• Meditation, mindfulness, and awareness thread -- Not a good excuse to smoke WEED
    114 replies, posted
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jPpUNAFHgxM Namaste, you anxiety-filled fuck buckets. Pull up a cushion, plop your ass down, and get ready to do nothing but breathe for like thirty minutes. This is the meditation thread! Use this thread to learn about meditation, share techniques, brag about breakthroughs, or just talk about how much better you feel! What is meditation? There are many different forms of meditation, but the premise is simple: a careful, effortless observation of our thoughts and feelings along with a feeling of acceptance and compassion for where we currently are in life. This is done through noting, visualization, bodyscans, and many more. Does this actually do anything? This seems like hippy tripe to me! Yep! Meditation is scientifically proven to benefit the mind and body. Books! Wherever You Go, There You Are 10% Happier Zen Mind, Informal Mind Fully Present https://theme.zdassets.com/theme_assets/717481/1d49fd212a276fabf54c928eef0a0c18bdbcc9d4.png Headspace is God's gift to man. It's like having a zen guru sitting in your pocket at all times. For someone that's never done meditation before, you're gonna want to start here. It runs on a subscription basis but you can check out the first few packs for free. Give it a go and see if it's for you. Personally, this has been a defining investment and worth every cent. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CS76mK58urI Remember that meditation is a skill that must be developed. The more you do it, the better you'll feel.
Be extremely careful with meditation related practices and which one you pick, some of them have potentially malevolent results. The objective should be to exercise your brain, not erode it. I know a bunch of meditation related horror stories that ended up with people's psychologies being horrendously damaged from it, and have talked to a person who seemed to have been suffering from a cascading mental collapse because of them. Believe it or not meditation as a tool is designed to transform consciousness, it's not just a mental stressball, it is a very powerful practice that is frequently designed to achieve very specific results. Pick something which TRULY works for you, and be fully aware of what you are getting into and what the meditation is designed to do. Analyze very carefully what the whole thing is actually about, it's about a LOT more shit than just relaxation and relieving stress.
Appropriate name tbh op. I'd highly recommend everyone try to get into mindfulness meditation, since it actually does wind up being life changing for so many people. It's even utilized in a lot of treatments for mental disorders.
Was reading the sources and uh, just saying that the "Proven" link is broken @Dasein https://files.facepunch.com/forum/upload/1612/628de6ad-7020-473b-ae19-c64fb6e4b825/image.png
FIxed! Thanks for pointing that out. Interesting. Any records of this happening? I imagine you have to really screw up meditating for a long time for anything like this to happen. As long as you have mentors and use your resources, you should be in a clear.
I'd like to hear more about this because I've never heard of anything like it. I don't think many westerners would be doing meditation routines rigorous enough to do this to begin with. And for anyone reading this getting into meditation for the first time, you should be trying to understand consciousness rather than transform it.
Basically this stuff can happen from picking a practice that is incompatible with you. Certain cults also use stuff like chants to prevent them from thinking instead of actually nourishing their mind, but if it's a cult "meditation" that should be obvious anyway. It's also important to keep in mind that a lot of meditation is indeed designed to make the user progress through things that are frequently not fun at all, so simply treating it as a way of relaxing is not correct, and it's important to be aware of what the origin of that specific exercise is. Naturally it's also important to follow your intuition, if it feels wrong on a fundamental level then there is a fairly good chance that it is. Some meditative practices that originate from buddhism are actively designed to move the user towards enlightenment and when that happens one may go through some really scary shit including something known as a "dark knight of the soul" in which the person's sense of identity starts to melt off their skull and during which they have to push through extremely negative emotions and basically experience a state like extremely heavy clinical depression without it being clinical depression. In terms of records I do not mean to sound rude or to be the "just google it" dude but searching "meditation horror stories" or "meditation mental collapse" or "ego death" should find plenty of sources that show that this stuff is not to be taken lightly. I am obviously not trying to discourage anyone from these powerful practices but simply recommend to treat it with caution and intuition.
Some of these are pretty scary! Especially these cults. I'll go ahead and put some disclaimers in the OP. It seems like a lot of these episodes only really occur when people jump into the deep end without knowing what they're doing -- like ten day silence retreats. If users stick to what was posted in the OP, they should be fine. If you're reading this and are unsure about a resource, feel free to ask the thread and we should be able to figure out if it's right for you.
Thank you for adding it! Really nice of you.
I prefer using Insight Timer for meditation. Kinda don't like how Headspace has many paid courses.
Anyone read Tolle?
I'll check the Insight Timer out! I can definitely see how paying can be a barrier for entry. It's worth it for me personally because the guy goes into good detail as to how meditation can affect different facets of our lives as well as how different exercises can be used for different things -- plus all the videos on how the exercises work. I also think his accent is really charming Right now, I'm doing the pack on relationships, which requires you to visualize someone you care about slowly becoming engulfed in light. My problem is I always choose to visualize people naked, so it gets kinda freaky when I choose to do the exercise thinking about my 60 year-old Dad.
From your later explaining and some googling this just seems like an existential crisis/nihilism. You can get the same thing from watching certain tv shows, listening to certain lectures or reading certain books. IMO this isn't a warning/danger specifically related to meditation and should be consider a more general warning - put a sanity check of anything you let influence you.
It actually is specifically related to meditation in this case, you may ofcourse empirically or skeptically dismiss it as nonsense but nevertheless I had to throw it out there for very important reasons. Better to have a disclaimer about very real dangers instead of having a user end up in this thread who is wondering what the fuck is happening to him.
Well how I see it is with mediation you are training yourself. So with mindfulness when I practice not responding to thoughts, not feeding intrusive thoughts etc I'm training my mind to do that passively or actively with less effort. If you applied that repetition to anything you'd be training yourself. Like if one repeatedly told themselves they're worthless they will believe it. Likewise if one told themselves repeatedly, every day, that nothing mattered that'd likely have a very real effect on them. I'm very sceptical toward the "spirit" side of meditation but I believe it can be a very useful thing to do.
I think the best thing to say on meditation, is be very careful if you have a pre-existing mood disorder or mental illness. Although there are a lot of studies relating to improvements of symptoms of schizophrenia and depression, in the long term it does induce changes to the way your brain works. It's the same with antidepressants. Meditation is not as rigorously studied as ssri's, so it's hard to pinpoint what went wrong if something goes wrong. Having said that, not all forms of meditation are the same, and not all forms of meditation carry the risk of bringing out latent mental illness.
it kind of sounds like you're schizophrenic
You know, there is being skeptical and then there is being borderline offensive. Deciding that this stuff is dumb and that you do not believe in it is one thing, calling a person an insane idiot in relation to it is 10 times worse, especially when I literally have not used a single first tense about the actual meditation throughout the posts. If you are going to say shit like this atleast read things properly so you can come up with a more accurate insult.
I've got to ask about the thread title, man. Why do you think weed and meditation are incompatible? Weed can absolutely be used to assist in focusing, clearing, and managing one's mind when meditating. Cannabis meditation is a well documented and explored field honestly.
What types on positions do you feel aid your meditation (Lotus sitting, cross leg sitting, using a chair or bed)?
I think that it was more of a joke and also because weed meditation may irk some traditionalists perhaps, I am pretty sure it was not meant as a serious disclaimer.
I sit cross legged if at home but I often do it on the bus, so in that case just sit whatever way I can.
You're telling people to beware of being fucking mind controlled by meditation. You're also dismissing empiricism for "very important reasons". Literally disregarding reality. I'm not being an asshole. Your posts literally look delusional. And they are.
Just a cheeky jab to grab people's **attention** Personally, if I smoke and meditate, I end up falling asleep or going to McDonald's after five minutes.
Hence why you are a skeptic who treats everything experimental as delusional insanity as mentioned earlier, without even trying to THINLY veil it. If I was posting this stuff in a thread about designing a car engine or a bridge, your reaction would be kind of understandable, yet what you are doing is kind of the equivalent of walking into a catholic church and telling a priest that he is being retarded for wearing robes and using candles. Please don't make the atheistic mistake of randomly shitting on people because they are not presenting you with 15 mathematical formulas confirming that they are drinking a cup of coffee.
just jumping in here, my understanding is that meditation doesn't cause psychotic breaks, but what it can cause is you to be more mindful of situations that you weren't fully processing you're not going to get BPD by trying to clear your mind
Excellent, however because people DID have extremely serious experiences with it, which is why it is important to mention in this thread. When a local resident near a body of water is telling you that when you swim there you are in danger of being bitten by a shark, even if the dude looked kind off the hook it doesn't hurt to glance around a few more times does it?
but it's another thing entirely to say "you're guaranteed to get bitten by a shark" some cults guise themselves as meditation/self help. you only need as look as far as scientology for proof but that doesn't mean downloading an app on your phone is going to get you into a cult
I didn't say guaranteed, I said "be extremely careful", and then requested for people to pick what worked for them.
well this thread is off to a great start
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