Meditation

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Original post by acid2 I was curious, how many people here have or do practice meditation here? I'm trying to get into myself, and will be trying for about 10 mins tonight before I go to bed. I've always had a lot of interest in spirtituality, for a while and read lots about it so I'm gonna give this a shot. What are your standings?

What do you mean by meditation? I've found that the "sitting, concentrating on your breathing" style doesn't do anything for me. A walk down the street or a beer on the front porch with music in the background is much better meditation for me. Seriously.

From personal experience, the subconscious mind is far more powerful than the conscious mind. While meditation can help one relax by shutting down the noise of the conscious mind, it also allows the subconscious mind to work more efficiently.
This form of meditation requires that you concentrate on not-concentrating! As thoughts come into your consciousness, you force yourself not to continue with them and they fly away. Then another thought comes in, and you let it go too, and so on. After some practice, it gets easier, and pretty soon you really can clear your mind (not think about any-thing). Sounds will come from your environment, and you will be aware of them, but you won’t think about them. You will be aware that you are perhaps hungry, or have a pain/ache/itch somewhere, but the thought will pass and you’ll be back to thinking about no-thing. This technique can increase physical energy, help your body heal faster, and amazingly, help you solve hard problems (such as with software development).

Try it at different times during the day (some would recommend not trying to meditate before sleeping: meditation should not facilitate sleep (should increase energy while reducing stress)).

This may sound cheesy but if you watch the karate kid 2, he does that breathing excercise thing when daniel is all stressed out. I tried it when I watched the movie, and for me it really works. I just breathe in and out (I do the weird hand thing to) and just concentrate on breathing. Whenever I do it I pretend the karate kid japanese music is playing the background and mr. miyagi is saying "all life starts with breathing" Relaxes me every time.

Last year there were a bunch of discussions on parnormal, supernatural, witch craft, and such and meditation was brought up a few times I think.
If you do a search you may be able to find a few of the sites that give you hints on meditation if you are interested in learning more about it.

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Original post by John Schultz From personal experience, the subconscious mind is far more powerful than the conscious mind. While meditation can help one relax by shutting down the noise of the conscious mind, it also allows the subconscious mind to work more efficiently. This form of meditation requires that you concentrate on not-concentrating! As thoughts come into your consciousness, you force yourself not to continue with them and they fly away. Then another thought comes in, and you let it go too, and so on. After some practice, it gets easier, and pretty soon you really can clear your mind (not think about any-thing). Sounds will come from your environment, and you will be aware of them, but you won’t think about them. You will be aware that you are perhaps hungry, or have a pain/ache/itch somewhere, but the thought will pass and you’ll be back to thinking about no-thing. This technique can increase physical energy, help your body heal faster, and amazingly, help you solve hard problems (such as with software development). Try it at different times during the day (some would recommend not trying to meditate before sleeping: meditation should not facilitate sleep (should increase energy while reducing stress)).

That's the type of meditation I refer to. In general, it seems all forms of meditation are letting your mind "go" for around 10minutes. I'm off to give this a shot now, should be good :)

Here's how I meditate: I imagine that my skin is made of light. Whenever I breathe in, the light comes into my body and collects around the center of my body. When I breathe out, the light comes back on the edge of my skin, but the light in the middle of my body stays there. Then I just repeat. If I do this for long enough, everything gets slowly blocked out until I'm not thinking about anything. No emotions or anything.

Just my 2 cents.

i have tried to meditate a few times.

Basically i just try to relax all of my muscles and clear my mind. I find it is helpful. Moving my arms doesnt help me.

I have practiced vipassana a while in the past, did several 10 day retreats. It worked quite good, however I have found it too hard and don't practice anymore. My stance is that it's useful if you are able to integrate it in a good way in your life, but I'm not so keen on all that talk about enlightenment anymore.

I dunno about meditation, since I've never gotten particularly good at it and I'm too lazy to practice ([grin]), but I use this program on a regular basis. In addition to being amazingly good at putting you to sleep in minutes (or making you extremely alert and energetic if you're feeling drowsy), it can definitely produce extremely strange mental states in which basically no thoughts whatsoever run through your head. It's pretty cool.

Also some of those presets can produce the longest, craziest and most vivid dreams I've ever had. Man, the dream I had last night would make the coolest horror video game ever. [smile]