. Additionally, the chip in the headset has algorithms that interpret the raw data stream and give readings of "attention" and "meditation."

The manufacturer has put together a pretty decently documented developer center with several different APIs you can use to create games and applications that make use of the headset.

The fancy headset costs $200: http://store.neurosky.com/products/mindset

Here's a link to the developer center: http://developer.neurosky.com/

I haven't written any apps yet, but I've been using this app to record and chart the brainwaves in my sessions over time: "http://store.neurosky.com/collections/alchemy/products/medit...

After I get a couple more weeks data recorded, I plan on writing up a longer post!

If anyone in the NYC area would like to come over and have their brainwaves recorded and try it out, give a shout. I'm in the East Village and I'd love to compare my brainwaves to other people interested in meditating and seeing some sort of "tangible" measure of "progress."

Compares favorably to modafinil. Well, in my case modafinil tends to give headaches, so it loses by default, but comparing 50 mg to 10 minutes of meditation:

- meditation works faster - 10 minutes compared to about 1 hour for modafinil

- meditation tends to be shorter term (but it varies) - 2-4 hours vs ~6

- modafinil has several side effects (though your mileage may vary)

- meditation kills most of my social instincts. Unless I focus on interaction, I tend to be really quiet and slightly non-responsive. But if I do try to focus on being social, it's ok.

I'm curious how the MagicRuby group is doing.

Do hackers meditate? And if they do, what it is having to do to the condition of "hacker"? Maybe ask "do taxi drivers, meditate?" or "do traffic police meditate?"

When I was between the ages 16 until I was about 22, I would meditate for at least 1 hour per day - at night prior to going to bed.

I would just focus on my breathing. If I had anything in my mind - I would choose a mono syllabic word to repeat over and over in my head, once with each inhalation and once with each exhalation.

I would breath slow and deep, typically, however - when I was focused on healing myself after strenuous workouts - I would breath more rapidly.

I was doing bujinkan six days a week for at least 4 hours per day.

I have recently been trying to regain that level of discipline in my meditation as the correlation between my awareness, my mental fitness and ability to focus while I was meditating then was amazing.

I am now 36 - and I regret very deeply not continuing to have this as my daily routine for the last decade.