With meditation comes great wisdom

[the village idiot]

On 3/9/2018 at 16:32, sandspider said:

Most of Richard J's output (including The Story of My Heart) are available as free ebooks on Project Gutenberg if anyone so wishes...

 

http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/2317

Free books!  How wonderful.

 

Many thanks sandspider.

[sandspider]

No probs!

 

There's some good stuff on there. Mainly older works due to copyright expiration, but lots of worthwhile reads.

[Greys0n]

meditation is not for me, my head is full of thoughts

[tractorboy1]

28 minutes ago, Greys0n said:

meditation is not for me, my head is full of thoughts

Thats what its about observing thoughts

[the village idiot]

5 hours ago, Greys0n said:

meditation is not for me, my head is full of thoughts

Everyone's heads are full of thoughts all of the time.

 

Most of it is nonsense, and a good percentage of it is harmful.

 

Meditation trains you to observe the thoughts (which materialise automatically) dispassionately, giving you the space needed to let them dissolve away quickly if you want them to, rather than getting carried along by them.

 

Particularly useful if your thinking is causing you problems.

[joshuatree]

[Rob D]

Yep have been doing or trying to meditate for a couple of years - but it is hard to do and results have not seemed that obvious.. but will keep doing it until I get results. I think it ties in with how you live your life and how you percieve things... Can't say I've got far with it but had enough with all the meaningless twaddle my brain churns out all the time.

 

I want control of my brain - at the moment it does what it pretty much pleases!

 

Headspace app is a good easy way to try it.

[the village idiot]

1 hour ago, Rob D said:

Yep have been doing or trying to meditate for a couple of years - but it is hard to do and results have not seemed that obvious.. but will keep doing it until I get results. I think it ties in with how you live your life and how you percieve things... Can't say I've got far with it but had enough with all the meaningless twaddle my brain churns out all the time.

 

I want control of my brain - at the moment it does what it pretty much pleases!

 

Headspace app is a good easy way to try it.

Hi Rob,

 

Great to hear that you have been experimenting with meditation, and sorry to hear that you are finding it tough. It certainly is very simple in theory but frustratingly difficult in practice.

 

Might I be so bold as to suggest a slight change in emphasis. It is not really possible to do much about what the brain does, the key is to change your relationship with/reaction to its outputs. 

 

You have already noticed that the brain churns out twaddle most of the time. This is a key insight that most people are not particularly aware of. The brain 'thinks' all the time and our default is to get carried along with this thinking as if we created it, so therefore it must be meaningful.

 

Your brain will carry on doing this whatever you do, but you can get much better at simply recognising it as thinking and get on with your day. It breaks the link between thought and mood/action.

 

Quite a good strategy is to have a really good think about the 5 or 6 things that you really value in life, the things that would make you into the person you want to be. Keep meditating and get better at recognising the nature of thoughts as they pop into your head. This will give you the necessary distance to be able to 'hold up' the thought against your values and choose to run with it or let it go.

 

Thoughts that don't get a hold of you very quickly fade to nothing. The more you ruminate on unproductive thoughts the more often they will appear. You can't stop thinking, but you can learn to accept whatever comes up and only act on the good bits.

 

People's natural assumption is that they are their thinking. This is not the case. In my view it is more accurate to say that you are the conciousness into which thoughts appear. This is a neutral, observing space into which all thoughts and perceptions make themselves known. It is the rarely visited space between thoughts. It is where Wes D and Bolam go when they are snowboarding.

 

Breaking the stranglehold of your thoughts (lessening their duration) trains your brain to spend more time in this marvelous space between thoughts. The clouds of your thinking drift on by and the world starts to look like a very different and much more interesting place.

 

Good luck with it all, and keep us posted on how you get on.

 

 

[Rob D]

Thanks for such well informed feedback and I will try and keep it up!!