100 Days of Meditation
docs.google.com
docs.google.com
I started meditating recently after reading MIPE. I'll try to find a teacher as soon as I can. What got hooked me up was some research that it improves cognitive performance: http://www.gwern.net/docs/dnb/2010-zeidan.pdf . There's some evidence that long term meditation changes structure of the brain and improves mood and attention outside of meditation practice: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brain_activity_and_meditation#C... . This post seems like good encouragement as well: http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/38947/is-prac... .
One thing which I notice the most is increased ability to deal with distractions and staying focused on boring subjects . It is essentially what one practices during meditation. Dealing with distractions is very important skill for programmer: http://blog.ninlabs.com/2013/01/programmer-interrupted/ . What's more it's kind of skill, that is hard to develop without active practice. I can't think of better way of developing it than meditation.
http://www.urbandharma.org/udharma4/mpe.html
(Scroll down for the on-line version.)
An interesting TED talk describes the seat of awareness as a primitive network of neurons in the brainstem and body, the network that gives one a sense of "I am" and experiences the rest of the neurological processes. http://movies.netflix.com/WiMovie/70236306?strkid=1954165956...
If true, meditation and yoga can be thought of as techniques that progressively still the later evolved "higher" thought processes, and turns one's awareness back into the experiential parts of the mind. Yoga is simply a very active and tactile meditation hack, that provides strong stimulation responses through the nerve network that one is training to become more actively connected.
* "Zen and the Brain" (written by a meditation practising neurologist)
* "The Buddha Brain" (about the neurological/physiological background of a couple of buddhist principles)
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Mindfulness-practical-guide-finding-... (Mindfulness: A practical guide to finding peace in a frantic world, Prof Mark Williams and Dr Danny Penman)
It's a great book that leads you through the first 8 weeks of meditating, and contains meditation aid audio clips for various scenarios. The most useful I've found is the 3 minute "breathing space" meditation, particularly for that noisy bus - you need good noise excluding ear buds though.
If you don't like the speaking audio, and/or you've practiced enough not to need the prompts, you should check out Simply Noise:
http://simplynoise.com/ << they also have apps for phones.
I've found it equally helpful for rendering words unintelligible, which makes mindful awareness much easier.
I've found in practice that I have most success when I treated emotional highs and lows as irrelevant. The books I've read all suggest that the point is to focus on ordinary life, not search for ever deeper trance states, and my experience has been that trance states are transient while ordinary life goes on always. Taking my meditation in that direction has tended to make it gentler, lower-impact, but longer-lasting. At least it feels that way.
If you ever meditate differently, it would be interesting to see you contrast any new effects with the ones you've already experienced.
I found your essay fascinating, by the way, particularly your precision in analysis. It's what I might call first-person science :)
Firstly, why do you think it's worth it and do you notice a substantial difference in your life when you stop for whatever reason?
Secondly every time I read something like this, or talk to people that meditate, it seems extremely unscientific and filled with subjective analysis. Can you point me to something that would convince me that it has real world benefits, past that of taking a nap, or stopping for 45 minutes to think about your day/life.
There is a lot of scientific research on meditation underway. You might want to check out the IONS Meditation Bibliography to see if any of the studies interest you: http://noetic.org/meditation-bibliography/bibliography-info/
So far I find it more than worth the time investment, and at this point the 45 minutes flys by.
I have a question. Could you explain "The Deep" in a little bit more detail? What happens to your body and your mind? What is going through your head?
The Deep is sort of a 2nd plateau, the first being basically just an awareness of your mind being (very) noticeably stiller, ie "Hey, my thoughts have stopped--cool." The 1st plateau would occur usually at the 30 minute mark.
The Deep would occur a bit after that, usually at the 45-60 minute mark, occasionally sooner, and it is like the 1st plateau, only much more so--almost like if you were actually scuba diving and you had gone deep enough into the water that you could just barely see the light of the sun above you. The first plateau is characterized by stillness, but The Deep is a profound stillness, stillness to the 2nd power. It struck me, because I realized I had never experienced a stillness like this before in my life.
Body and mind are secondary and not thought of--in fact nothing whatsoever is going through my head, except the awareness of the stillness and calm. Breathing is barely perceptible, heartbeat not felt. It is a significantly refreshing experience.
http://www.amazon.com/Meditation-Without-Gurus-Clark-Strand/...
the first review sums things up nicely:
Clark Strand cuts right to the heart of meditation, without dogma, gurus, religion, beliefs, or any of the other gunk that gets in the way of sincere and honest practice. In a beautiful style reminiscent of Thich Nhat Hanh, Strand has created the ideal meditation companion and guide. While Strand is probably among the few teachers who would never invite a following, he most certainly deserves one. If you read no other book on meditation, read this one. If you have other books on meditation, put them on the back shelf and read this one. If you have never meditated before and want a book to teach you how, read this one. This is the only meditation guide you will ever need. It is superb!
Meditating while walking sounds interesting but it also seems like it could be quite hard to control heart rate. Of course, maybe that's not as big of an issue as I make it out to be. In any case I'll have to try it sometime. Do you have a link to any further source of information about it?
If you are so out of shape that the walking causes you discomfort, then walk slower. Same if you feel your heart rate is too quick to allow you to stay calm.
Other than than that, there's no reason to worry about heart rate.
My wife was remarkably cool about it, but of course, if you read the end of the article, you can see that I didn't quite make it all the way. =) What she didn't like so much, was that between 6-7pm I was not available to help out with making dinner.
As for your "forehead catching fire" that sounds like it could be related to concept of the acquired sign or counter sign (basically "images", though they need not be visual, that come to signal certain mental states), though for it to persist outside of meditation sounds odd.
Yeah, the forehead-flame was/is really bizarre. I did some Google searches for it and didn't find much of anything that didn't seem like pseudo-science (look up "Ajna chakra" and you'll see what I mean...)
It's always hard to convey to people that it was very different from a mental image / thought / feeling in that it actually feels tactile, in the same way that if you had a rock in your shoe, you wouldn't confuse it for anything else--I just don't know what this "rock" is made of; it could certainly be a creation of my mind, but it doesn't present itself that way. It's easy to ignore, so I ignore it.
http://www.accesstoinsight.org/lib/authors/thanissaro/painhe...
Not to diminish the OP's accomplishment, but he only meditated for 100 days. Even if you're as disciplined as he was, you're only scratching the surface at 3 months. If you want the perennial peace of a monk or a master, that takes years. But it's about the process and the work as much as the result.
Most of us have decades of conditioning in a high-stress, competitive society (and, if you believe in karma, possibly eons of difficult karma). We're also evolved to survive in a much harsher environment than the one we're in now. You're not going to undo all of that in 3 months, but you can make a surprising amount of progress.
Perhaps the electron, which fulfills its physical contract perfectly, is already in a state of pure meditation. Who knows?
As for whether animals meditate and what would happen if they did, I have no idea.
I think I would have been able to persist the state longer if I lived in a suburb where I could avoid those things more readily.
To me this could promise some powerful benefits, beyond just sitting every day. But thus far, I've found it very hard to do this 5 times a day. Anyone ever try this?
This sounds really interesting.
Something I'd like to strive for is more purity in experiences. What I mean is that when I go swimming, I shouldn't be thinking about work. When I'm at work, I shouldn't be thinking about my next swim.
I'm far from qualified to opine on this topic, but it seems to me that the "most meditative" practice is to do whatever you're doing well, with intent, and free of pollution from other influences, i.e. "when I sleep, I sleep; when I eat, I eat".
The Deep (to me) is a lot like being in a coding flow, or that blissed-out feeling you get an hour or two into a long bike ride or a swim.
So when you are in the flow with coding, swim, or bike ride, you are in the midst of an action that granted you access to this state. But you did not actually consciously enter this directly state by choice.
But the I think the trap can be that you can only access this when you are doing things that lead to being in the flow. What about being able to enter this state when you are really upset about something or when things are going badly, or when you are bored, or when you are doing something compulsively.
The practice I believe is trying to access this state at random times of the day, and especially in those times when you are not engaged in an activity that lends itself to this awareness, but actually engaged in activities that do the opposite (such as being annoyed at someone).
The idea is that you are building this muscle that allows you to access the "flow" more and more and eventually maybe realize that in some way can always access the space from which thought arises, because that space must always exist.
But again, this is theory. Practice is hard. I'll take a moment now.
The concept for this came from this ebook. I've only skimmed it.
There are tons of micro exercises you can come up, the trick is to "catch" yourself as often as possible every day. screw the 5 times, just try to max out every day. Dont stop what you're doing, just start to become conscious of what you're doing. The breath is the key. Its tough but it works.
I also wanted to continue to be social and that meant going out and having a beer every once in a while. Those two things really crowded out the 6-7pm time slot that I had for sitting.
I wish it were easier for me to sit in the morning, but alas. I'm hoping to restart the practice with the 2nd Annual /r/meditation sit this coming January.