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Comment by kahawe | Hacker News Reader

An interesting detail to add: at least one mental health expert has told me that meditating on a regular basis can be a very powerful tool for fighting depressions and other psychological issues; the number of patients suffering from those issues amongst people who have been meditating for years seem to be extremely low.

Now a question for all you hackers: how to get started on meditating without running into the arms of some obscure cults and sects? And pointers?

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For me I've found these two websites to be helpful: * http://www.audiodharma.org -- podcasts, including introduction to mindfullness meditation * http://www.accesstoinsight.org -- translations of the Pali canon

I found this to be a good introduction: http://www.urbandharma.org/udharma4/mpe.html

Second Mindfulness in Plain English. It is excellent, and though written by a Buddhist monk it is for the most part careful about separating the (little) material on Buddhism out as mostly contextual information, and point out that it is not necessary for the meditation practice itself.

I also recommend a series of podcasts by Gil Fronsdal at Audiodharma called Introduction to Meditation: http://www.audiodharma.org/series/1/talk/1762/

It covers largely the same approach as Mindfulness in Plain English and fits great in with the book. It contains a series of short guided meditations.

It is also "cult free". While Fronsdal is Buddhist, he deliberately makes fun of how being a Buddhist or knowing much about Buddhism isn't necessary, for example by pointing out how mindfulness meditation is being taught as a stress reduction technique at places like Kaiser but "without mentioning the B-word", and that's about the full extent of the mention of Buddhism in the recordings.

Thank you, this was a nice podcast series. Added to my recommendations. :)

For me, The Mindful Way Through Depression was a good starting point. I was never really depressed, but I feel that without that book, I might have gotten to the point of real depression.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Mindful-Way-Through-Depression-Unhap...

It's written by four western doctors, so there's no cultish things here. It's also about the practice of mindfulness in general, not just mindfulness meditation. There's an audio guide to meditation included.

Other books By Jon Kabat-Zinn could also be useful introductions.

Then, pretty much everything by Alan Watts is interesting. He's an excellent speaker and there's tons of his audio lectures available online. Watts has a peculiar way of being able to introduce the listener to very complex information, without being off-putting.

If one want's to read about the benefits of mindfulness meditation, there's a great number of scientific studies done in the past 30 years or so.

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