Hi everybody,
There's been a bit of talk of Mindfulness meditation around. I am curious about this, because it looks like it might be practical advice backed by a deep theory.
Unfortunately, all the tutorials on mindfulness meditation seem to be semi-practical advice backed by totally bogus theories (focus your energies, blah blah). I've been able to extract some useful stuff from such articles, but I don't know what I can trust, and I still don't fully understand how it's even supposed to work.
My current understanding is that you are supposed to pay attention to something and then pay attention to your attention, notice when you go off track, not judge yourself, and focus your attention back on the thing you were paying attention to. Or something.
I'd like to understand the technique at least well enough to judge success. When I'm doing chin-ups, it's easy to see if I did a chin-up or not, and how many, but I don't even know what this mindfulness stuff is supposed to look like.
If anyone knows more about what it's supposed to feel like, what the steps are an so on, I would really appreciate if you posted your knowledge here.
There is wake-induced lucid dreaming where you transition from being awake into a lucid dream while retaining consciousness. I can do it sorta-regularly with the wake-back-to-bed technique, which involves me getting up six hours after bedtime, staying up for half an hour, then lying awake and meditating in bed for up to an hour. Haven't figured out a way to do this regularly without messing up my sleep cycle, and the lucid dreams are pretty short and uneventful.
I think the trick is to both have a sufficient level of wakefulness (need to stay awake a bit and read the morning news instead of just turn off the alarm clock and go back to bed) and having the brain in a state where the next phase of sleep isn't very deep. Going to bed or taking a nap after a day of being awake always just leads to a full loss of consciousness.