A little counter-intuitively, meditation seems easier if I have some mild discomfort, like an itchy skin, feeling slightly ill from having strong tea on an empty stomach, or an excess awareness of saliva secreting in my mouth. My attention keeps getting automatically drawn to these discomforts, so I can use them as an extra meditation focus in addition to my breath. Over time (several sits) it may become harder to use them as foci, though, as they stop feeling uncomfortable.
Headaches work for me. There are also some types of strong negative emotions which improve my meditation enormously, while others prevent meditation from working.
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.