Ten years of trying to meditate (opens in new tab)

> I cycled through these noticings. Just like on the beach a few years prior, for a moment I felt that there was no distinction between me, the train, the tunnel, and the space we were all moving through. Nothing to grip or hold on to.

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.

Great piece! I’ve had a rambling zen practice for over 20 years and little of it has been the tranquil, peaceful experience that people imply when they colloquially call something ‘zen’. But totally worth it. And as you rightly pointed out, the act of just noticing can be done in motion as well as at rest. Thx for sharing…

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/

I was in a similar rut for a while. I had a sense that meditation could help me deal with various mental health issues, but I couldn't do it: I just spent my sessions being bored and annoyed with myself. I tried picking it up many times but never got momentum.

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.

Siddhartha is a fantastic book, it changed how I look at pain, love, and everything in-between. I recommend even if you're like me and don't want to meditate to read Siddhartha, it helped me step out of my own headspace into a way of thinking that actively tries to step further and further out from myself.

When I was 12-13 I used to have trouble falling asleep, since I'd be thinking of anything stressful from the day. I fixed it with a form of meditation - thinking about nothing was impossible, I forced myself to think of fantasies when I'm trying to go to sleep instead of anything real. It has worked well for me for 20 years.

> My practice changed significantly as I began mentioning it to some friends.

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

So for 10 years, the author read some books, occasionally did sitting meditation but only briefly and not getting anywhere, took no classes, got guidance from no teachers, did no retreats, etc, and ends the piece with a teaser for the next article/email.

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.

I have practiced Autogenic Training for years on and off; for the past two years I have been practicing it regularly. I have observed very positive effects on my life, particularly a growing sense of confidence and enjoyment in and for life. When physical and emotional tensions are let go, old memories come back vividly in my mind, new hopes emerge, and my life seems to be made up of fragments that, on the whole, seem to make sense. My tension headaches are gone, poof, vanished.

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.

I gave up after about 1,5 years which included a while year of almost daily body scans die about half an hour an even a full on Vipassana retreat. While my practice seemed to improve somewhat i simply didn't perceive any benefits within my psyche. It would not even calm me down. In the end it just didn't feel like it was worth the time investment.

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

Meditation does help me to become less reactive. focus, observe thoughts but don't react to thoughts. Goal is to eventually become observer than reacter. When done consistently, the subsconcious mind will learn it. You overall stop reacting in-general.

My biggest advice for anyone is to not ignore the traditional advice. Secular meditation practises based on Buddhist meditation take the practise out of its context in a quick and forceful way. Buddhism has had 2500 years to slowly develop and work out what works and what does not. It is quite dangerous to take it and call the parts that do not immediately appeal to the secular western mind, like devotion, worship, compassion, traditional forms & rituals, and cast them away. I personally know two people who went into severe psychosis and depression by trying to practise meditation in a secular context. Something about meditation attracts people that think they fully understand something before they’ve even tried it. This will get torn down by the practise, and if you do not have support in place, this quickly can result in extreme mental health problems. I always say that the effects of meditation can be like the head space of an lsd trip except you don’t come down. It’s hard to “unsee”, and a lot of this religious “backwards” Buddhist worldview and practise exists specifically to integrate these experiences

"The book of the golden rules" is what you're looking for.

I switched from meditation to contemplation. we are here to use our feeble brains not shut them off.