

A Guide to Meditation for the Rest of Us - martey
http://lifehacker.com/5591576/a-guide-to-meditation-for-the-rest-of-us

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amohr
Anecdotally, I was surprised, above all, by how natural it feels to start
meditating. There's thousands of years of practices and traditions meant to
improve/structure the act, but I never really thought of those as being aimed
at someone like myself. As a result, most of my exposure, up until a few
months ago, was either through articles like this one or occasionally at the
end of martial arts workouts.

But I spent a part of this summer working on a farm in rural Wisconsin and I
ended up with a period of downtime in the early evening - after the day's work
and catching up with emails and whatnot. As it turns out, I was also
struggling with a particular quandary (specifically, I was trying to define
'value') and one day, I just sat down cross-legged on the porch with my eyes
closed, facing the setting sun.

What I did from there is hardly what any sort of zen master would consider
'meditation,' but I was amazed at what a difference it made to simply make a
conscious decision to sit and think only of one topic. Consequently, I was
reminded of a zen koan that I had encountered earlier in my investigation of
the meaning of value, which was edifying enough for me to feel okay with
calling what I had started doing 'meditation.'

I guess the bottom line is not to put too much stake in what everyone else
says meditation is or isn't and focus on the practice of just taking time to
be alone with your thoughts long enough to organize them in such a way that
makes sense for you. Again, this is strictly anecdotal, but I think that's
where you'll really see many of the benefits associated with meditation coming
from. As someone who was diagnosed ADHD in college and has always had a
problem with focus, I can say that having a disorganized mind can really be
toxic to your life and work.

~~~
chaosmachine
_I was also struggling with a particular quandary (specifically, I was trying
to define 'value')_

Is that you, Mr. Pirsig?

Serious question, though... have you read Zen and The Art of Motorcycle
Maintenance?

~~~
amohr
I have and loved it - it is responsible for my regular use of the word
'gumption.' But, now that you mention it, I should go back and read it again.
When I first read it, I was much more technically oriented and have since
shifted towards a focus on writing. This is largely what caused said quandary.

When you're working on technical problems, the question of value is relatively
straight-forward: you are attempting to solve a problem by creating tools or
applying existing ones. As a writer, it's a bit more nuanced. Moreover there's
not a quick or easy way to measure that value.

If I hack up a script to grep a dataset, when it's done, I can toss the code
and nobody has to know how ugly it is - the task is done. I cut an hour of
work down to 30 seconds using 15 minutes of coding: saved time = obvious
value.

If I rewrite the copy on my landing page, I may see an increase in
conversions, but there's a strong chance that I timed that rewrite to coincide
with a marketing push. Did my new landing page with a stronger call to action
and a more approachable voice convince people to sign up? Did my popular
friend give me some twitter love? Or did I change the copy to fit a new, more
attractive design?

Basically, 'value' is an extremely elusive concept. I've asked a lot of people
about it and the resulting conversation is pretty formulaic: it starts with a
simple, poorly veiled abstraction of what the respondent does and, as I
challenge it, it morphs into this maddeningly abstract compromise.

This response was inappropriately long, I realize, but it's obviously a topic
that's been tugging on my brainstrings.

~~~
TerryMorrow
Speaking of long responses, feel free to ignore this, I just wanted to explore
your idea a bit.

If I am understanding you correctly, it sounds like in your example of re-
writing your landing page the question you're facing is "Can we measure the
value that re-writing the landing page generated" (or even "Can we measure
value"). It sounds like the elusive nature of the answer to this question is
coming from a couple of sources:

1) Incompleteness of information - you can't possibly know who's sharing links
to your site or what exactly caused every new visitor to decide to visit (was
it just x,y, or z? simple correlation?). 2) Complexity of information - even
with perfect information of the environment your site operates in - the number
of variables affecting it is so large that it would be near impossible for you
to comprehend how they all interconnect and determine the root cause of the
up-tick. 3) Inherent subjective nature of value - The new trend could be
fleeting, or even worse -- you might have changed something that increases
short term performance but may be detrimental in the long term (Reddit gold?).
This makes it hard to categorize this as good/bad/neutral.

I think the root cause of all of these issues in relation to your conundrum is
the basic desire or need to categorize information we receive about the world.
In this example, you would be attempting to categorize the rewrite as an
action that was either positively, negatively, or neutrally valuable, and at
least the above 3 limiting aspects of this information are preventing you from
easily doing so.

The two extremes of the options you'd have, given this, would be on one end to
try and minimize the limiting aspects of the information (maybe going so far
as to invent some type of analytics tool with AI that can tell you with X
probability that the action will be worth it), with the other extreme being to
throw your hands up and ignore any information related to it. I think the
question obviously isn't "which option do you choose" but rather where do you
draw the line -- where do you stop and decide that whatever else lies beyond
your current state of understanding can remain unknown?

I think in the literal sense, this is relatively easy, as we have to make
choices based on limited information every day. The real trick is in the
follow-through: refraining from judging our decision to limit ourselves (or
not) as either good or bad.

Sources: just my own thoughts and opinions...

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aantix
To those who suffer from depression, I recommend the book _The Mindful Way
Through Depression_ ( <http://amzn.to/dmoI3f> )

It's a practical guide to meditation and dealing with emotions.

~~~
gcheong
Even if you don't, it has a lot of good information and guidance on developing
mindfulness skills.

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joubert
Also check out Roger Wells' Happy to Burn: free at
[https://www.fifobooks.com/Catalog?bkid=6b430c42-5bf7-4e0d-a5...](https://www.fifobooks.com/Catalog?bkid=6b430c42-5bf7-4e0d-a53a-01db83500a49)

Roger also has a second book, Love and Imagination, which is a meditation
handbook, and a follow up of "Happy to Burn":
[https://www.fifobooks.com/Catalog?bkid=f80d82f9-2692-4ed0-8a...](https://www.fifobooks.com/Catalog?bkid=f80d82f9-2692-4ed0-8a10-99546c5ecf27)

(disclaimer: Fifobooks is my startup)

~~~
catch404
Cool site, nice and easy to use

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zephjc
I recommend _Alan Watts Teaches Meditation_ which is about an hour and a half
audio presentation:
<http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=502469226312126362#>

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KC8ZKF
I recommend Gil Fronsdal's audio series "Introduction to Meditation"

<http://www.audiodharma.org/series/1/talk/1762/>

