If You're Too Busy to Meditate, Read This

In my opinion, Meditation and Mindfullness are not the same thing.<p>Meditation is a state, where the mind is completely silent, the breath slows waaaay down, the heartbeat slows waaaay down. Slowly ever so slowly, some bliss starts to bubble up from within. It is the climax of one pointed attention. Few people who say they "meditate" are reaching that point since it requires years of sincere effort. In Yoga, meditation is known as Dhyana, or the state resulting from the mind becoming one pointed for 100 seconds. Samadhi, which is considered a state of deep bliss is considered reached when the mind becomes completely still for 1000 seconds.<p>Mindfullness, is the act of being more aware during daily activities. Like watching actions and interactions. There is a gradual tendency to modify behavior to being more calm, collected and centered which helps to go deeper when attempting to meditate. The mind is still active during mindfullness, but it is being directed or corrected as needed throughout the day.<p>Meditation helps to develop deeper Mindfullness and vice versa. Meditation is like taking a shower, whereas Mindfullness is avoiding rolling in the mud and getting dirty. It is important to keep in mind that Meditation is literally a state where the mind is free from thought and that all the "meditation practices and techniques" are just different paths of reaching that same place.

The misconception about meditation is that it requires one to give up everything and sit silently. This is not true in its entirety as it depends on how one interprets the word "meditation".<p>The meditation does not necessarily require you to give up one thing for the sake of another. The goal of the meditation is to "be in awareness" and you can achieve this same goal by being alert and aware with any activity your find yourself doing at any given moment. For example...<p>You are washing dishes but you are not really washing dishes because your mind is wandering with thoughts on what you need to do tonight at the place you need to visit. By the time your dishes are done, you have already planned for your future as your mind kept you busy with the thoughts of the future while you forgot what you were doing in the present (which is, washing dishes, which you really didn't).<p>The meditation is to be-in-present with whatever activity you do and love to do. If you had washed your dishes with full alertness and awareness, you would have achieved the same goal of meditation.<p>Let's go even further with another example.<p>You love to play music as your passion (or dance, or paint, or fill in the blank activity here) but you don't get enough opportunity in the day to do what you love to do more with passion. When you dance or sing or play music or run or exercise, you get the opportunity during that activity to forget yourself in the act (the subject merges into the object) and you become one with the reality, or you transcend that favorite activity by merging your self into it. That moment of transcendence is meditation, and you should find more opportunities to be in that meditation, in those moments.<p>Now, I am not suggesting that the type of meditation mentioned at the source is wrong or ineffective. What I am suggesting however is that people don't need to get stuck with one type of explanation of meditation because ultimately you can achieve the same goal by shifting the focus a bit.

Wait. Wait wait wait.<p>&#62; Research shows that an ability to resist urges will improve your relationships, increase your dependability, and raise your performance...<p>Great. Yes. Impulse control is key. Delayed gratification is part of how we define higher intelligence.<p>Meditation has what do with this, exactly?<p>&#62; How [does meditation help]? By increasing your capacity to resist distracting urges.<p>This entire article is predicated by this leap of faith, which as far as I can see has little to no justification besides, "Of course it does!"<p>&#62; Meditation teaches us to resist the urge of that counterproductive follow through.<p>One cannot just say things over and over to make them true.

What the author calls "impulses" the Buddha called sankhara, or reactivity. The ones the OP is talking about are minor reactions.<p>These reactions do indeed impede our progress, as when our actions are driven by reaction we are not fully aware of what's going on around us. I first recognized the practical implications of this playing billiards - when I would strike a ball and miss, I would feel slightly dejected, and neglect to analyze what I just did to learn from it. When I would strike a ball and make it, I would feel slightly elated, and neglect to understand what I just did to learn from it.<p>My game got a lot better when I started playing the game, fascinated but detached from outcomes. There are a remarkable number of ways to strike a ball wrong - and it is interesting to consider <i>why</i>, having learned the game sufficiently, one would ever strike the ball wrong. Where does the variation creep in? Why, if I examine a table and decide to put the cue ball "just so", can I not do that? The answer, of course, is that there is countless non-verbal data that your body is sending you on each stroke - feedback from your bridge hand, the hand on the cue, even your stance and the feel of the felt all factor into this.<p>If you are attached to the outcome, all of this goes out the window. There is nervousness, fear, and excitement instead of systematic understanding.

I highly recommend to take a 10 days retreat in a Vipassana[1] meditation center. I know that 10 days is a lot to ask but in my opinion is well worth the effort.<p>I've been there twice in the past three years. I thought that I understood everything the first time. Boy, was I wrong.<p>[1] <a href="http://www.dhamma.org/" rel="nofollow">http://www.dhamma.org/</a>

I think the author has an excellent point about training one's ability to resist urges. Urges are spontaneous. They don't necessarily fit with our work flow. In fact, they interrupt it. Maybe a good analogy is the Time Management Matrix by Eisenhower (and popularized in Steven Covey's '7 Habits' book). Urges almost always present themselves as urgent tasks, but they aren't always important.<p>I'm not sure I agree with the conclusion that meditation will make you more productive. The evidence presented reminds me of a scenario from The Office, where Michael defends Monday morning movies by claiming they are more productive the rest of the day. Of course the reason they are more productive is because they have to be in order to recover the time spent watching a movie!<p>Rather, I think people don't realize how much spare time there is that gets wasted. Tasks expand to fill the time allotted. It's possible that meditation can help you identify those wasteful activities (urges) and address them appropriately.

Happens to me all the time. I am working on a piece of code in the afternoon, and can't move forward or looking to identify a bug or optimizing some algorithm - wasting hours. After a meditation session I walk back to the computer screen, take a seat, and my hand clicks around the tabs, my fingers scroll around, my eye catches one obscure line of code which is EXACTLY where the problem sits. I had this happen so many times, it's a given by now. The article (and I am sure all who do meditate) shares the same kind of experience.

I took a mindfulness meditation class a year or two ago and I thought this was a pretty nice introduction to some of the ideas.<p>For anyone interested in the science, I have found lots of good articles by subscribing to this mailing list: <a href="http://www.mindfulexperience.org/newsletter.php" rel="nofollow">http://www.mindfulexperience.org/newsletter.php</a><p>The ideas have been around forever, but scientists have really taken to testing them in recent decades.

"And you will have experience that proves to you that the urge is only a suggestion. You are in control."<p>This is the most interesting part to me. Don't we always act on the urge that is strongest at the moment? If I decide to continue to meditate even though I have an urge to stop, doesn't that just mean that the urge to continue happened to be stronger than the urge to stop? Did I really get to choose which of those urges was strongest at that moment? Of course, this gets into questions of free will, which has been discussed on HN before. But when I meditate, it becomes very clear that I am definitely not in control of my thoughts, feelings, and urges. I see that I have multiple, competing urges at any given moment and that I don't control which urge emerges as the victor and compels me to act.

There's nothing in this article that isn't said better elsewhere. I'd recommend the (free, online) Mindfulness in Plain English: <a href="http://www.urbandharma.org/udharma4/mpe.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.urbandharma.org/udharma4/mpe.html</a> (also available as a "real" book).

I've been meditating pretty much every day for a few months now, and the thing that got me into it was getsomeheadspace.com<p>I've found it incredibly helpful - having a different guided meditation to do on the train every day makes the London commute, whilst not blissful, certainly better.

<i>Focus on your breath going in and out. Every time you have a thought or an urge, notice it and bring yourself back to your breath.</i><p>From what I've heard so far, meditation is based on focusing on your body in order to quiet your mind. Are there other schools/techniques?

When I meditate concentrating on my breath,my mind interferes with my breathing and it becomes uncomfortable if I dont relax<p>I believe this acts as some negative feedback for the control freak self inside me. Every time I exert unnecessary control it becomes uncomfortable.<p>Meditating long enough may show me that the mind will wander in its own ways regardless of what I maybe doing at the moment, and its best for me to let it wander on its own ways and focus on what I am doing. Thus helping me understand that all the thoughts about ego, and judgements is just come process on the sidelines, and different from the core of me, the core that is focused on what I am doing.<p>This is the impression I have of where meditation is taking me.

What about comparative effectiveness? For example, if we did an experiment where we started subjects on the following regimes, which would have the greatest effects on impulse control: 1) Learning to program (assuming the subject is not already a coder 2) meditation 3) aerobic exercise<p>Then we would have to figure out ways to measure "impulse control."<p>Such a study would have a lot more credibility than the author's contention that "I control impulses while meditating; therefore, meditation makes me more productive."<p>One controls impulses during a wide variety of activities; the burden is on the pro-meditation crowd to provide evidence that meditation is an especially valuable form of practicing impulse control.

Some of you pointed out it's not easy to control/stop the mind, yes, that's very true, especially for some people. To solve that, I suggest to read Ekhart Tolle's The Power Of Now, I think it's the modern book that explains the orignal Zen in a easy-to-understand way.<p>I used to think/worry/imagine too much about the future, and thus missed every actual moment I was living in, and it made me unhappy. I was living like that since I was very young and until I read the book The Power Of Now. So I highly recommend it.

There was a study done by Sarah Lazar at Harvard Med a while back. They concluded that meditation can not only prevent age related cognitive decline, but it can actually physically reshape our brains, thickening our cortical structures. There's a TED video online, and the actual study is available online if anyone is interested (<a href="http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16272874" rel="nofollow">http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16272874</a>)

Jonathan Haidt, the author of one of my favorite books, "The Happiness Hypothesis," points out–based on extensive research–that there are only three ways to change "automatic reactions" to circumstances like a flooded kitchen...meditation, cognitive therapy, and Prozac. Meditation is an inexpensive and natural alternative to the other two, it's been around for thousands of years and there are no negative side effects.

I'm into the basic practice of mindfulness since years. I read research papers about it every month and also train people in mindfulness skills. Here is the essence of what I learned. <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sspY43lxqhE&#38;list=UUh-TdJwz4z0dN9hAYnCWZow&#38;index=12&#38;feature=plcp" rel="nofollow">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sspY43lxqhE&#38;list=UUh-TdJw...</a>

For casual meditation, all that has been pointed out here is fair and good.<p>But if you want to delve deep into meditation, then I seriously suggest that you look up MCTB - it talks about several of the dangers that lie in that path.<p>www.dharmaoverground.org/web/guest/dharma-wiki/-/wiki/Main/MCTB

I'm seeing quite an interest here for the principles and techniques of meditation. Here's a link for some talks given by a wonderful teacher, on mindfulness/meditation and other topics.<p><a href="http://www.audiodharma.org/" rel="nofollow">http://www.audiodharma.org/</a>

Read Pragmatic thinking and Learning for good explanation as well.. Meditation improves focus... this is not based on reports or data but from my own experience. That is always the best proof for me.. trying it myself.

I use fishing for the same purposes. Helps me concentrate on just that activity and get my mind off work-related stuff. Every time after a fishing trip I feel really rested, although might be tired a bit physically.

This excerpt from Shunryu Suzuki might add another approach to the conversation.<p><a href="http://www.kingstonkendo.org/mistakesinpractice.pdf" rel="nofollow">http://www.kingstonkendo.org/mistakesinpractice.pdf</a> (PDF)

I meditate while walking my dogs or taking a shower. Unless you are trying to achieve the title of Zen Grandmaster (which you probably are not) there is no need to sit still while doing so.

For me, meditation is a way of separating myself from the issues I'm dealing with. The act of distancing my mind from the issue itself provides renewed vigor when returning to the problem.

If I'm too busy to medidate, why will I have time to read this article (presumably on meditation)?

(Yet) Another venue to for the competitive display of subtle nuances and arcane desiderata.

Aw, I know the benefits. I hoped this would help me find a way to fit it in.

I have been meditating for forty years. For thirty nine years I did transcendental meditation (TM)as taught by Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. I sat for 20 minutes twice a day without fail.<p>Last year I switched to Vipassana not because I was displeased with TM but just for a change and because the Goenka community seems to be very professional. I have been sitting in this new way one hour a day for a year now. I am not as regular because Vipassana requires more arrangement than TM. I am satisfied with my practice and can see a path to grow in this community for the rest of my life.<p>I am not sorry that I have spent so much time meditating. It changed my life. Before I began meditating I was aware of a certain pervasive incompleteness. I am a programmer and I love programming and I have been married for forty seven years and love my wife. But these satisfactions were not enough. My meditation practice did not materially change my life but it has given me a sense of centeredness. I am in a quiet way more fulfilled.<p>My experience was that TM was a very practical choice. I paid $75 to be initiated and found the TM community meet my needs for companionship on my path. Community is important to support a meditative practice. The actual practice is practical to do in our busy lives. If you are too busy to take two twenty minute periods each day for your personal readjustment then you are too busy and you need to readjust your life pattern. If you do not realize the imbalance in your life, probably meditation is not for you. Don't waste your time. Perhaps later.<p>YMMV, nowadays it cost $2k+ to learn TM. It is a good deal at this cost at least the benefits in my life exceed almost any amount of money. But without my experience I would never understand that. It is a chicken and egg problem.<p>OTOH, the TM community has changed and I am not sure I would be served by the Post Mahrishi community. In my case, as a long term meditator the difficulties with the community don't really affect me. Although I did consider the quality of the Goenka to support me in future.<p>So the choice of TM is a possibility for a newby. One caution, I knew many poeple who started TM and did not continue. So you are risking $2k+.<p>Vipassana is different. The technique requires more training and a greater daily investment. I sit for an hour a day. But Goenka suggests a minimum of two hours a day. And most practioners do at least one ten day retreat a year. I find this a bit much. But given that I am retired it is easily feasable. It merely a matter of commitment for me. A midlife married programmer will find this a greater challenge.<p>The introduction to Goenka's technique is charming. You do a ten day retreat at no cost to you. Their story is that adopting this practice is a serious matter. You learn the technique and then practice ten hours a day for ten days. For this learning period you live on the charity of others like a Budhist monk. Since this technique is a way of living that extends beyond just sitting, you need time to get into it.<p>I don't know how to tell which is most appropriate for you. I can just say it works for me. But I can say one thing for certain. Meditation is a practice that must be done everyday. Don't bother if you are not ready to commit to a regular practice. The benefits of meditation can not be explained. It is an experience and all that a teacher can do is give the experience and show you how to protect it. The rest is up to you.<p>I will say that meditation and psychotherapy are not mutually exclusive. For more than twelve years during the last forty I have been in therapy.<p>My final thought is that if you have a sense that your experience of life seems not quite complete, meditation can work to give you greater experience of connection.

Oh, come on. Meditation is not the way to "exercise willpower muscle" (running is the way to do so).<p>Meditation is the way to learn that your flow of thoughts is not you, it is mere side-effect, a smoke from an engine, a screen-saver, or just idle-running.<p>Yes, the practice of meditation is beneficial for will-power and self-control, but it is not the goal.) Goal is realization that what you think you are, is just a running total of all previous conditioning, and the ''real you'' could be "seen" is in an instant between two thoughts.<p>Any good ''eastern'' teacher will tell you that.