Some blog posts on meditation

I started my blogging with the idea of writing about meditation. In some ways, it is a very, very simple subject but many questions can arise about it. In the 5 years I have written posts in the blog Fear, Fun and Filoz, I have created many posts that discuss one aspect of meditation or another. Here are some of them:

Google Alert #2 on children [and] meditation

Meditative practices have proven themselves very valuable for both physical and mental health. I am interested in news that Google can find on the subject of meditation and children. This is the 2nd set of results of a Google Alert on that subject. It is the email I tried to send to my usual recipients but was prevented by Google's own scam stopping software. I think the large number of internal links in the post coupled with the multiple recipients tripped an algorithm and got me labeled a spammer. I will work on the problem. In the meantime, I will send this paragraph and the information that my signature will take you to the latest blog page. It shows the Alert result #2.

Posted by Bill at 8:00 PM

Saturday, June 8, 2013

Excepts from What if you are "bad" at meditation?

"Search Inside Yourself" is a book and a Google employee's course and a course you can take online. This business of being "bad at meditation" is totally false, bogus, a misunderstanding. (The links take you to the post.)

http://www.siyli.org/what-if-youre-bad-at-meditation/

Excepts from

What if You're "Bad At" Meditation? Click to read the post

People often have concerns about being "not good" at meditation. They say things like:

• • "I've tried meditation before. I'm not very good at it."

  • "I can't sit still for that long. It's just not for me."

  • "I get distracted very easily. I'm not a good meditator."

If you've ever meditated before and walked away feeling like you didn't do a good job … this is for you.

The truth is, the worse you are at meditating, the better it is for you. In fact, you're doing your meditation just right. Even if you're doing it "wrong." Here's why.

What if You're "Bad At" Meditation?

The "Perfect Meditation" – It Doesn't Exist

Beginning meditators often think that there's a "perfect" way to meditate. ...Yet that state of feeling distracted, spacey, emotional, sleepy (and so on) is exactly what meditation is all about.

Meditation: It's Like Training for Your Brain

The brain muscles that you "work out" during a meditation mimic the brain muscles that you need to develop in your everyday life.

In meditation, you might practice noticing when you get distracted by stray thoughts, then bringing it back to your breath. This has a direct impact on your ability to focus ...

You Can't Be "Bad At" Meditation

Meditation is a practice. You start from where you're at, then practice keeping and moving your attention in different ways. Those ways directly translate into real life benefits.

If you were perfect at meditating already, there'd be almost no reason to meditate...

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Bill

Main blog: Fear, Fun and Filoz

Main web site: Kirbyvariety

Posted by Bill at 6:02 AM

Saturday, May 26, 2012

Meditation always goes wrong

I know a very muscular, ex-Marine physician who told me he doesn't like yoga. His experience of the practice was that it was a form of self-torture. All adults understand that many good things and worthwhile achievements are attained only with steady effort, that is often unpleasant and difficult.

I am sometimes fascinated by the concept of incarceration. When did humans first understand that confining a child to a given chair or a felon to a cell was a form of reminder, rehabilitor and punishment, strong enough to have an effect? How can a fence or walls, so inanimate, still and dull, affect the mind, memory and behavior?

As with anything, we want to use our tools to good effect, achieving what will be good. So it is with meditation.

Meditation is sometimes described as "simple, but not easy." At least two highly educated and mature men, scholars and fathers and well-traveled, have complained to me that they can't meditate properly. The most common complaint I read that meditation teachers hear is that the mind of the meditator won't be quiet. I have a feeling that observing the unquiet mind, coupled with the "sit still" part of meditation, results in a discomfort that the meditator wants to escape. What's on tv? How about a snack? How is the garden doing? Shouldn't I call a friend?

When confined to a chair or a meditation cushion, the active, ok - fidgety American is quickly able to find reasons that meditation is not for him, clear-cut experiences that he isn't built for it, can't do it, etc. Like muscle building, drawing, learning Italian, gardening, playing the piano and many arts worth learning, you just have to do it. Here's one set of directions:

How to meditate - simplified basic directions

Sit comfortably

Don't move

Concentrate on your breath

Do this for a number of minutes according to a timer

The purpose for doing this is most fundamentally to practice repeatedly bringing your attention back to your breath. The mind continually supplies thoughts and the attention has a tendency to jump to those new thoughts. The most valuable aspect of practicing meditation is the increased awareness of what you are thinking about. Many people who try to meditate have the idea that no thoughts should come to mind. All functioning minds have thoughts that arise in them all the time. Don't fall into the trap of thinking you are doing meditation incorrectly if you find the stream of thought continues. It should. Just redirect your attention back to the target, your breath, feeling your breath, breathing deliberately. Redirect over and over as needed. Each redirection is valuable.

See more here: http://sites.google.com/site/kirbyvariety/meditation-1

It is easy to describe the action but not so easy to do. It is worth doing but you will never know unless you try repeatedly.

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Bill

Main blog: Fear, Fun and Filoz

Main web site: Kirbyvariety

Posted by Bill at 6:09 AM

Thursday, August 25, 2011

Some concepts and terms

1. Two types of meditation: (1) single-point emptying the mind and (2) observation of own thoughts as they pass by

2. Sources of the idea of meditation: Hindu practice, Buddhist practice, American psychology and medicine

3. Terms and descriptions: Eastern meditation, relaxation response

4. Purposes:

   1. 1. originally, perhaps, to sacrifice and to restrain natural tendencies for religious discipline and glorification of god(s)

      2. also religiously, to be open to the entry of divine into one's self

      3. American psychology and psychiatry

         1. self awareness, self knowledge

         2. mindful awareness of what thoughts one is harboring in the mind

      4. Other American physical medical purpose: elicit the relaxation response, balancing the flight or fight response in the body and dealing with stress

In recent days, I have written about ideas of meditation from Prof. Herbert Benson, author of The Relaxation Response and The Relaxation Revolution. For knowing your mind and self, meditation is a great tool. But just what is meditation? I am referring to the idea of sitting still and quiet for 10 or 20 minutes and attending carefully to the state of your mind. During the meditation period, you watch what you are thinking. As soon as you realize that you are caught up in thoughts, gently put them aside. That is all you do and doing that reaps big benefits. Not immediately but over a couple of weeks of daily practice.

If you look at the popular literature on meditation, you will find two types mentioned. Practicing as I just indicated will start you with mind-emptying but over time, that leads to more observational awareness of what your thoughts (and feelings) are. Doing the practice leads to more awareness of your mind, both during the meditation and at all other times.

So where did this practice come from? The earliest records indicate Hindu practice. The idea seems to have come from sacrificing for religious purposes. Fasting or celibacy for the body and the cessation of thought for that restless organ, the mind. In some cases, stopping thoughts seemed to open a person for visits by divine presence or guidance, much as Quakers tend to believe today. In truth, versions of meditation are present in all religions. See Lost Christianity by Jacob Needleman and many other sources.

Prof. Benson tends to emphasize the physiological results of quiet sitting and its value as a de-stressor. Personally, I find that the mindful awareness of what I am thinking, a more mental result of practice, is more important and more valuable.

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Bill

Main blog: Fear, Fun and Filoz

Main web site: Kirbyvariety

Posted by Bill at 6:42 AM

Wednesday, June 13, 2012

notes on meditation

I have now received 8 results from Google Alerts on the subject of 'children [and] meditation' and posted them on my Kirbyvariety web site. To avoid a page that went on and on, I have started a 2nd page of news results on the topic. I am not too interested in finding still another duty for either parents or children. American life already has plenty of both. But the spread of general use of meditation practices is interesting as heck for me. Ever since 1982, I have been interested in the evidence that is piling up that nearly all human endeavors are easier to carry out if one meditates. Besides my interest in watching the topic of meditation expand and change over time and across places, I use the handy idea that when anything is explained or presented to children, it is probably in a format and vocabulary that we can all understand.

I focus on the term 'meditation' but many aspects of the subject come up under a title or label using the word "mindfulness". Being mindful or being attentive or being aware or being conscious [of something] is a good thing but I am convinced that I must pick and choose what things I will be mindful of. With a little meditative practice, I learn to be more aware of what I am paying attention to. That is, when I find I am annoyed with the government or worried about my security, I am quicker to notice that I am thinking about those topics. It is easier than it used to be to decide to really sit and think about something or notice that I am indeed worried yet again or decide consciously that I don't want to spend time on that repetitive worry right now. Simple, basic meditation allows me to be more mindful of how I am or am not using my mind, my time, my resources.

This week's Google Result only contained two items. One is about the Congressman Tim Ryan and his practice and book on meditation, A Mindful Nation: How a Simple Practice Can Help Us Reduce Stress, Improve Performance, and Recapture the American Spirit. The actual news item comes from a Birmingham, Alabama Fox News item. Normally, I steer clear of Fox since the organization seems deeply focused on frightening and negative news of all kinds. All the more reason for me to be surprised at the tone and content of the item about Ryan, his book, his practice and his message for others to begin a simple practice. When a politician from a northern state (Ohio) gets a news item in a Birmingham paper, I take notice. I just bought his book. I want to see what his message is and how he words it.

The news item by Julie Carr Smyth describes Ryan calming himself in the midst of a busy day in the nation's capital and then goes on to say:

"Marines are doing it. Office workers are doing it. Prisoners are doing it.'

I know that is true for office workers, medical workers and prisoners. There is even an item about that among the Google results I've posted. But I didn't know much about the military.

Clicking around here and there, I found Elizabeth A. Stanley, PhD and her work with the American military in the program she founded called Mindfulness-Based Mind Fitness Training (MMFT, a.k.a. "M-Fit"). Whether you are a road warrior, a school warrior, a household warrior or a warrior warrior, the practice of meditation can definitely help us live with more ability to face stress, difficulties and burdens while increasing our awareness of the miracle each of us is living all the time. Meditation does way more than makes us sharper at finding and releasing muscle and mental tension but it is a good angle for approaching the topic. It is exactly the one used by a major American figure on the subject: Dr. Herbert Benson.

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Bill

Main blog: Fear, Fun and Filoz

Main web site: Kirbyvariety

Posted by Bill at 5:58 AM

Tuesday, November 6, 2012

New best book nomination

In about 1980, I started getting familiar with the benefits of deliberate relaxation for 10 minutes a day, as described in Herbert Benson's "The Relaxation Response." Benson always refers to sitting still and focusing one's attention on one's breath, a spoken, chanted or mentally repeated word or phrase as the elicitation of the body's relaxation response. I still feel that the book is an excellent one for getting into a relaxation/meditation practice. Having just reviewed it for this post, I am still impressed by the scope, directness, and simplicity of the presentation.

For quite a while, I felt that the book was the best single, inexpensive, succinct introduction to practicing what I now call meditation. When I asked myself, what author seemed to be the most help in understanding how to meditate and why one should, I thought of the Benson book but gradually, I came to feel that Jack Kornfield was more helpful. Two other names that loomed large are Jon Kabat-Zinn and Daniel J. Siegel. Kabat-Zinn is a molecular biologist who found meditation very helpful personally and successfully introduced the practice into treatment at Massachusetts General Hospital for cancer patients dealing with pain, exhaustion of all treatment possibilities and coming death. Siegel is a psychiatrist especially interested in children and is the main support of the actress Goldie Hawn's foundation and work to find ways for children to benefit from meditation.

Jack Kornfield has several excellent books but the one that shocked me the most was "Bringing Home the Dharma", the story of his training in Eastern countries and founding centers in the US to assist people in learning and applying meditation practices. The most striking thing I read in the book was that Kornfield experienced several Eastern meditation masters who were expert and experienced but still lived cramped, grumpy, unhappy lives. I feel now that meditation can be very helpful, may be the most helpful thing I know for knowing one's self and facing one's feelings and isssues but is not a cure-all and is not guaranteed to magically make everything peachy.

Now, I have a new nomination for an excellent, clear and useful book. It is "Search Inside Yourself" by Chade-Meng Tan. Meditative practice is excellent for increasing mindfulness, the ability to notice what subject or target one is giving attention to and providing the chance to question whether one is attending to what is best at the time. After developing such mindfulness, it becomes easier to see and feel the life situations of others in a truly empathetic, compassionate way. This book by a Chinese-American Google engineer does a fine job of explaining the way to more compassion while simultaneously being open with others about one's feelings and fears. He notes that the most common reason for failing to give oneself the benefits of meditation is the mistaken belief that one should be able to keep attention on the target without interruption. People often take wandering attention as a sign that they are not meditating while the truth is that noticing one's attention has strayed and returning it to the target is the golden moment, the time of benefit, which trains the mind into awareness of itself.

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Bill

Main blog: Fear, Fun and Filoz

Main web site: Kirbyvariety

Posted by Bill at 6:21 AM

Tuesday, May 15, 2012

News on children and meditation

Meditation continues to show itself to be important in knowing and living comfortably with one's own life, body, companions and other. I have been keeping a Google Alert on the subject of "children meditation". I chose this particular subject because it is quite American to try to get into something valuable like meditation earlier rather than later, even if doing so may not be such a good idea. I don't really know whether it is or not but many people think it is. That number seems to be growing. Sitting still for 10 minutes or so, concentrating on one's breathing and return to that focus when the mind strays is a simple and inexpensive practice. Disease, disability, spiritual confusion, political oppression, emotional distress such as depression have all been shown to be more endurable when one practices meditation.

If a family has a practice or one of regular prayer, especially silent prayer, with or without spoken prayer, too, that practice will probably help both the adults and the children in the family if they are old enough. What sufficient age is, I don't know. That is just one of several questions that remains open. Like anything else, it almost certainly depends somewhat on whic individuals we are talking about.

Here is a link to my web page of the Google Alerts on the subject of "children [and] meditation". The 4th set of results just came in today and has been added to the bottom of the page.

https://sites.google.com/site/kirbyvariety/meditation-1/children-and-meditation?pli=1

Bill

Main blog: Fear, Fun and Filoz

Main web site: Kirbyvariety