Any meditators on the board?

[Drew_ab]

Do we have many meditators on this board? Meditation has become an important part of my life lately, and am wondering if there are fellow McDougallers?

Is anyone using the 'insight timer' app for meditation? I've been using it and quite like it.

[roundcoconut]

Not a meditator per se, but into reiki which has similarities. (They're both energy work as far as I'm concerned.) Love the 'insight timer' for either purpose.

Several others here have mentioned meditation, so certainly three or four people will come out of the woodwork for you!

[Thrasymachus]

I think meditation is over-sold. Here is a good article that debunks alot of the ridiculous claims made about meditation:
The McMindfulness Craze: The Shadow Side of the Mindfulness Revolution

If you have been duped by Eastern Asian buddhist meditation salesmen I recommend this video:
The Problem of "the Exotic" in Philosophy & Religion
From the transcript this portion hits at the crux of it:

I had a guy visit me a couple of weeks ago, and he's a smart, well-educated guy, probably
3:40
one of the smartest people I've talked to in the last five years, and, uh, we talked
3:46
about Buddhism for several hours, and, of course, by the end of that time he really
3:50
had a sense of how many years I've worked on Buddhism and my depth of knowledge about
3:56
the history and other issues. But then he stopped at one point, and he told
4:00
me with real excitement, after we'd been talking about all kinds of problems of philosophy,
4:07
corruption, history, and he stopped and he told me with his eyes glowing, that he knew
4:12
one Buddhist temple that didn't have any of these problems, because, at this one temple,
4:17
he said, they just worship statues (they worship this particular god) and if you ask them anything
4:27
about Buddhist philosophy, they just preach the doctrine of "not knowing".
4:31
They just preach the doctrine that none of them know anything, and there are no answers
4:35
to any questions. Sounds great. And, y'know, this guy, again, he's not an idiot; he's really
4:46
quite bright, but I could see he was taken in by this.
4:52
And my response was not to question the value of a bunch of monks preaching that they don't
4:59
know anything, but to ask him a hypothetical question: how would he feel if I told him
5:08
the exact same thing about a Catholic monastery in Italy, where the monks just worship a god,
5:16
and if you wanna ask them any questions, they just preach their own pious ignorance? How
5:22
would he feel if I knew about an Eastern Orthodox temple somewhere in Russia where people professed
5:31
the same doctrine? Right away, his whole expression changed.
5:37
The concept of "pious ignorance" has a pretty deep history in Christianity, and, um, it
5:46
isn't well-suited to Buddhism at all. If you know anything about the history and philosophy
5:50
of Buddhism, it's got to be the most anti-ignorance religion going, although a lot of people conveniently
5:56
ignore that side of it. But in posing the question in this way, what
6:02
I was challenging was the mystique of the exotic that, really, for him, made the idea
6:11
of pious ignorance seem appealing. And, right away, if he was just visualizing how he would
6:17
feel, how he would respond, if we were talking about white, western people, doing the same
6:23
thing, with the same excuses, in a western setting, then, suddenly, it didn't seem so
6:31
appealing anymore. My own sense of apprehension of "the exotic"
6:39
and of how people tend to turn off their own rational faculties once something is declared
6:45
exotic actually is much earlier than my interest in Buddhism.

[snapple]

I'm trying to get in to Mindfulness. Only as a way of getting on top of stress and hypertension.

I'm not a meditation kind of person, but I have to try something to just realize the world isn't going to end if I don't make a work deadline and I'm not useless at everything.

Chronic, long-term raised cortisol and stress can be as damaging endothelium health (if not worse). It's very very bad for MS prognosis too. I have constant chest pains too. So I need to just not always be aiming for a goal, and panicking.

http://www.overcomingmultiplesclerosis.org/Recovery-Program/Meditation/

In actual fact I start a MBSR (Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction) course in a few weeks.

[vgpedlr]

Buddhist meditator here. I alternate between vipassana and Tibetan contemplations.

[roundcoconut]

Restorative yoga is a fun one for people who want to relax, but are lazy about it: (Snapple, this one's for you.)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M4ypffiVkHQ

It's just lying down in a bunch of different positions, but it gets the job done, in terms of settling down the nervous system. I've been doing a lot of restorative yoga positions over the last couple of weeks, and the cummulative effect is lovely. This teacher is wonderful, by the way. See what you think!

[Risto]

I've been very slowly getting into a meditation practice, but I'm very much a beginner. I've had some very good results, though - much better mood and less anxiety when I take the time to meditate.

Coincidentally I ended up reading about the cult side of Transcendental Meditation (I don't practice TM and haven't been in any contact with the organization). Years ago, I read the book A Piece of Blue Sky, which is a very detailed, informative account of L. Ron Hubbard and Scientology, and since then, I've had a bit of an interest in mind control - interest in the sense of gawking at what people can be made to do. TM is an interesting case, as the non-cult part of it (their version of mantra meditation) seems to be possibly genuinely helpful, to many people, anyway, and they don't seem to push the cult indoctrination too hard at all (stark contrast to many others). However, for those who fall for it and get into the cult proper, it's as bonkers as anything: inerrant guru (Mahesh), yogic flying, magical gemstones, magical world peace, so much continuous meditation that some people go into psychosis etc. They pulled quite a trick getting Oprah to promote it. She even tried to ask some hard questions on her show, but completely let the TM people off the hook when they didn't answer. Anyway, anyone who's impressed by Oprah, Ellen DeGeneres, David Lynch et al. should probably google and take a look at the critical views of TM.

[eXtremE]

@ Thrasymachus , I think you are so wrong about the healthful beneficial effects of meditation. I practice the relaxation response and it it helps me tremendously when I do it regularly and practice it consistently.

The relaxation response is something anyone can learn in 20 minutes. Like eating McD, you do not even have to spend a single penny to learn the technique.

[Jumpstart]

I started with Transcendental Meditation and it morphed into counting of breath and then to simply watching breaths without the counting. The benefit I've seen is the mind focusing on "the now" instead of running in one direction or the other playing "what if" games about every decision I want to make. I don't do it every day, but when I caught myself with a scattered brain I'll resume for a week or two to bring focus back into my life. Just this benefit alone I consider a miracle which no drug or working with some physiatrist or psychologist can match. We're talking about peace.

[Spiral]

Do you ever go a day or a week without meditating due to a busy work/life schedule?

If you have a busy life and that is the reason why you find meditation helpful, how do you make time for the meditation?

[Thrasymachus]

@extreme:
This is a good excerpt from an essay length piece where a Marxist psycho-analyst destroys the field of modern health:

http://www.davidsmail.info/respons.htm
For what seems to me to have happened over the years is that a mechanistic and objectivist approach to people's distress that, while it didn't overtly blame them, dehumanized them, has been replaced by a 'humanist' and 'postmodernist' one that interiorizes the phenomena of distress and - often explicitly and nearly always tacitly - holds people responsible for them. Even though the pendulum seems to have swung from an almost entirely exterior approach to an almost entirely interior one, the problem of responsibilty has not been solved: formerly we had people for whose condition nobody was responsible while now we have people whose condition is largely if not solely their own responsibility. The reason for this is to be found in what these two extreme positions have in common: a studied avoidance of the social dimension.

It is true that, as the pendulum began to swing (for example with Laing's work), the social power-structure did indeed become visible for a moment, even to the extent of spawning 'radical psychology' movements. However, as far as the mainstream is concerned, the possibility that emotional distress is the upshot of the way we organize our society has never been seriously entertained and at the present time is if anything further than ever from any kind of official recognition. The imputation of responsibility is absolutely central to this state of affairs.

It seems off-topic, but the role of buddhism and meditation in traditional Asian buddhist societies had alot of overlap with the role we attribute to Western disciplines of mental health like therapy, psychiatry. It reduces the question of social order to what David Smail calls mere problems of interiority, the interior space and alleged unique failings of individuals. Meditation actually had a very small role in traditional Asian buddhist societies, most lay people never meditated, very few monks did a little meditating. Christianity has just as little, or just as much a tradition of meditating as buddhism ever likely did, it is just as not exotic and marketable in the meditation market.

I don't think meditating 10-30 minutes a day is bad, it is even likely beneficial. But to act like modern man, doing a job he doesn't want to do for the majority of life, just to receive money, who can have no satisfaction of meeting his needs directly or control his fate with simple tools to work with his natural environment, can meditate his way to total bliss or nirvana is absurd. Further I don't believe that meditation better prepares you for certain things. There are just some people born with an amazing fortitude who even undergo and survive horrors like the genocide of their people and never lose hope, and no amount of meditation will make most of us like them.

[sksamboots]

Do you ever go a day or a week without meditating due to a busy work/life schedule?

If you have a busy life and that is the reason why you find meditation helpful, how do you make time for the meditation?

I think being busy is an excuse. Schedule meditation just like you schedule other things in life. Other wise it's just an excuse. Do this until you become disciplined. My practice is Monday-Friday, 10 minutes a day. No props---just me and my breath. All you need

[BlueHeron]

I'm an irregular meditator. I stopped because of back pain and haven't gotten back into it, but when I've done it, I've found it helpful. There are studies showing that long-term meditation is beneficial to your brain. This one showed changes in six weeks: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25632405

I love this documentary on meditation in an Indian prison:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WkxSyv5R1sg

I'm really glad you posted this. It reminded me that I need to commit to meditating again. Spiral, it's like anything else you don't have time for: cooking brown rice, baking potatoes, exercising. You just need to do it. But you can start with five minutes. I think almost everyone can find five minutes.

[Drew_ab]

And we should all remember that meditation was part of Dr. Ornish's program, though the results are mainly affected by the food, meditation no doubt has a positive influence.

[Ern2Win]

Don't get hung up on Buddhism or eastern philosophy. The Relaxation Response by Dr. Herbert Benson details the physical benefits, demonstrated in studies, of eliciting the relaxation response, otherwise known as meditation.

When you look at the popularity of mind-body medicine today, it's hard to understand what a groundbreaking book this was when it was first published in 1975. Based on studies at Boston's Beth Israel Hospital and Harvard Medical School, Dr. Herbert Benson showed that relaxation techniques such as meditation have immense physical benefits, from lowered blood pressure to a reduction in heart disease. The Relaxation Response demystifies the mantra meditation used in the transcendental meditation program, explaining how anyone can reap its advantages with or without the help of a guru. If you want to understand the beginnings of today's alternative medicine movement, or if you're simply looking to learn a simple meditation technique without a lot of metaphysical trappings, this is a good place to start. --Ben Kallen

About the Author
Herbert Benson (born 1935), is an American medical doctor, cardiologist, and founder of the Mind/Body Medical Institute at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston. He is Mind/Body Medicine Professor at Harvard Medical School and Director Emeritus of the Benson-Henry Institute (BHI) at Massachusetts General Hospital. He is Founding Trustee of The American Institute of Stress. He has contributed more than 190 scientific publications and 12 books.[1] More than five million copies of his books have been printed in different languages.[2][3]

Started in 1998,[4] Benson became the leader of the so-called "Great Prayer Experiment", or technically the "Study of the Therapeutic Effects of Intercessory Prayer (STEP)". The result published in 2006 concluded that intercessory prayer has no beneficial effect on patients with coronary artery bypass graft surgery.[5] He, however, still believes that prayer has positive health benefits.[6]

Benson coined "Relaxation Response" (and wrote a book by the same title) as a scientific term for meditation, and he used it to describe the ability of the body to stimulate relaxation of muscle and organs.[7]

I have been an off and on practitioner. I feel much better when I do it. I feel like I am more calm and in control. But, like exercise, it does take discipline and practice. It is interesting that I have achieved much the same level of calmness by getting off the meat-based diet. I am certainly less anxious and have a longer fuse on the WFPB diet.