It is good to do practices that will enable you to sit longer and more comfortable, however, you can also use a chair and sit comfortably and meditate with less distractions from the body. Just don't lean on the chair, only use it to put you buttocks on it and keep the back straight.

Walking meditation is very good! Try it sometime! You can also rock and move when you meditate. Don't completely ignore the aches and pains in your body. Put off the aches that you can and pay attention and adjust when you need to. The more you meditate the stronger those muscles will become and you will notice less and less aches and pains.

If I am feeling restless, I stand, rock back and forth, walk and will return to sitting if I feel like it. This entire process I allow myself to just be present. It's ok for some meditations to go better than others. In fact, it is perfectly natural. Don't beat yourself up with rules and worrying about doing it the right way. Just be in a state of mind that "This is meditation time, period." and go with that. Find your own way. Research lots of different ways to meditate. Meditation can happen at any time, anywhere. Remember that please. Anytime, anywhere!

Don't try and quiet the mind. Allow it to do it's thing. Just watch it. Observe it. You will notice something. It never shuts off. It goes and goes. Observing this is the first step in the mind to begin to quiet itself. The more you resist thinking, the more you will think. One thing that can be helpful is to concentrate on every sound, smell, feeling, touch. Concentrate on every sense that you have. Obeserve it all. Observing all this occuring is being present. It's ok if the mind goes off in many directions. When it brings up emotions, feel them. Just allow yourself to be. Allow what you can to pass. With practice, the mind will have gaps in thought. When this occurs, it is a wonderful feeling. It is very peaceful!

My therapist said to me once. “At first your mind is like a little puppy, pulling on the lead excited to be in its new space, unpredictable. Just gently tug on the lead to bring it back in beside you. After a lot of walking and some time your puppy will stray less and less and begin to walk beside you”

That really helped me with my busy thoughts. It became not such a big deal that I had no control over my thoughts. Just gently bring them back to your surroundings and inner self

Nice thread, long time meditator with 6 years serious mostly daily mediation time including two 6 month sessions with several per day but what-ever, that is my ego talking.

Our meditation experience changes even as our diet/sleep/life changes, like our experiences with DMT. We do progress and learn with practice. The thing about true progression is how we carry ourselves and what we do in our lives. For example 1 hour building a new neural pathway and 16 hours strengthening the OLD habitual ones and guess what happens? little change. As others have mentioned it really takes exploiting that GAP and deepening the new pathways, disrupting the habitual. This is the basis for Neuro-plasticity and it begins with identifying the gap, becoming the observer, recognizing transience, and building equanimity.

a few months ago I was given a muse headband (monitors brainwaves during meditation) and although each day/moment is different, I did two experiments with DMT using it and posted them in the Meditation POLL thread. I wasn't sure how to link it.

Ah, synchronicity...This thread...Many thanks to DmnStr8 for it.


A few days ago, I saw this thread and said to myself, "when I have some time, I am going to contribute to that thread. I know it's got to be good because DmnStr8 started it...

Much respect.


I will begin with a small amount and attempt to contribute more, as I am able, over time.


Regarding the "eyes open or shut" questions & answers I give this interesting tidbit:


I "discovered"/"taught myself" meditation when I was about 8 years old in church surrounded by a family & community who were a truly loving, giving family & community. To add a little bit more context, my great-grandfather and my grandfather both helped build (both literally & figuratively) the small, country church that I grew up participating in every Sunday morning until I was 18 years old. It was originally a Quaker church, and there were still a large handful of traditional Quaker couples, albeit senior citizen-age, that still regularly attended Sunday services there when I was a little kid in the 60's & 70's.

Quakers practice meditation. Silent meditation. In church, the pastor would say at some point in the service, "and now we will observe a time of meditation" (this was distinct from the prayers, hymns and sermon that were all part of the old-school Quaker church). The entire congregation, which back then numbered at least 50 people if not more, would sit on the pews silently with their eyes closed for like 10, 15, sometimes 20 minutes at a time.

It was during this meditation period every Sunday that I learned to meditate with my eyes open. While everyone's eyes were closed, I would fixate my gaze and attention on a random thing in the main church room where we sat. It could be the carpet, it could be one of the stained glass windows, it could be the pastor's pulpit, or the hymnal in the book racks directly in front of me. Eventually, I found that I could "lose myself" doing this and that it felt good (in a sense; in another sense it felt rather weird).

So, every Sunday I would hone this ability more & more. It became a game or a challenge to see how quickly I could get myself into the peaceful, trance-like state. My ability to concentrate grew as I did this, week after week, month after month, year after year.

Years later, in my late teens, I was introduced to the concept of differing meditation techniques originating from Asia. Of course, I was intrigued and, other than all the body pain that I endured through in the first several years, I seemed to take to it like a fish takes to water. It came easily and naturally. However, all that was presented to me at the time regarding these new-to-me meditations were all eyes-closed, which I found to be a little more challenging than the eyes-open technique that I had grown up practicing.
So that is my contribution for today.



May Peace be with us all

Thanks for sharin everyone and thanks for the tips.

@Doc, thats intriguing about the church meditation. I feel like i used to do the same thing during mass, but it wasnt part of the service, and i proly focused more on zonin out rather than in. Im not sure if i wouldve responded to it very well, had it been presented to me at that age. I was antsier then than i am now, and once you add in that someone else is telling me to do it, im naturally gonna fight it til the end.
It wasnt until my early adulthood that i began to start using different activities as a form of meditation. I wasnt aware that at the time, but looking back, i can see where it began and how its evolved. After a few years of sobriety and work in a 12 step program (a whole other thread in itself), i feel like i was being pulled into beginning a daily practice. So, here i am today. Id really love to see how this thread evolves and im honored to be apart of it. If anyone else would like to share on their beginnings, id really love to read em. Thanks again, Peace

So many types of meditation are available. I find it very interesting how we choose what is best for us individually. I think all forms of meditation are of value. I have tried many forms of meditation. Some I liked and others I did not. I found personally that Zazen or sitting meditation suits me best.

I found this website (listed below) which describes many forms of meditation. Check out the list if you have not yet found a form that appeals to you yet. Try them out. Research the ones that interest you the most. I wanted to place a list here. I will work on coming up with a long list when I have time. In the mean time, please check out the link below. I think you will find it informative and educational.

https://liveanddare.com/types-of-meditation

One profound piece for me is doing a daily practice at dawn. 4am is considered the ambrosial hour when the veil between the spirit world and the physical world is thinnest. The thing I found amazing was the quiet and lack of distraction. A short warm up like sun salutations and a small cup of black tea and ginger beforehand. My practice involves a mantra projected mentally during pranayam. On occasion if feeling called I will partake in a very light dose of Changa after the warm up, but with this I never begin the mantra work until I have returned to base.
It is good to journal after meditation. Sometimes the things that come up, distractions of thought, personal revelations etc are worth noting. When there are obstacles they can then be understood and cleared. The aha moments can become reflections to return too over time.
Here is my challenge to those without a daily practice. Pick a meditation, do it for 40 days for at least 11 minutes and journal about it. Daily practice will bring about change. For me the discipline broke a lot of habitual behaviors and set a new pattern for my day. Just committing to getting up that early will shift a lot of things in order to achieve it.

I love this

Finally made time to read through this.

Now that I am finished I've forgotten what it was I wanted to say.

Right.. the voice that 3rdI mentions. Do people really think thoughts that way? I will oftentimes think en vox, particularly when I am in a conversational mood or wanting to work something into words for the sake of exercise, but by no means do my thoughts come to me in that form. Sitting in silence, unless I am remembering a conversation or something someone has said, all is quiet.. yet I would not say that I am very good at meditating. I get antsy and have the usual doubts everyone else has, like what is being accomplished and how many other things I could be working on with this precious time, etc.

So when I read about literal inner monologues that won't turn off... I'm not sure where I would fall in comparison. But the prospect of there being a definite progression of experiences as one continues with the practice is extremely encouraging. Thanks.

Also, I had no idea brain wave monitors were available to the general public like that, SM. Very neat.

When I decided to begin practicing meditation as a serious discipline 37 years ago (at the ripe age of 19), I often times would get the same feelings. However, I persisted (and read a crapload of really good books about meditation at other times of the day when I wasn't working)and it would subside eventually.

Back then, I read all about the "levels" of mind and "benefits" of regular practice, even though I experienced only a little tiny bit of any such phenomena after the first 6 months of serious, disciplined, get-up-at-4:00 a.m. and sit for at least 45 minutes, if not a full hour type meditation. If I remember correctly, I started off with the observing the breath technique, generally trying to figure out whether I could actually pull that off for any sustained amount of time. I tried different focal points of the breath to see if perhaps one particular technique suited me better than another...First I focused on the sensation of my breath passing in & out of the tip of my nose; next I tried the feeling of the air passing through my third eye once it was inside the nose and at its highest point in the body before it descends into the lungs; then I tried watching my belly go in & out as I breathed...I found that I actually liked all 3 of these techniques and could pull any of them off after a few months of letting go of the desire to control my "monkey mind", which of course would run amok with thoughts at first, but after a few months I could noticeably feel that gradually begin to subside. In the long run, the breath-through-the-third-eye technique became one of the most ingrained meditation techniques in my repertoire of them (I later went on to be instructed in tons of different techniques that I would evaluate over time, keep the ones that really worked for me & forget the ones that didn't).

These days, it comes so automatically that I am meditating most half the day, whether that is doing farm work, washing the dishes, mowing the weeds or sitting with our goats. Over the decades I have, without really consciously thinking about it, melded together several different meditation techniques into a "flow", so to speak, of, well...I guess I'd call it, perhaps, "no mind"; where the mind is very still and crystal clear and anything that I put my attention on is my full and unwavering attention, like a sharp knife cutting through all the bullshit that would normally get in peoples' way of actually doing an activity fully engaged, without any static mucking the picture up, so to speak. It is difficult to explain in words, that's for sure.




At first, I was very skeptical about this. But I was lucky to have a lot of encouragement along the path, especially the Buddhist monks that I trained and studied with in Sri Lanka & Thailand back in the early-mid 80's.

At some point it hit me that it was really all about being able to do absolutely nothing (like really, sincerely, truly nothing & not even think about it) and not to seek or look forward to any kind of future "reward" or "benefit" from it, that defeats a whole purpose of meditation. It tends to be very difficult for those raised in Western culture to wrap their heads around this concept. I know that psychedelics played a major role in helping me "get" this concept; that all there is is infinite space/time; that there really isn't anything "to do".

Doing nothing and saying nothing has always come quite easily. That's why I live in poverty and have no friends. I was even able to enjoy living outside alone for some years, and appreciate the simple things.. like a can of chili.. water.. silence.. or the peace of mind that hard earnest work will bring you.

The purpose of pursuing this life is to me the healing and fortifying of my body. There still a lot of improvement to be done.

It won't be difficult, but it is a process.. and the fact that I have so many other projects (adhd) I am slowly working on, is all that really stands in my way when I go to sit.

There is a little I have discovered about myself in recent years, my limits and that... But it is a lot that I have discovered about the world. This has recentered me and shown me where my priorities lay. And I think I'm ready to begin the slow climb up the ladder. There is really nowhere else to go but further inward, after all.

Literally doing nothing and doing nothing with regards to meditation are different though. There not being anything 'to do' with regards to meditation is not trying to meditate, not committing to a philosophical discipline etc.These just become more focus points for the mind, replacing old goals with something else to achieve.
It's very true that in our society this is a difficult concept to overcome, achieving becoming. Concepts full stop. To do nothing, just be.
But then you've still gotta do stuff

You have to buy a throw rug to meditate. Prove me wrong.

Just another meditators take.

I don't worry about the details.
I do not worry the least bit about posture. I can literally meditate anywhere even while doing mindless things. The mind is silent that's is really all that needs to be to call it meditation.

When I wish to go deep most times I am sitting and a bit slouched. I want to be relaxed and comfortable. I put no effort into body position, judging your body position is a thought so right away you are complicating matters unnecessarily anytime your posture moves. Due to my conformation and natural balance point my upper body ends up slightly in front of the vertical. It works so I wouldn't worry to much about the hows just the result.

I was lucky and it was easy for me to silence my ego from the start.

I did the typical "watch your thoughts" method and suddenly my mind full went quiet. It was almost like my ego didn't want to be watched. Fine with that. Works for me.

When I am trying for inner silence while having to also "do something" like weed the garden or long drives I simply play a game with myself. The listening game.

I find not thinking while actually having to do more than be still can be a tricky task.

If you instead pretend you are waiting for someone (say the universe) to speak, the ego will often right away shut up and wait patiently for the reply. Eventually I end up getting profound guidance my ego certainly would have drowned out with chatter.

I find this to be true.

However, for me personally, it took a while to get to that stage of the game (but I was never "trying" to "get" anywhere and that's kind of the whole point, LOL!)



Peace

Meditation is a useful thing to many different kinds of people and not necessarily for the same reasons. To suggest that there is a “point” to the practice insinuates also that everyone should benefit from it in the same fashion, which seems mildly ridiculous. Its like talking about exercise.. ymmv — to put it as delicately as possible. If you dont notice any difference after 30 years, likely nobodys lookin at you funny and judging you.

Por mi, it is definitely helpful with my nerve problems and adhd. Very conducive to refocusing and doing body work, clearing blockages, etc.

Extremely well said...







The energetic fields that comprise us so-called "human beings" are only barely just beginning to find their way, barely , I can almost guarantee you that thymamai... The road we all walk is a long one within the eonic cycles that span vast stretches of space/time.

When one can finally get in deep touch fairly constantly with Nature's Rhythm, one begins to realize the depth, breadth and width of the infinite cycles involved... when a pendulum swings one way, it will always swing the other eventually; neither is "right" nor "wrong" in the biggest-picture sense of It All. We've got a ridiculously long road ahead of us as well as behind us. Deep appreciation for this wisdom brings a Peace that passes all understanding.


"Nature never hurries, yet everything is accomplished."

-Lao Tzu

Not sure what you mean there. I was expressing that initial confusion there can be, or at least I certainly had, when I started meditating and the idea of doing nothing was at odds with my ingrained concepts of starting something new and preconceptions of what meditation was going to achieve in terms of potential benefits and insights.

But as understanding deepened with regular practice it became clearer to me that these initial preconceptions were just replacing one set of goals for another and became something I was trying to do or achieve.It was only when I let go of this and realised that I didn't need to try to do anything that my practice improved.



I'm not sure that only a silent mind means that you call it meditation. You can be meditating with a flurry of thoughts coming in and out but accepting their presence, observing them and letting them go without attaching to them and getting caught up in them can still be called meditation. But obviously if/when the mind does fully shut up that would great!

I try to meditate through out the day but inevitably my mind wanders, lifes distractions can whisk me away. But I keep trying to come back to that silence, by giving full attention to whatever task it is I am engaged with. It's a full time practice!

I know what I initially wanted when I started but I don't know what, if anything, meditation has done for me over the years I just know I wouldn't be without it now.

Just a little internet triangulation. Curiosities are now satisfied.

I understand. What was brought up about "doing nothing" is, as far as I can tell, a very important observation to make in a thread like this one. Because it's quite true that many people, their whole lives a perverse sort of mini race set, will find it difficult to disengage from the track, that mentality. It's easy to forget that.. To forget about other people and how they think.

There is one thing I've always had trouble embracing, about eastern cultures and their aesthetics, and that's the predominate taste/tendency for the ornate.. That pervading ritualistic flavor that is of course significant of strong traditions, but also so misleadingly bland, florid or hackneyed to a western viewpoint. I noticed this only recently when I was looking through websites for the shaolin monasteries.

But that is still yet only another outsider bias. Life experiences will always enrich these perspectives and lend new meaning, over time, I am finding.

And that of practicing meditation is one such instance.. 8 years ago I could not take it seriously. It seemed a fad, regardless of what my cranial sacral therapist said and however much I wanted to take her words seriously. Now, of course, that has all changed.