Hey peeps!!
Do you meditate?
Is this helpful?
I started realising I would like to start to meditate:) 
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Maybe today will be the day after a long time when I will meditate 
I try to meditate by thinking about different things and planning my future. I don’t really know anything about meditation though.
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I can meditate for a couple of minutes but if I do it for too long my voices get louder.
I was into meditation in my prodromal phase though.
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Well I believe we can meditate in many different ways 
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Oh hell, sounds bad. Probably then you shouldn’t meditate if it makes you feel worse…
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I believe that too.
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Very helpful. It’s amazing when you do it right. But my anxiety and interference, I never try. And I haven’t always had a proper place to do it. If I was better at it, those things probably wouldn’t matter.
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Meditation has been very good for me, but I don’t get any effects from it anymore, for some reason.
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I think meditating while thinking of different aspects of your health is helpful.
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I like to meditate. I usually use an app called Headspace, and there are other tools out there which can be useful.
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Meditating helps me to calm my nervous system like nothing else does. I highly recommend.
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I have a love hate relationship with meditation.
First of all, as a word, it technically covers practices that have nothing in common. Second often the practices are not goal oriented, if your goal is to clear your mind and you do zen meditation it’s like somebody who wants to disable an alarm hitting the snooze button, you know sh*t is going to start back up right? You will never have success erasing your thoughts beyond the moments of practice if you don’t incorporate some form of negative reinforcement with the instinct of thinking itself and, in fact, 90% of the heavy lifting will be done by the negative reinforcement if this specific goal is to be reached because while meditation can give positive reinforcement for not thinking, thinking in itself gives positive reinforcement for thinking by default because it allows you to express yourself.
In general all practices of meditation focus solely on positive reinforcement and it’s often unclear what the end goal for the reinforcement is, which even when clear could often be achieved strictly better incorporating some form of negative reinforcement. If nothing else as a tool to fix possible mistakes done along the way, instead there is an over-reliance on your subconscious fixing all your bullsh*t, which, clearly, isn’t viable for many practices if you have a mental illness, you need an abort button.
Secondly, thousands of years of history and they don’t have words for sh*t, everything becomes mystical and spiritual and what have you, and all is way more fuzzy than it needs to be. I’m sorry but the Dao that can be described isn’t the true Dao because you haven’t gone in and taken the time to really create some form of language to communicate this stuff without purposefully making it distant and vague, and it’s so annoying because it’s much easier to create a framework if you can talk things through in a group but not a single effing guru in history was humble enough to ask the proper questions needed of his followers to build a cohesive framework to communicate this stuff and so we are basically better served just doing our own thing because there isn’t a single school worth its salt.
That pretty much covers the hate, well not really, I also dislike a ton of the emotions people in the meditation industry have and spread around, especially on the male side they have among the most disgusting charismas I have ever seen, they literally make me want to puke. But that’s more of an issue that has nothing to do with meditation itself and more with the people drawn to it, again, mostly on the male side of things. Which doesn’t mean all male people that meditate have that problem, it’s a minority, but unfortunately as it often happens with charisma a very influential one.
Then there is the good. Many meditation practices offer ways to build up useful tools and train relevant mental pathways or help decompress and help giving clarity, of course only when practiced alone because the extra clarity is leveraged as positive reinforcement in groups, aka instead of clarity you get bonding because that’s the effect achieving clarity in groups has on people, which, if anything, reduces your clarity, especially with those sh*tty emotions and charismas running rampant in the field.
Personally I have my own meditation techniques, when I am extremely bored I make up a new meditation technique, I can literally come up with new ones on the spot try them out a couple seconds and usually never use them again, some though I come back to regularly in order to train this or that but, unfortunately, most of these throwaway techniques, not all, are built by picking random qualias and mixing them together and they serve no purpose beyond giving a way to develop some very weird synesthesias, I put them together at times purely because that’s one way to keep my brain flexible by asking it on the spot to create something completely novel, in a sense creating the techniques is a meditation technique in itself.
For all my critiques I generally no longer train techniques that require negative reinforcement outside of deviation management, you never know when you let your intrusive thoughts win and do something purposefully stupid with your positive reinforcement, (except for the upkeep needed to maintain my default state Zen). I do have some techniques that are a bit on the unpleasant side to use though, namely the ones that shape existing pain or existing emotions but I don’t train them, I use them when needed. For the ones I do train actively, not for upkeep nor to handle something already existing they don’t have negative reinforcement baked in because they aren’t trying to change or remove something already present but generally they are there to introduce something new or revitalize something lost and keeping my own opinion of the execution honest is enough of a negative reinforcement, which by the way is more negative reinforcement baked in than some meditation techniques out there whose goal is to ultimately ignore your mind or train yourself to accept things. I don’t do that, even when my meditation is about letting go the focus is on discipline, even when I completely dissolve my ego which I do quite often just for kicks, it’s all about control over the experience, not necessarily in the sense of dominating it as much as setting boundaries or goals. Weirdly enough I do use those very same techniques, the ones that focus on not judging, when something happens that I either don’t know how to deal with or am to tired to as a way to stuck my head under the sand until it passes without risking to mess things up, or to fall asleep, they can help with that as long as you don’t try to be present while practicing them.
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No and no. It is the most effective way I have found to wind my voices up to the point where I lose insight as I remarked to @angledangle earlier today.
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I learned to do TM (Transcendental Method) 40 some years ago and used it a lot before I went acute. While I was acute I couldn’t meditate. During my recovery period I have been able to resume TM to a greater extent but often lack the motivation needed to meditate regularly which is required for the best results.
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Great post. Lots of good insight and info.
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Meditation is bad for me.
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The man who meditates and clears his mind when it’s time to think engages in escapism. A child is born with an awareness, but without words or systems of thought there is no application. If you can’t apply something it has no value. Without values how can you live a good life. A good life is how a man’s life is measured. What’s the alternative? A bad life full of escapisms and blank stares. Experience trumps theory. Would you rather have a doctor with 10 years experience or a doctor who has been reading books for the last 10 years? Experience demands recollection of events to process reality. Look at the technological advances we’ve had in every discipline all from thinking. Now redefining thinking as intuition is a categorical mis-step. Thinking about thinking or meta thinking is how you understand reality using different models. Without an understanding of reality you can’t define who you are. Understanding reality with no bias is futile; when one tries to be enlightened they study other guru’s who give them new systems of thought and their version of reality. Because you follow the same systems of thought you have similar experiences; making you the guru’s carbon copy.
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Money