Meditation

Meditation. What is everyone's experience with meditation?

I have done mostly vipassana meditation. I just sit in a chair because I find crossing my legs and sitting to be uncomfortable. I just sit there and breathe for 20 min. I remember I really wanted to get into transcendental meditation but looked into it and it was $1,000 for 4 sessions. I consider going on a retreat somewhere. I do not know if that is necessary. I do think getting away from the mainstream conditioning world of living in a US city to a more truthful, empty space lacking in mainstream conditioning would be beneficial. Yeah, I just want to talk about meditation and spirituality with out religion.

My meditation has been mostly self taught, intuitively. I live 5 min away from a water source, and mostly sit on a rock and concentrate myself on the nature feels: sounds, smells and the wind. I never timed it, so assume it's anywhere between 15min - 1hour.
I also walk a lot (10km + per day) and pretty much consider it another form of meditation, though more closer to a sleep state where I basically "dream" for 1h-2h of walking (most times I "wake" up and surprise myself with a "how did I get here" moment)

Yeah, IMO walking is the best form of meditation, there is a reason why Ghandi was quite a walker

On October 13 2016 21:20 RiKD wrote: Meditation. What is everyone's experience with meditation? I have done mostly vipassana meditation. I just sit in a chair because I find crossing my legs and sitting to be uncomfortable. I just sit there and breathe for 20 min. I remember I really wanted to get into transcendental meditation but looked into it and it was $1,000 for 4 sessions. I consider going on a retreat somewhere. I do not know if that is necessary. I do think getting away from the mainstream conditioning world of living in a US city to a more truthful, empty space lacking in mainstream conditioning would be beneficial. Yeah, I just want to talk about meditation and spirituality with out religion.

If you work out have you tried it after cooling down with and stretching? I suppose thats the whole thing about Yoga, for some reason after you stretch you get in a SUPER relaxed mind sate for a few minutes

Started trascendental meditation 4 years ago, didn't need to do any course, improved my life a lot. All you really need to do is relax, focus on present moment and let go of thought.

Some meditations include chants to make it easier to not think or add some positive thoughts but the end result you want to reach with meditation is bodily and mental relaxation plus cultivating and feeling a sense of wellness and calmness in your body. You don't need to spend money if you are willing to go by trial and error and look on the internet how people learned to meditate themselves. It's a straightforward practice you just need to sit down, relax and do it consistently.

i think meditation is nonsense but i don't want to shit on the subject entirely because it comes from a good place

a disciplined mind is important in general (and the ability to withdraw and relax) but i think the route to achieving that is just by doing it. i don't follow when people have to do a buddha pose and hum for x hours. to me it seems like a historical relic of people thousands of years before anyone knew anything doing the best they could. it's like a brain fetish, with fetishes people think, i need to have better sex, they look around and they see everyone is doing anal, but maybe in another country at another point in history everyone is doing rope bondage, i think meditation is like that, people instinctively know they want to make their minds better but they go first to what's most culturally visible rather than working things out for themselves. so i like the talk of walking and so on.

now maybe i didn't do it right or have something missing or didn't keep at it long enough so i'm also not saying don't do it.

Not sure if this counts but i often wake up around 3-4am for about 10min or so. Then when I go back to sleep I do a sort of non thinking meditation to help me fall asleep and have had the most vivid dreams after those moments. After some research it turns out that Lucid dreaming is most easily achieved for some people by waking up after 5 hours of sleep or so and then going back to sleep thinking about dreaming or about anything really. And that's certainly been the case for me.

I also experienced an interesting vision while meditating once when i was on the border of falling asleep but not quite asleep yet. I was soaring over an expansive meadow with flowers in bloom. Was very surreal but I felt very much present, not like dreams. Happened a couple months ago and hasnt happened since.

i used to lay down in a quiet room, close my eyes and listen to this video whenever i was going into a spiral of procrastination and stress (can't remember, might've posted this on here before)



the first handful of times it really did a pretty impressive job of getting the noise out of my mind and allowing me to just calmly focusing on what i want to accomplish. but it's become less effective, i guess because my mind becomes used to it and knows what it's going to hear. tried a few other youtube videos which didn't seem to have much effect, been too lazy to pursue meditation any further since then (which is kind of ironic i guess).