Recently just started using lesswrong to supplement meditative practice and I'm having some success with it.
Essentially I see my approach as having two major aspects - firstly meditative practice (zen style shikantaza) in order to increase focus / attention and become less reactionary to external / internal events. I've been meditating for approx 10 years, and more intensely in the previous 2 (1-2 hours a day during the week, 3+ hours on weekends). The meditation has reduced the effect of several of my own personality traits and habits.
Secondly study and practice in rationality is to refine / improve the remaining "dominant" thought processes, or provide better outcomes when I do need to think / verbalise through a situation.
Summary of goals is to i) have fewer automatic actions and responses to my own stream of thoughts and ii) rationalise and improve the reactions that do occur such that they result in a positive outcome.
Buddhism itself has several tools and structures to support ii) but I find the language a bit excessive and impenetrable as compared to here.
Background: I and many other attendees at the CFAR rationality minicamp last weekend learned a lot about applied rationality, and made big personal lists of things we wanted to try out in our everyday lives. I think that a regular (weekly or maybe semi-weekly) post where people mention any new interesting habits, decisions, and actions they have taken recently would be cool as a supplement to this; it ought to be rewarding for people to be able to write a list of the cool things they did, and I expect it'll also be interesting for other people to peek in and see the sorts of goals and self-modifications people are working on. Others at minicamp seemed enthusiastic about the idea, so I hope it takes off. Feel free to meta-discuss whether this is a good idea or if it can be done better.
Addendum 5/15: By the way, non-minicamp people should feel free to post too! I am highly certain that minicamp attendees are not the only ones working on interesting things in their lives.
This is the public group instrumental rationality diary for the week of May 14th. It's a place to record and chat about it if you have done, or are actively doing, things like:
Or anything else interesting which you want to share, so that other people can think about it, and perhaps be inspired to take action themselves. Try to include enough details so that everyone can use each other's experiences to learn about what tends to work out, and what doesn't tend to work out.
Discussion's likely to continue gradually through the week, so try to remember to check back now and then!