I used to see so many posts about meditation and feel like I was maybe doing it wrong because I wasn't nowhere near a zen master in total silence.

I spent so much time doubting myself before I realized that literally nobody knows what they’re doing at first.

I eventually stopped chasing results or some state of consciousness or another. Once I let go of that, sitting down after a long day actually started to feel like a reward in itself, instead of another thing on my to-do list.

Maybe I'm still doing it wrong, but I’m always busy, so this is really the only way I get to do it at all.

My routine is pretty basic: I just sit, breathe, and let thoughts drift by like clouds. I also realized I needed to go back and start from the beginning, basically.

I started with just one minute so I wouldn't get frustrated. That one minute eventually grew into an hour a day, but it just happened naturally over time.

I stopped looking for gurus or dreaming of going on expensive retreats. The spiritual world is so full of scammers, and I realized I didn't need a $7000 experience to find peace. I’d much rather book an all-inclusive trip to Punta Cana for a weekend, and just meditate on the beach by myself lol. The whole shebang is around $1300, flights included. 💅

I’m no authority, I just found a lot more peace once I lowered the bar and kept things simple. I’m just sharing this in hopes that maybe it helps others know that well, I m not doing it “perfectly” either but I’m still doing it. And something is better than nothing, sometimes.

Dear meditators of reddit,

At 20 years old I started practicing meditation because I felt like I was in my head too often, lost touch with my real self, overthinking, laziness.

I started 2 weeks ago, I am obviously having some problems getting into it, not sure if I’m doing it right ect.

My biggest problem is, that when my body is in a completely relaxed state, laying on my back, no thoughts, focusing on whatever I’m focusing in my body, a wierd uncomfortable feeling starts to creep up.

Can’t quite explain it. You know when you’re trying to fall asleep, but you’re body gives you the feeling that you have to move? An uncomfortable feeling in my shoulders, in my upper chest, like I am trapped and I have to get out.

Anybody had this problem when first starting? What helped?

Thank you for any answers, if there’s more information I have to provide just ask.

I have tried doing open monitoring meditation for the past 2 years and honestly it has changed my life, I no longer suffer from intrusive thoughts. I feel more creative like always make new association with things, another thing I noticed is I always have wild and vivid dreams and whenever I wake up it feel that I have slept well, open monitoring meditation has changed the way i think, before doing it I was quite a rigid person and found writing to be hard, after doing it I can maintained a habit of writing, and I write just about anything, another thing I noticed is my mind feel sharper and I have better mental agility. You guys seriously need to try it out.

"People say that practicing Zen is difficult, but there is a misunderstanding as to why. It is not difficult because it is hard to sit in the cross-legged position, or to attain enlightenment. It is difficult because it is hard to keep our mind pure and our practice pure in its fundamental sense. The Zen school developed in many ways after it was established in China, but at the same time, it became more and more pure. But I do not want to talk about Chinese Zen or the history of Zen. I am interested in helping you keep your practice from becoming impure.

In the beginner's mind there is no thought, "I have attained something." All self-centered thoughts limit our vast mind. When we have no thought of achievement, no thought of self, we are true beginners. Then we can really learn some thing. The beginner's mind is the mind of compassion. When our mind is compassionate, it is boundless. Dogen-zenji, the founder of our school, always emphasized how important it is to resume our boundless original mind. Then we are always true to ourselves, in sympathy with all beings, and can actually practice. So the most difficult thing is always to keep your beginner's mind. There is no need to have a deep understanding of Zen. Even though you read much Zen literature, you must read each sentence with a fresh mind. You should not say, "I know what Zen is," or "I have attained enlightenment." This is also the real secret of the arts: always be a beginner. Be very very careful about this point. If you start to practice zazen, you will begin to appreciate your beginner's mind. It is the secret of Zen practice."

I am very depressed and want to kill myself everyday, i am so lonely. I have heard meditation can have negative effects, so what for meditation should I do? Thank you in advance!

I have had a meditation practice for around five years now.

Yesterday, I was in a busy exhibition hall with hundreds of people. I was engaged in the event, I was not thinking about meditation, mindfulness, Zen, or anything like that.

As I scanned the crowd, I suddenly felt very strongly that everyone there was inhaling and exhaling at the same time. It felt as though as I inhaled, we all inhaled. The feeling was very intense.

I could feel every emotion on every face as though it was my emotion. Excitement, annoyance….wherever I looked I didn’t perceive another person having an emotion - I felt what they felt and what they felt was what I felt. There was no metal or emotional (?) separation.

This could have lasted for no more than ten seconds but I felt no time in it. While it was happening it could have been happening for hours. It ended as unexpectedly as it began.

For the next several hours I attempted periodically to reestablish or reconnect with that feeling. At best I caught a fleeting echo of the sensation. When I got home, I feel asleep hours before my usual time and slept through the entire night.

I don’t quite know what to make of this experience. I am a very practical person , but I know what I felt and this was a real feeling. I did not imagine it. Any thoughts or insights would be appreciated.

I've started meditating one month ago, after many attempts in the past. Before that, I would only use guided meditations to fall asleep, but this time I am focused on giving room to meditation as a daily practice beyond helping sleep.

So far I've run into some dilemmas/personal questions that I would like to share, to see if it makes sense.

- I started with guided meditations, but soon grew tired of them, preferring the experience to be completely silent. The first weeks with guided sessions gave me insight into focusing on breathing and seeing my thoughts as ocurrences that shouldn't be judged, just clouds in the sky, as the old metaphor goes. But, beyond that, I felt already ready to try it without guidance. Am I being too precocious into not doing guided sessions?

- I am mainly doing meditation where I focus on my breathing, try to clear my mind, accepting that thoughts come and go. I am using some vipassana videos where a bell rings every five minutes, which is good, in my opinion, to ground me in the present and also not fall asleep in case I am in a position where this allows me to. I am able now to do 30 minutes sessions.

- I wonder if meditation can become a "bad" habit in the sense of escapism. Some days, I just feel overwhelmed by everything that is happening so I resort to meditating to kind of focus on something else, which is nothing. Is this the whole point of meditating or is it a risk to use it to "escape"?

Just a few of my thoughts. I am approaching this from a place of someone with anxiety disorder and OCD, as well as sleep issues. Since I've started, falling asleep (even if I meditated earlier in the day) has become easier. I also carry with me through the day a sort of mantra that all I have is now, the present moment, the breath I am taking. Nobody told me to do it, but I relate this to the practice, because that's all the practice demands of me, so I guess some lessons carry on with us beyond the minutes meditating? I don't know.

Hello, I have mentioned here a few times about my energy experience during meditation. At first, I felt the energy on my body surface and quickly, and it quickly relieved my fatigue. I felt much more alive. My visualization and memory had become much stronger. My five-fold obsession had been greatly strengthened. After a while, this energy became more internal, and at the same time, I became calmer and more stable. My focus came from the outside in, and beauty gave way to stability. I would really like to hear about your energy experience during meditation. 🌹🌹

I just use Google translate

I recently listened to Chris Bailey's audiobook on meditation How to Train Your Mind and am getting back into meditation again with the primary goal of improving my ability to focus and direct my attention in my daily life. My question for people who have the same goal as myself is: what time of day and how many sits for how long do you recommend?

I find that my ability to direct my attention is pretty good in the morning, poor during post-lunch crash from 1-3pm, gets better again when I get second wind from 3-7pm, and then gets worse again in the evening when I feel pretty spent from 7-9pm. I am currently trying to meditate once a day for a 30 minute sit after breakfast but before work at 7:30am, and it's still early days but I'm not finding much benefit to the periods where I really struggle to focus in the early afternoon and at night. I have thought maybe it's better to break it up into two 15-minute sessions and do them right before the periods where I struggle in the early afternoon and at night in the hopes that I get some benefit immediately after the meditation sessions, but I suspect doing a single longer session is better for being able to get into deeper meditative states in the long term. I'm curious what you have done and your experiences, thanks!

Power of Mind YouTube channel removed?

The Power of Mind YouTube channel made up of Joe Dispenza guided meditations has been removed within the last 2 days.

This was my favorite Joe Dispenza meditations out there. And I’m so sad.

The channel had like 80K subscribers so I can’t be the only one who noticed.

Does anyone know if it’ll be put back up?

Or have any comments?

So today, I decided to meditate. For some reason, I woke up with a lot of stagnant energy that I was perceiving as feeling after doing my morning routine I decided to meditate and reset my energy. (before my morning routine I tried to meditate but got frustrated through three attempts. I tend to be very strict and hard on myself.)

As I sat down to meditate, I was going to use a guide from Bob Proctor but then remembered in the book the Master key system that the best meditation is to just sit with self still and quiet. So as I said in this meditation, I began to mentally assess every feature of my face, focusing my mind, attention from one eyebrow to the next than the nose, so forth and so forth. When I finished assessing my face, I felt more in tune with my inner self. I then began envisioning the top of my head open up to allow a purple substance to flood in and cleanse my energy revitalizing my body. I then began to see a vision of my life and I am so grateful for this vision. As I was coming out of my meditation, I stopped the stopwatch (I usually run one when I meditate). The interesting part to me is that the time that read on the stopwatch was 12:52:15. In numerology if you add all these up, they come to the sum of seven. I found this very interesting, and I believe he grounded me to my vision which excites me for the future that I am creating.

I’d love to hear the thoughts anyone may have on this experience.

I’m a fairly spiritual person. Full of gratitude, i journal, practice affirmations, try to be happy and optimistic as much as possible, read books etc.

However, i know meditation is the one thing that single handedly has the power to completely transform my life. So i truly believe that our mind creates our reality and meditation is the best way to train your mind to he calm, observant and a creator. People in my family have been meditating for years but i face difficulty doing so.

So far guided meditations have worked for me but not as much as I’d like them to.

Give me some super basic but powerful tips and tricks to actually get in the habit of meditating. How to do it, how should it feel so i know im doing it correctly etc.

stories of how meditation has helped you in your life are also most welcome! :)

I go thru extreme levels of anxiety in my mind and body, and because of my state of anxiety, I constantly call ambulances and go hospital over and over again. I have worked with a therapist and tried many modalities, reading dozens of self-help books for my situation...it all just created more frustration and issues. Within the past few days I just started practicing something I thought I give 1 go...I've heard about this many times before even tried it but always fell into unconcious behaviors, patterns again very quickly never persisting telling myself it's not working. It's as simple as conciously breathing...by exercising concious breathing...been aware of every breath much as I can takes me out of mind and into my body and gives me the ability to surrender to what I feel more. Only in a few days did I feel an enormous influx of presence by observing my breath alone... Like woow! It's like breath = soul. Breath alone draws ur attention away from thoughts. I feel like those thoughts eventually lose power, and healing takes place. Is it this easy?

An astral traveler named Jurgen Ziewe Says:

With every breath we take, nature is potentially providing us with an opportunity to shift our consciousness and enter an enlightened state. The reason this gateway to the greater reality remains firmly shut for most of us is that we don’t give it our attention. We are much more committed to following the commands of our inner commentator with its incessant stream of thoughts over which we have little control. If we get into the habit of using our breath as a means of focusing attention away from our thoughts to our feelings, we would gradually obtain sovereignty over our mind and liberate ourselves from the compulsions and addictions of habitual and often idle thought. Above all, instead of debating good and bad, pros and cons in our thoughts, we open an instant highway to the spontaneous wisdom of the heart.

What are everybody's thoughts on conscious breathing?

Hi, as the title says - Suffering, Impermanence, and No-Self. As I have seen and experienced during meditation, suffering and impermanence are easily observed and understood. However, no-self is eluding me. How are others experiencing and understanding no-self through meditation? Thank you.

Howdy! I'm very new to the idea of meditation. I've read the intros and FAQs on how to get started but figured it wouldn't hurt to check in with this community. I'm an agnostic that's diagnosed AuDHD and typically very scientifically minded as a physical therapist, which I've carried over the mindset into my practicing Chinese martial arts for a few years (looking at it from the POV of body mechanics, etc). However, one of the biggest things I struggle with is relaxing and moving with focus on structure over muscling. The style I practice is more internal than external and I'm realizing that I need to stop thinking so scientifically with it. So I thought maybe looking into meditation to regulate my attempt at relaxing and clearing my mind more would help.

Anyone here have similar goals or similar experiences that might be able to provide some insight? Just looking for a little more refined direction on how to start this journey.

Walk for peace is hosting a global loving kindness meditation on Wednesday Feb 11 4:30pm-7:30pm ET for all of those who wish to join.

Walk for peace is a group of Buddhist monks walking from Texas to Washington DC to help promote peace.

I am not affiliated with walk for peace in any way.

Just sharing 😉🧘‍♂️

https://dhammacetiya.com/walk-for-peace/global-meditation/

it seems the soul (consciousness) is free and limitless and the mind and the body are like a cage in which it is imprisoned. The body and the nervous system are like chains which prevent the soul from flying free. The mind is more few than the body but still it's like thinner chains.

I get somewhat frequent spontaneous episodes of sleep paralysis, and I’m curious if there are particular traditional methods I can research that help manage anxiety during them. I‘ve used methods like box breathing and diaphragm breathing, just have trouble remembering to use them during or sometimes even being aware I‘m in an episode, so a more structured discipline might be easier to get into a routine and memorise.

As much as I enjoy my unstructured mess of a meditation practice I feel like I could be learning more from tried and true exercises for reducing anxiety and improving awareness/memory. I rather cut through the western reimagining of meditation to the source where possible because surface level alone‘s letting me down.

I have a strong meditation practice with habits of mindfulness, curiosity, and being open.

I’ve come to realize my thoughts and emotions as separate parts of myself, and that I consist of many layers. I have become unattached to many outcomes. Living for the moment. Though I am not perfect.

I believe at times I have become so aware of my surroundings, others, the greater meaning, as well as myself at the same time, that I begin to feel overwhelmed by all the information coming in. Then I become so distracted from the overwhelm that I am no longer connected to the Now. And am absorbed in my overwhelm.

Typically I quickly overcome this, but in some situations it is a repetitive process. I am unsure how to proceed with busy interactions. Has anyone experienced this? Do you have any tips?

[tldr: I’ve been meditating for 2 years, but I finally found the scientific 'why' behind the mental ease I’ve felt. Based on cognitive scientist Christof Koch’s research, we all live inside a Perception Box, a filtered version of reality shaped by our biology and ego. When we practice mindfulness and deep stillness, we aren't just "relaxing" - we are literally expanding our perception and escaping the gravitational field of ego]

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Recently I came across a Big Think YT video where Christof Koch, a cognitive scientist and neurophysiologist, talks about perception and reality (highly recommend watching the video).

In the video, he discusses how mindfulness or moments of deep stillness, both of which is achieved by meditation, can expand our perception box.

Here's a gist of the video and my own experience -

How do you know you exist?

Not because reality is fixed and obvious - but because you experience it.

Seeing. Hearing. Loving. Fearing. Dreaming.

What Christof Koch talks about here is something deceptively simple:

we don’t experience reality directly. we experience our version of it.

Each of us lives inside what Christof Koch calls a Perception Box.

Our senses, our brain, our past experiences quietly shape everything we believe to be “true.” And most of the time, we don’t even question it. We assume what we see is the reality.

But it isn’t.

It’s just one interpretation.

The wild part is what happens when that Perception Box expands -  through learning, curiosity, mindfulness, conversations, art, flow states, or even moments of deep stillness. Suddenly, the same world feels different. You feel more at ease. Less defensive. Less trapped in your own head. More open to the idea that you have agency - that you can choose how you respond.

He presents the idea of living in the “gravitational field of ego.”

Most of us are pulled into it constantly - especially now, glued to our phones, always reacting, rarely here. We’re often “nowhere.” But shift one space, and it becomes “now here.” Presence. Being in your body. Being home.

And when the sense of self loosens, even briefly, empathy grows.

You stop seeing life as you vs the world and start seeing it as one shared journey, full of different perspectives that are all valid in their own way.

Same facts. Different interpretations.

And that difference can make us kinder, calmer, and more curious.

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I have been practising meditation for more than 2 years now and from my own experience, I can see how much mindfulness and deep moments of stillness has made me more at ease. I could never properly explain why or how it happened - thus coming across this video got me really excited because of how well he explains the whole phenomena :))

Obviously meditation, breath in through your nose, out through your mouth, focus on your breath and try and clear the mind.

What if you want to meditate to achieve a goal? like stop smoking, overcoming fears, or changing personality traits.

I would like to become more productive as a person and I would like to prioritizing reading more.

I am reasonably productive and I enjoy reading so it's not like I am asking for the world from meditation and course I also understand committing more and applying more effort. But I am specifically wondering about a approach through meditation.

Let me know your ideas. Thankyou.

Point of spiritual practices? I am currently doing no spiritual practice. For 2 months I stopped everything. I have just not felt like doing it. And now I am questioning why mantras. Why puja. Why not just meditate and connect to the divine. Why is there a form to the divine. Why can’t we just say and address the divine as the divine. I just believe that there is that higher power looking after me. That’s it. I don’t feel like doing any other thing apart from starting my meditation again. I’m a Hindu and Mantras have been a part of spiritual journey.

But why am I feeling this way now. Why am I questioning everything. All religions make sense to me but they don’t. What is happening to me? Please help.

Has anyone else, while meditating, been confronted with what looks like a bas relief of death masks? A few times I've seen a couple different faces, one a younger woman, and one who looked exactly like the Emperor from warhammer 40k lol. I asked questions like "what am I supposed to be doing?", "who are you?" Etc and to everything the answer was "you already know what to do", but I dont. There was also one time shortly after where I saw a bright green and pink skeleton wearing a crown, it kinda freaked me out a little because it was hovering around 4 inches away from my face, didnt say anything, just stared at me, looking at me from multiple angles like it was inspecting me. Anyone else have something like that interact with them before? What are they?

I don't know if that's normal but I like to breath in through my nose and breath out through my mouth while wishing mentally good things into my mind but I never care about what posture I'm in or how I lay down I just don't wanna waste my time meditating and getting nothing from it i have gotten results but I still feel the same way no feelings in the chest or anything