Ask HN: What changed in your life when you started meditating (and how)?

I have no formal training in mediating. But have used recorded audios for most of my life and later streaming videos. Lately this is the most calming meditation I've found so far: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7T9Hb1-skNA

I focus on my breath instead of thinking about anything else. It helps lower my BP too. Like 117/68 or 70 despite having 'uncontrollable high blood pressure.'

I am in no way associated with that creator.

As others have said, the wandering mind is part of the process. Can be frustrating if not use those moments to learn to recognize those moments and accept them. Let them run their course. And then get back on track. Not directly try to fight those moments.

> frustratingly difficult to even get through the first lesson in which you are supposed to focus on your breath and minimize the wandering of your mind

Everyone experiences this. Please don't be frustrated by it.

The mind wandering is part of the practice. In fact, that instant where your mind has been wandering and you "snap out of it" is perhaps the most valuable.

That little skill carries over into real life. When someone cuts you off in traffic and you feel that flash of anger, your mind will catch itself and you'll just let it go and get on with your life.

You're probabably already doing things right.

Sounds like you are trying to tame your thoughts? It will not work, they just don't succumb to effort. Noticing them is all that is required and it's the only thing possible.

Instead of a how-to course, I suggest you look for Dharma talks on the practice of meditation. They can be very, very profound, there is a lot of material available. On just one site, the first one I looked at, spiritrock.org, there are over 100 talks for beginners.

A how-to app is doomed, which fact can be hard to grok. It's not like learning to drive or learning a programming language. A teacher or a retreat can be very helpful to get you past the initial missteps and misapprehensions.

This really helps with my anxiety. I'm naturally a pretty anxious person. When I combine meditation with basic breathing exercises, it completely clears my head my brain just functions so much better and my cognitive ability gets a solid boost

It seems like longer I practice meditation, more often I can snap out of my thoughts. I like the app name "Waking Up", because that's how it feels - waking up from a dream.

I use an app called The Way. There's a simple daily progression which is really straightforward, and it is tailored towards Zen ideology/practise. If you struggle with Waking Up, I recommend giving The Way app a try.

I think meditation is similar to going to therapy. You can only notice the improvements after you have done the work.

> minimize the wandering of your mind

To paraphrase the wonderful Thich Nhat Hanh, include that in your meditation. None of us, even the most skilled mediators can get to the kind of clarity and simplicity that people expect from meditation.

It's not about emptying your mind, that's impossible, it's about learning to be fully present in the moment. Anchor in your breath, in your senses, in the right now and think "Breathing in, I know my mind is wandering"

I like to imagine it as a clear afternoon day. Some thoughts, some clouds will appear, but my presence is the sky behind them.

https://plumvillage.org/about/thich-nhat-hanh/key-books

I also started with the Waking up introductory course. I took 10 min of my lunch break every work day and practiced, I wasn't so good on the weekends.

I am not sure if I can give definitive answers to all the ways how It's affected me, but I recognize more often when I've gone into autopilot

I read something that helped me keep going, can't remember the source so I'll paraphrase: Meditation is like showering. You have to keep doing it for the affects to stay

> It's frustratingly difficult to even get through the first lesson in which you are supposed to focus on your breath and minimize the wandering of your mind.

There’s the problem: trying to control your thoughts. Thoughts will come and you shouldn’t beat yourself up when they do. Be patient, keep practicing, and you’ll get better at focusing.

Alternatively consider something like box breathing. I use the iBreathe app and find that works better for me than meditation.

One thing that might help is to understand that every time you catch yourself thinking about something else, that is a success, not a failure. That’s meditation, that’s the training… being able to recognize your mind wandering, and bring it back to a point of focus, again and again.

Your mind is designed/evolved to wander, it’s a feature, not a bug, So don't worry too much about that. In meditation, especially for beginners, it’s about how many times you catch yourself and bring your focus back to your anchor. More the merrier, every distraction is just another opportunity to practice.

Stopped mistaking my thoughts and opinions with reality.

Result: 90% reduction of agony.

Meditation method: remembering the sense of “I am-ness” in every waking moment, stop thinking whenever possible, focus on senses whenever I remember. When: always, unless I forget.

You mean the way Don Draper was meditating at the end?

Short answer - stress word started feeling like a joke

Literally nothing, so I stopped

> I realized that even lifting weights, sleeping and eating well aren't enough

aren't enough for what?

I prefer walking meditation, not sitting meditation. You are not your thoughts.

awakening, everything else is a joke in comparison, but you don't believe it's possible, so for you it will help you relax with day to day stressors :)

full nervous system is calmer

breathe better, think better, speak better and focus better

also the ability to go into "center" and see things from multiple perspectives

What if you asked the opposite question?

I'm sorry this seems terribly HN of me to not answer your question and go on a tangent, but consider a retreat. If you want to give it a serious try, it's night and day compared to doing it at home for 20 minutes a day, especially in the beginning when nothing makes sense and it's hard to know which direction progress even is.

The first time I did a Vipassana retreat many years ago it really showed me that "oh, right, the mind can get into a veeery different state if given the right environment".

Some might say it's an artificial environment you can't replicate at home, and I agree, but by getting much further in such a dense time, it provided a better anchor for me to know what I'm even trying to achieve in my 20 minutes at home.

But it can be very intense, it's possible it would be too much for someone that isn't in an appropriate mindspace.

I'm a very unserious meditator, but when I sit down I at least know when I'm doing "right concentration" or not, so it's possible to have a direction.

I'm speaking very vaguely, but, you know... it comes with the territory.

Get chair. Sit perfectly still for at least 20 minutes while not moving and breathing deep. Not even scratching an itch. That’s how long it takes for your brain wave functions to adapt and your PSNS to relax.

You are now meditating.

Continue until your question to the universe is answered.

This works.

What's the problem with stress? If you have sleep problems, just put something monotone on the TV/headphones in bed and try listening to it. If you don't - just roll with the thoughts. You will most naturally sleep it off every night.

I went from having an experience of life, of reality - that was very self-centered, lonely and nihilistic - to basically a "life worth living". I wish I had met with meditation - through genuine teachers when I was much younger.

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It sounds like you are “failing” because you have a mistaken idea and application of meditation.

Meditation means “getting used to”

Get used to what? Well, that depends on what you are already used to and not.

One example:

Imagine, visualize in your mind, the home you grew up in. Maybe you can even "walk" from room to room and see familiar items.

Now ask yourself, is this thought - the mental projection of your home - "you". Did you just experience witnessing "yourself"?

What about every other thought - how are these thoughts "you"?

* So - are you "used to" thinking that you are your own thoughts?

- If you feel that you "are your thoughts", and they represent "you" - then “who” or “what” is the thing that are observing the thoughts as they happen? Are these two things one and the same?

Getting “used to” and integrating such direct - experienced -knowing of how your reality actually works is in many spiritual traditions considered steps to “awakening”

But even if you are completely allergic to even the word “spiritual”. It never ceases to amaze me, that we all - materialistically speaking - are carrying extreme mental supercomputers - but we never take a second sit down to figure out how these work. You are carrying the one central equipment that determines every aspect of your quality of life, but you’ve never for a moment tried to understand how experience unfolds?

Ok, so how to begin “getting used o” and “figuring out”?

First of all, to do anything worthwhile at all, you need to be able to place and maintain your attention over time - concentrating. This is obvious to you. If you want to get a good education, a good job, be a great sportsman - than that requires effort and concentration. Intelligence can of course offset some of that, but intelligence without diligence is equally as useless as not being intelligent.

To practice concentration and diligence, you should learn meditation with an anchor. What is an anchor? Anything you choose to place your attention on, and return to if the attention has wandered elsewhere.

What is attention? Your bandwidth of experience is limited. If a bee stings you, the pain of that will overpower your experience of hunger. All your ideas about grabbing a burger go straight out the window.

If your experience is neutral, you can willfully shift your attention between your senses.

Let’s try it now.

Now you are just experiencing the sounds you are hearing.

Now you are feeling the sensation of the weight of your body pressing against the surface it is in contact with.

Now you are imagining and experiencing the sensation of tasting a very sour lemon, or strawberry.

Now you are imagining and experiencing the visual playback in your mind of Einstein peeling a banana.

You really can use any anchor (object of attention), but it is usually recommended to begin with placing the attention on the breath - like the physical sensation of air entering and exiting the nostrils, and counting one cycle of in-out as “one”, and then counting to 10 or 21. Decide before you start, how many repetitions of 10 or 21 you will do.

The concentration aspect of the exercise is maintaining the anchoring of attention on the physical sensation. The “mindfulness” aspect of the exercise is remembering or rather - not forgetting - your anchor.

The moment you realize you have stopped remembering, and your attention has moved to a different sense (ear hearing sounds, eye looking at something, mind having a thought) - this is the exact moment to rejoice, because you are learning - and your are remembering, and you are being mindful. So the moment you remember what you were supposed to do, congratulate yourself and re-place your attention on the chosen anchor.

In the beginning, do this for no more than a minute. But do it often- 5 times a day. Once you start getting used to that, and that becomes easy, then increase.

It’s important to know, that meditation like this does not cause you to become unfocused or unconcentrated or distracted - it simply shows you through direct experience how unfocused, unconcentrated and distracted you already are.

And it’s even more important to know that this exercise - this method of getting used to - does not immediately reduce or remove that, but it will naturally do that over time.

How much time? Well, that depends on the mind and mindset you start with. Some people say 3-6 months of daily practice.

And if that sounds like a lot- try to put a value on a life where you are mindfully choosing your actions vs a life where you are simply being a passenger of actions - causes and conditions - being chosen for you.

This is the diligence aspect. If you want to experience the fruit of being able to willfully place your attention wherever you chose- to achieve whichever goal you set yourself - then you have to use your intelligence and recognize the need to train it. If you are unwilling to practice this key instruction that holds to access to everything else, then everything else will - logically - probably not be accessible to you.

When you begin to train in this extremely simple thing, you will experience right away how unwilling and unable you are to do it. Logically you understand that this is perfectly sensible. But still, you may be unable to do this for years. And that knowing, combined with the apparent inability to practice consistently- diligently, is one facet of the suffering of existence we all experience, but can’t put into clear words.

I hope you do not ever dismiss meditation ever again as “not working”, or even “woo-woo” or mystical - but recognize that your inability to appreciate its function, or to train it it - is the actual thing that “isn’t working” and what is causing the suffering and discomfort.

I recommend the book "Attention revolution" by B. Alan Wallace

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My meditation is religious in nature.

I work my way through the Lord’s Prayer every morning. I pause after each line and then pray with words.

I started this pattern a number of years ago as I could not concentrate during silence and I wrestled with intrusive thoughts.

This has been life changing. I believe I have become more disciplined in other areas of life and health as a result.