this post was submitted on 16 Aug 2024
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Out of genuine curiosity, how do you meditate properly and what are the benefits?
Basically just focus on staying present and not letting yourself get carried away by your internal monologue. It’s infinitely harder than it sounds. You can close your eyes, focus on a specific spot in a room, focus on your breathing, anything to keep yourself present and focused. Keep your mind empty as best you can.
The best advice I ever got was, when you have an intrusive thought during meditation, to acknowledge it, and let it fade away. Don’t focus on it or criticize yourself for it, as that will usually only make it harder to refocus yourself.
Meditation is super helpful for a lot of reasons, but for me personally it helped a lot with negative thinking and mental traps (like catastrophizing and stuff). It helps you to be more aware of when you’re getting carried away by thoughts, and how to push them aside and be present.
Look into mindfulness if you’re interested, it’s helped me a lot.
A good saying I've ran into before, "If your monkey-mind gets distracted 1 million times, you just need to refocus 1million +1 times". Meaning no matter how many times you get distracted you just gotta refocus 1 more time so you'll always eventually win if you keep at it.
There's a lot of different ways to meditate, and things to meditate on. The most common is mindfulness and essentially boils down to observing and paying attention to everything your consiousness has available. Sounds, smells, sensations, etc. After a while your mind internally kinda shuts up, you get relaxed, stress levels drop, you notice things you hadn't before. Long term your telomeres get longer (bits of sacrifical DNA that protect your actual DNA). Anxiety drops, inflammation drops, depression drops, you end up more in control of your emations, more rational, better attention span, more self aware, less lonely somehow, improves sleep. And that's just what science has found so far
You can also meditate on other things, like some forms are based on focussing on love and positive feelings, manifesting them at will, feeling them strongly, essentially feeling your love for everyone.
You can also do things like explore your consciousness, like observing where thoughts come from, how they are formed, what the inside of your mind "looks like"
The benefit, for me, is that it's like stuffing a piggy bank full of calmness. Later, when I need some calmness, I can reach in and grab it via the meditative practice.
I learned with calm.com
They have a course of mediation for beginners or something like that and they "teach" different methods so you can choose whichever suits you the most
There used to be a 3-month trial which is enough to go through the course (I didn't keep my subscription), I'm not sure if they still offer trials like that
I'd like to recommend two books: