Self Improvement
A community which focusses on improving yourself. This can be in many different ways - from improving physical health or appearance, to improving mental health, creating better habits, overcoming addictions, etc.
While material circumstances beyond our control do govern much of our daily lives, people do have agency and choices to make, whether that is as "simple" as disciplining yourself to not doomscroll, to as complex as recreating yourself to have many different hobbies and habits.
This is not a place where all we do is talk about improving "productivity" (in a workplace context) and similar terms and harmful lifestyles like "grindset". Self-improvement here is intended to make you a generally better and happier person, as well as a better communist, and any other roles you may have in your life.
Rules and guidelines:
- Posts should be about self-improvement. This is obviously a wide category, and can range from advice, to finding resources, to self-posts about needing to improve in a certain area, or how you have improved, and many other things.
- Use content warnings when discussing difficult subjects.
- Do not make medical decisions solely because of a discussion you have had with any person here (e.g. whether to take or not take medications; diagnoses; etc.) as we do not vet people. All medical problems should be discussed with a real-life medical professional.
- Do not post harmful advice here. If this is seen, then please report it and we shall remove it. If you are unsure about whether it's precisely harmful advice or not but feel uneasy about it, please report it anyway.
- Do not insult other users and their lifestyles or their habits (unless they ask, I suppose). This is a place for self-improvement. Critique and discussion about a course of action is encouraged over shit-flinging. Don't talk down to people.
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Everyone has thoughts. Meditation (at least the style I learned) is acknowledging those thoughts and then letting them go. I can't remember where I read it, but the advice was to visualize yourself as a mountain, and visualize those thoughts as clouds floating past. You can take note that there are clouds there, but a mountain doesn't go follow them. They just float by and are gone.
Right its the letting them go part that I can't seem to stop. I can't really do visualization because my brain is fucked up, so for me it turns into a relaxation exercise, but I can't relax fully because I'm always thinking.
Its okay and normal to have thoughts popping up. It's counterproductive to try to force the thoughts away. Meditation is like gardening in that way, in that you can't force a flower to bloom before its time by forcing the bulb open. Instead, just like in gardening, you make the conditions for growth and let "nature" go from there. Do the little work everyday, and with time something will come.
And "nature" here just means that there is a process, it takes time, and forcing thoughts away won't speed things up and it will introduce this idea that you are "failing". It may just make you angry and associate bad thoughts with meditation.
Buddhism (if doing a Buddhist style meditation) and Dialectical Materialism, too to some extent, are all about conditionality. You create the conditions for later insight through meditation. You can't force the results, you can just lay the groundwork.
Meditation is like gardening, but it is also like practicing an instrument or exercising. It is building up a "muscle" (the mindfulness muscle) and so it's best to treat like you would any other exercise or practice routine.
It's best to do a little everyday, slowly build up that muscle. Accept you will make mistakes for a long time at first as you get started. Forgive yourself and move on. Don't make a big fuss about "not doing it right" as that creates a bad feedback loop. And it's an unrealistic expectation anyway. As long you have a good intention of a.) recognizing (or being mindful) of thoughts as they come, and then b.) letting them pass by not intentionally feeding them, chasing them, or letting them snowball into other thoughts, then you will be good.
Notice that "stopping thoughts" is not on your to do list. Instead, it's noticing them as they come up and trying to let them pass by, like a cloud, without chasing them or getting lost in them.
You will have roaming thoughts. It is normal, your mindfulness muscle is not fully developed, and if you push too hard then you'll burn out. So keep the Meditation short enough at the start. If you practice for 10 minutes but only had a brief moment of focus where you recognized thoight and didnt chase it - good! You succeeded! Now next day try again, maybe you can make thay brief moment of attention a little longer next time. Maybe you can't - progress isnt linear.
Its a marathon, not a sprint. You can't stop thoughts, so instead try to be more mindful of them as they come, and build up the muscles to notice that those thoughts will also go away on their own if not fed.
It sounds like you have a hard time with letting thoughts go. I know, it's hard. And youll find sometimes your mind can be in a particulalry "noisy" state or a particularly calm one (again there are conditions which caused that). But also remember, any muscle you haven't exercised will be weak at first. So I think the trick at this point is to accept that the process will work, it may take a long time. So you cant get worked up right now about any expectations of how hard or easy or fast or slow it should be.
If you can only let thoughts pass for 0.01% of the time of your meditation, and the rest of the time you are lost in thought, then guess what - you still succeeded. As long as you're earnest but relaxed during meditation, then the garden will grow on its own time. It's said that the only bad meditation is the one you didn’t do. But I would also add to make sure you aren't getting mad or frustrated at yourself during meditation.
Just treat it as observation time. Like you are a third party examining what goes on in your brain. Maybe at this moment the goal is to more deeply feel the observation of: "gee, I really do think all the time - imagine how lost in thought I get when I'm not trying to meditate!"
You have all your life to practice.