Ask YC: Meditation Advice
I am getting a lot of stress lately and have trouble focusing, so I'm looking to start meditating to help my case. I failed to find something useful on searchyc.com. My only experience with this are the 5-minute meditations a professor made us do in class. I am basically failing to see the difference between meditation and sitting on the couch and watching empty space for a couple of minutes.
So, what is the hacker way to meditation? Do you have any tips as to how to approach it? Thanks!
79 comments
[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 156 ms ] threadI found it helpful..
1) Dark room. Dark.
2) Lie in bed or on the floor.
3) Breathe.
4) More slowly.
5) Nope, slower. Hold it in tension.
6) Concentrate on breathing. This is not a nap.
7) Practice. This isn't magic. You are trying to get your body & brain to do something. It's not something it just does regularly by itself. Think of it as exercise.
There are variations to the breathing technics - so its important that you do a little research on it rather than just randomly trying out something.
Search for 'baba ramdev' in google/youtube - he's a yoga guru in India who's achieved cult status.
Also 'Art of Living' does some basic and advanced courses. They are helpful too.
Update: http://us.artofliving.org/art-of-living-course/index.html
I liked the part where the immortal himalaya yogi instantly makes a palace appear, walks in it for a while with his pupil, and makes it disappear again. The point was just to get rid of a desire for luxury that remained in the pupil's karma (or something like that).
See http://tinyurl.com/cx39vd
Having a punch completely take your equilibrium because you let your mind get trapped in an analysis paralysis loop is a wonderfully effective biofeedback mechanism.
The trick, of course, is that nobody's fast enough to do that kind of calculation in the middle of a fight. A simplifying model helps--the most popular model involves "chi"--but even using that model, conscious analytic thought is too slow for anything but mostly-scripted practice.
In other words, chi may be magic fairy mysticism, but if you believe it, at least temporarily, it works anyway.
Instead, what about this: "You willingly suspend the disbelief being thrown up by one part of your mind so you can get something useful done in a different part."
Formulated that way, it covers fiction too.
See also: http://www.overcomingbias.com/2009/01/why-fiction-lies.html
http://www.overcomingbias.com/2009/01/a-tale-of-two-tradeoff...
Even though I've always 'known better', I've still been tossed on my ass more than a handful of times by a soft arts practitioner, once or twice by a guy who was almost 80 years old.
It's an interesting thing, you can get tossed around for a couple of reasons:
One, you can be a subconsciously willing partner - even if you don't realize it, you want your partner to succeed because it validates what you're spending your time doing.
And two, your partner cheats and uses force in a sly way.
Taiji, Xingyi and Bagua guys are absolute masters at body mechanics. After lots of years spent practicing, they know as much about body leverage as a lot of judo guys. It can be shocking, and your body often won't realize what's happened because it encounters an overload - there's a foot and two hands touching you all of the sudden, and your brain doesn't know what to make of the sudden stimulus when you're already in a mentally stressed state. I honestly don't think that a lot of the practitioners even realize it, hence the devotion to "chi flow".
I've spent many many years studying kinetics as it relates to power generation, and the internal artists are amazingly good at it; it's just not immediately obvious what they are doing.
Fortunately, there is a simple solution to the paradox: you learn to anticipate what your opponent is going to do so you can start your response before they even initiate their movement.
Chi probably helps too.
*Xingyi(quan)|Hsing-I Chuan, Bagua(zhang)|Pa Kua Chang, Liu He Ba Fa, and Meihuazhuang are Chinese internal arts. Systema is a Russian art that shares a lot with Tai Chi, but substitutes specialized calisthenics for chi gung, and guarantees you learn how to get punched. Pentjak Silat is an Indonesian art--actually a large group of arts, like Kung Fu--with a lot of fun knife and machete work.
The nice thing about exercise is it will help you sleep better, which I find is half the battle in trying to maintain focus (especially for us programmers who spend most of the day sitting at a desk).
I took a blacksmithing class the other day, and that was excellent.
in general, the best ways to relieve stress follow the rule of thumb: "take care of yourself". sleep long/well enough, exercise, eat right, ensure personal health (go to doctor/dentist, get a massage, etc.), and take the time to do the things you enjoy.
Addressing the original question, this is an exceptional introduction: http://www.amazon.com/Miracle-Mindfulness-Thich-Nhat-Hanh/dp...
Fourfold Breath is the basic technique. Or google pranayama yoga. I idea is to control your breathing and through that control your being.
EDIT: I neglected yoga, which is excellent for de-stressing and working out daily kinks. The problem is it's popular and so it's expensive. As an extra bonus, if you're single, there are many worse places to be than in a yoga class.
Your body needs to be in an alert or awake position in order for you to be able to settle into yourself. Sitting on a couch will just make you sleepy.
It's also hugely important not to expect anything out of your meditation. "Having trouble focusing" is only a symptom of what's actually going on. Meditation won't make it go away; but, if you stick with it, you'll likely gain insight into the causes of it, and hopefully find more productive ways of dealing with it.
Thanks for saying that... it's such an important bit, but so difficult to actually live, and it's ignored by most.
Personally, I learned to meditated from a Shambhala center. They teach shamatha/vipassana meditation, which are the two most common forms of Buddhist meditation. The (over-simplified) explanation is that Shamatha is about quieting the mind, and Vipassana about awareness/insight.
In terms of your basic question, meditation can be as simple as sitting on the couch and watching empty space for a couple of minutes, if you are sitting on the couch and watching empty space the right way. Generally speaking, there are postures that serve better than couch-sitting, and instructions that are more sophisticated than "watching empty space", and a qualified meditation instructor can help you with those.
If you really don't have access to a local instructor, get in touch with me privately, and I'll see what I can do for you.
Rinse, repeat (daily).
- focus on your breath (count to N as you breath in; count to N as you breath out - where N=4 or some other integer that is comfortable for you. I sometimes use N=2 if I'm very stressed).
- focus on the texture of something in the real world - trace the actual edge of a rock, or a doorway, or a road. Don't skip ahead with your idea of the edge - trace the actual edge, observe the actual texture of it.
- focus on the sounds around you, middle, near (your own sounds, breath, cloth moving) and far (traffic hum, birds, wind).
Being in nature, and thinking about what is stressing me, then observing infinite reality around me (sky, ocean, plants, earth) somehow calms me and puts things in perspective: those things are much more complex. I also get ideas from this new perspective. :-)
Not saying these will work for you. But one of them might.
1. Get a good noise-blocking pair of headphones. Such as the Etymotic ER-6is I have.
2. Get some relaxing music. I usually pick up an album a month of new music. It keeps the music effective.
3. Walk around a bit with the headphones playing the music. Just outside the office is fine, maybe up & down a street or two -- depends on where you/the office is.
I've participated in retreats at a few of their locations and helped out on the volunteer staff a few times. The stuff they teach, though basic -- observe your breath & observe the sensations in your body -- is really useful.
They assume you have no background knowledge whatsoever about meditation, and they teach you everything you need to know. The course is very intensive and hard, but it's really really rewarding. It's a life-changing experience.
I attended this course a few years ago, and while I don't meditate regularly, I do meditate sometimes for 30 minutes. I do it when I feel stressed, or overworked, or when I feel my urges are controlling me. It works great against these things. I feel like this meditation is a sort of super-powerful weapon that I can pull out when life gets tough.
As I said, highly recommended.
(Genuine curiosity not dismissiveness)
According to Vipassana, all misery comes from "Sankaras". A Sankara is either a craving or an aversion. In other words, wanting something badly, needing it emotionally. The feeling associated with addiction.
You have a lot of different little sankaras going on in your daily life. Vipassana is all about systematically eliminating them. It's a sort of ultra-rehab. But they deal directly with sensations: It doesn't matter what the object of the addiction is. They won't talk with you about cigarettes if you're addicted to smoking. They just teach you to feel yourself all over your body, and whenever you feel a sankara, you have to (gently but firmly) destroy it. You destroy it by simply observing it objectively. Over time, you notice that you have less and less sankaras.
Why is it intensive/hard?
The hard part is having to deal with your sankaras all the time. This is very hard.
The intensive part is because there is so much meditation. It's somewhere around 10 hours a day, if I remember correctly, with the biggest chunk being two hours long. You wake up real early and start meditating right away. You have few hours to sleep. There is no dinner. (This is intentional: it's supposed to be better for meditation.) You aren't even allowed to exercise.
I think it's worth it though. I took it twice.
You can check out their site too: http://www.dhamma.org/
I did a ten day course with these guys: http://www.dhamma.org/
I found it to be difficult, but worthwhile. I'm not going to do a brain dump of my experiences here, but I came back with no shortage of focus, that's for sure.
Here's a thread where people talk about their experiences at this course: http://www.yoga.com/forums/forums/thread-view.asp?tid=18216&...
They tell you at the retreat that you should practice for an hour twice daily after you get back. I did that for awhile, but you feel like you're backsliding doing it for "just" two hours daily, after having put in roughly 100 hours in 10 days, and I was working 12 hour days at the time, so all I really did was work, meditate, and sleep. I ended up switching to this mantra-based approach: http://www.aypsite.org/13.html instead, because it only takes 20 minutes twice a day and seems to give you more benefit per time spent (this is not to say that this program is necessarily better than Vipassana, but it's easier to maintain while you're living in the real world). This is basically the same thing as TM, except you don't have to pay $2000 for a mantra. The people involved in this are too new-agey for my tastes, but the techniques will get you out of that permanent fight-or-flight reaction that does nothing but harm in the modern world.
The bottom line: do the 10 day course or something similar if you can and you are up to it. If not, a mantra for 20 minutes or so will help you deal with stress (although working out might be a good way to deal with too).
If you set a goal such as "stop thinking in words" you will never actually stop thinking in words because this is what you're thinking about.
Meditation is not about relaxation, stress relief, and being in peace with yourself and the world. These things only come as a byproduct.
Meditation is not a band aid you can apply to your life to make it better. You cannot continue living your life exactly the way it is now, medidate for half an hour a day and expect improvement. It is psychological self exploration. If you maintain your life the way it is now, you will very quickly hit a boundary and will make no further progress in meditation until your life is changed.
Meditation is about observing the way your mind works. The only way to do that is to anchor it by sustaining an incredibly focused attention on a single object for prolonged periods of time. It doesn't matter what the object is (although it's normally breath) - your mind responds to any object and by learning to sustain uninterrupted attention you will observe how your mind works.
I would suggest you to seek instruction in Anapanasati from a competent teacher. Ignore new age stuff, buddhist cosmology, relaxation and stress relief business, or any related stuff. None of it will make any lasting difference.
In a nutshell just follow your breathing, one breath at a time. When you discover you've lost attention, relax, smile, accept whatever emotions you're feeling, and go back to the breath. Seek a teacher once you discover how incredibly deep and subtle this process can be.
Good luck!
EDIT: I suppose I should add a disclaimer. I am far, far from an expert. If someone (including me) claims they completely understand meditation, they probably do not.
http://www.buddhanet.net/budsas/ebud/mfneng/mind0.htm
Read through it, try a few, see what works for you. Different techniques work for different people.
The best is to learn in a live environment from a trained teacher. I recommend Isha Yoga (www.ishafoundation.org) They have a program called "inner engineering" which imparts a yogic practice which is quite effective at lowering stress and bringing clarity to the mind. There have even been some scientific studies looking at changes in the brain through doing the practice.