Ten years of trying to meditate

I like to imagine what the Earth and everything on it looks like to a neutrino.

In the last few years or so I've been practicing letting go the compulsion to be doing Something Else in addition to the Main Thing I'm doing. For example: the urge to listen to a podcast while I'm doing the dishes. Among the worst is the urge to listen to music while I'm listening to music, or the desire to play a videogame while I'm reading a book to my child. Part of this change is because I don't want to break any more dishes for lack of attention, but also because attending to the Main Thing feels more valuable now in that if it doesn't require 100% focus my mind can wander, or just let the neutrinos stream through, and afterwards I appreciate the break.

Btw, I’m a big fan of Shinzen Young who has a secular/scientific(-ish) approach that combines various world traditions in a hybrid sorta MMA does with martial arts.

https://www.shinzen.org/

After a few years of this I finally bit the bullet and went on a 10-day meditation retreat. ~12 hours a day of meditating, no books or talking or exercise. The first days were tough, all that boredom and irritation was still there and I had to sit with it for many, many hours. But I felt like I'd made a big commitment in going there, so I sat it out. The solidarity of a couple dozen other students going through the same thing helped a lot too, even if we weren't supposed to acknowledge each other's existence.

On the third or fourth day a switch kind of flipped in my brain and it was no longer hard to sit perfectly still for an hour.

At that point I guess I had learned the basic skill of meditating, and it's stuck with me. As long as I'm somewhere reasonably quiet and distraction-free I can get back into that state within a few minutes.

Also, as a side note, some of the Buddhist philosophy was also helpful. I originally perceived mental illness as similar to physical disease: people are generally healthy, and sometimes there's something wrong with you that needs to be treated and corrected, usually by a doctor of some kind. In Buddhism the script is flipped: existence is suffering by default, and most people require some kind of deliberate work to come to terms with their own existence. I get that it won't resonate with everyone, but in my case it helped a lot to view what I was going through as a manifestation of ordinary human suffering rather than some special, unusually intractable mental health condition.

EDIT: Also, shit gets intense when you keep ratcheting up your concentration and introspection. Getting past the boredom and being able to sit still for an hour is just a first step.

“It is not good for people to be alone…”

I feel like if someone wrote that they wanted to understand computation, and over the course of 10 years they read Godel Escher Bach and some Smullyan puzzles, and occasionally pulled up a python interpreter to play with stuff for minutes at a time, and each time got bored and gave up, we wouldn't find it especially interesting that they hadn't reached any deep and satisfying understanding.

I'd like to be a better cook, and I read through Salt Fat Acid Heat and sometimes I try to make something more planned and effortful than I normally would, but over the past 10 years I have taken no cooking classes, made only sporadic efforts to learn more, and so I'm not surprised that my ability in the kitchen hasn't changed much.

What you get out of an endeavor is related to what you put in. But if you have difficulty sticking with it, maybe introduce stuff in your life that helps you maintain that effort? My meditation practice was most consistent when I was doing a class that met weekly. In addition to guidance and instruction, there was always some component of sharing or discussing experiences, asking questions, etc. Even if it's not a "sangha" per se, having a regular, structured, social interaction attached to your practice can really help. As can having a more knowledgeable teacher, rather than just a pile of books.

Autogenic training is an easy practice, much easier than traditional meditation practices, the teachings of which are, at least to my Western mind, impenetrable. I have read quite a few books on meditation, breathing, jhanas (sp?), listened to practitioners and teachers, and for the life of me I cannot make sense of 95 percent of it. In part, I think, my confusion occurs because those teachings don't make a lot of sense, there is an intellectual short-circuit that causes people to create concepts and practices that don't make sense because they have to "chase" or follow or build on other concepts and practices that don't make a lot of sense. A vicious circle of nonsense.

Something similar happens in martial arts. Movies and books showed the mystical and magical abilities of traditional martial arts practitioners: breathing, ki energy, horse postures, "watch how the eagle soars." I think, at least for Westerners, the pinnacle and climax was reached with Bruce Lee, who philosophized and kicked (but never on stage against other "experts") at the same time. And not with the brutal methods of Western boxing, but with a single finger. But, as we saw in mixed martial arts fights, empiricism-as usual and as expected-won out against magic, spirits and brutal training that made no sense; fighters who trained following empirical methods of training and fighting (develop the methods, test them, accept them if they work, abandon them if they don't) were throwing traditional martial arts practitioners out the proverbial window.

I would encourage many of those who have tried traditional meditation for years and faced all sorts of problems, from losing months to developing pathological conditions, to try Autogenic Training instead: easy, rewarding, accessible. And it works.

These days i will pay attention to my breath at times when i cannot fall asleep. And that's about it.