Ask HN: Do you meditate and why?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5653802

by khetarpal • 13 years ago

6 12 13 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

Meditation has several benefits including ability to focus, resist distractions, and manage stress. However, I don't see too many people talking about it in this community.

khetarpal3• 13 years ago

Maybe, I'll take it on some day

khetarpal3• 13 years ago

Yes

mattm• 13 years ago

Why did you answer both "Yes" and "No" to your own question?

dlf• 13 years ago

I think it's a failed attempt to set up a poll by the OP.

eksith• 13 years ago

Yes, I've had to struggle with OCD on an off and chronic insomnia for about the last 10 years. Before that time, I've had a mild but manageable bout of OCD in high school, but got worse after graduation.

My distractions are usually self-inflicted so the outside world doesn't need to do much (just having a book or sock in the wrong place is enough). So I've started listening to white noise a lot of time (I.E. The 10 hour track http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vcJ-o_fh1B4) which does help somewhat while working.

What helped me the most so far are breathing exercises. Focusing on breathing is a deceptively simple way to get your mind to sit still for a bit before heading back to work. But it's not just thinking "inhale, exhale".

You have to imagine air as a amorphous blob of light. When you inhale, imagine this lighting up the pathway as it enters your nostrils, sinus cavity, bronchial and your lungs. Now when your inhalation is complete, your lungs are full of light. As you exhale, the light leaves the lungs back the way it came (I keep the inhale-exhale cycle at about 3 to 4 seconds).

I started with just 1 minute at first (that was the maximum I could devote before my mind wandered off) and now I'm up to about 30 minutes when I have time.

The OCD has come down to manageable levels. The insomnia is down a bit too, although I'm making plans to see someone about light-therapy to hopefully "cure" it.

countzeroasl• 13 years ago

Yes. Two reasons:

1.) Concentration Meditation calms my mind and allows it to settle so that the important thoughts can rise to the top more easily when I'm NOT meditating.

2.) Insight Meditation helps to increase the time between stimulus and my response to such stimuli, allowing me to respond mindfully rather than totally driven by conditioned reaction or instinct.

leashless• 13 years ago

I'm something of a career meditator - six years of an hour a day in my late teens and early twenties, and another decade of regular practice after that. I'm fairly slack about it these days, but the groove is well burned in.

In those kinds of quantities you get discontinuous results, but it's a PhD's worth of effort for some fairly intangible rewards. If anybody has questions, ask away.

gyardley• 13 years ago

Just enter 'meditate' in the search box at the bottom of the page. From just a month ago:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5432713

crazydiamond• 13 years ago

1. Yes, I meditate. As of now I don't do sitting eyes-closed meditations regularly (I should). I keep up the state of not-attaching to thought, of remaining in "presence" (also called the I-am or Being). Once you get it, you will recognize what I mean.

2. Meditation has side benefits of helping with concentration problems, sleep issues, maybe even some psychological issues (there's a lot on it if you google 'meditation and neuro-science').

However, the original and main purpose of meditation was what is called "liberation" or awakening or enlightenment. Along the way, the grip of the fictional mind-created entity called the "self" or "me" weakens and at some stage just collapses. In a few cases this happens suddenly with no practice (e.g. Eckhart Tolle, Sri Ramana Maharshi). What happens further you will just have to experience yourself but this much I can say: as the false self or "ego" weakens and loses control, suffering also reduces and a time comes when you know that mental suffering is over for you.

There is far too much material on this. You can spend a whole life just reading (and as a result yourself get nowhere). Everyone will have their favorite books or resources or people. I would recommend Power of Now by Tolle as a very accessible book. There is also Sri Nisargadatta (I am That, and many other works, available on the internet freely in text/pdf form).

Most threads on HN recommend mindfulness and give you links to documents for that. Mindfulness puts the attention on the body and thus takes it away from the mental process. The references I gave (similarly) take the attention away from mind to what is present or aware (without going to the body). So these approaches still have a lot in common.

Whichever route you take, it is important to start practicing (stilling the mind) asap, and not get caught in the reading trap.

maximgsaini• 13 years ago

I do it when I need to relax myself or find an answer. It helps me get rid of some weird feelings. For example, if I'm feeling anxious, meditation can help a lot. For me, it is a very intellectual process and I love it. It is this fun game I play with my inner-self which helps me find out whats really going on. Its also good to find a way out of the bad situations I get myself into.

I've even been known to meditate in pretty crowded places as well. People find it weird, but you gotta go when you gotta go!! :)

SuperContext• 13 years ago

One of the reasons I meditate is because I find that it allows me to explore certain parts of the world that I believe are not accessible otherwise. This has to do with my meditation style: focusing on the "zeroes." Let me give you an example, when you breathe, you inhale and exhale, but there is a moment when you are neither inhaling nor exhaling, being aware of that moment is what I mean by focusing on the "zeroes." Using language from Zen, it's when expansion and contraction cease. There are zeroes everywhere around us, but we seldom become actively aware of them. I recommend it highly.

Ask HN: Do you meditate and why?

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