I took a 'mindfulness' course a couple of years back, and the biggest benefit for me was learning to be grateful. It sounds riduclous typing it out but there it is.
Practicing gratitude daily, e.g. giving myself reasons to be thankful for my lot in life is 1) really easy to do, and 2) takes about 5 minutes.
The rest of it felt like new-age hippy trash, if I'm completely honest.
The "new-age hippy trash" impression kept me away for years. What finally got me to try was "Mindfulness in Plain English" which is available both for free and paid versions, and Gil Fronsdals audio recordings (his introductory series), which are also available for free.
They're both more like "how to" guides than spiritual, and mention Buddhism or other practices only in passing (both have much more explicitly spiritual material too for those who want that), and Fronsdal jokes about the "B-word".
What I get out of it varies, going from just 5-15 minutes of calm and relaxation to multi-hour deeper meditation, to tumultuous sessions where I get no calm but all kinds of issues or ideas force themselves to the surface. I feel I benefit from all of it, but it's a method or a tool for me, not spiritual.
I just realized that "hippie", "hip", "hep" make more sense, for the area in context, than the disgraceful label K-Z introduced.
'Hippie' was used for those who wanted to be "hip", i.e. "up-to-date", because "aware". Originally, the term was used in the underground and was 'hep'.
Now, it is pretty clear from the sound why 'hep' can be related to "awareness". And it would make more sense, in reference to that "zone", than using terms that refer to the "mind".
Ugh this is so dismissive. I'm glad learning gratitude helped you. How would you feel if, instead, I said "your gratitude practice is actually new age hippy trash"?
Different people derive benefit from different things. Why not just leave it at, "the other stuff didn't work for me"?
I would prefer to live in a kinder world. I explicitly appealed to the parent's likely desires for same. If you prefer to live in a world where people are casual dicks to one another, then I guess there's nothing to take away from my original comment.
And I would prefer to live in a world where people can say what they mean, without having to censor or sugarcoat their speech because someone else prefers not to hear their words.
Different people have different preferences. Can't you just leave it at that? Why do you have to go around telling people not to say stuff you dislike in a public forum?
If you truly believe what you just wrote, why did you write it? Didn't you, in effect, dislike what I said and tell me not to say it?
The whole point of forums is to productively disagree and hopefully learn something. It's not sugar coating to avoid being casually mean or dismissive -- it's advancing the very reason we're supposedly here.
Original attacked a concept, you attacked an individual. Don't equate the two.
The first person who starts to attack an individual will be told to stop, that is the only reasonable way to make people stop attacking individuals so we can argue freely.
I don't normally get into this type of conversation, and I don't mean to pile-on either, but I think that the target of the dismissiveness is a distinction worth pointing out. The post that you originally replied to was dismissive about some mindfulness techniques. You made it more personal, accusing the poster of being dismissive. This is directed at a person. It's less abstract, and their more likely to cause offence or annoyance.
My general rule is that I try to have thicker skin when it comes to assaults on ideas, and be careful not to offend persons.
> How would you feel if, instead, I said "your gratitude practice is actually new age hippy trash"?
Directing the putdown "trash" to an idea and presenting it as a subjective opinion ("The rest of it felt like new-age hippy trash") is quite different to applying the putdown "trash" to a person and presenting it as a fact ("your gratitude practice is actually new age hippy trash").
"Felt like" means "It feels like this to me, your experience may be different"
while
"is actually" means "This is objective fact, regardless of how I feel about it".
It's the difference between saying "that idea is idiotic" and saying "you are idiotic".
I did the same, and found a different subset of techniques useful, and the rest new-age nonsense.
There are studies showing mindfulness works, but they've only tested the whole smorgasbord of techniques vs. placebo. I guess it would cost a lot more to test each one individually.
The origin of this wave of academical interest comes from that: a few mates in Harward - including K-Z, who butchered the concept introducing the absurd naming which uses the reverse of the concept of 'mind' - were intrigued by suggestions from the Orient. Events such as the fall into disgrace of Leary have been relevant (creating difficulties to said wave as a reaction - a general reaction with the crisis of its parent "hipster" wave).
It seems to me that the popular (American) practice of gratitude is just a substitute for Christianity, filtered out not to mention any deities explicitly, but still containing references to them implicitly.
I consider universe a random and chaotic place. In that worldview, there is nobody to be grateful/thankful to, so the practice of gratitude doesn't make sense.
Effectively infinite light at my fingertips (most of humanity couldn't do much when it got dark).
The world's knowledge.
So much food that I have to monitor how much I eat so I don't get too fat.
For having a loving family, friends.
For being given the opportunity to go to university.
For having a career that pays well.
That's just on the top of my head, but there's many more reasons to be grateful. That kind of thing. I have some physical disabilities, but reminding myself of the good things I do have grounds me, makes me realise all the things I used to stress about aren't really that important.
I try to do the same, and I find a good time to do it is as soon as I wake up in the morning, before I even get out of bed. It puts me in the right frame of mind to tackle the day.
I don't believe in a "creator/higher being" if that's what you're getting at, with that in mind - as I said above - the other people I'm grateful for are my family and my friends.
Thinking about it more, I suppose I'm also grateful for the individuals in this world who have had an incredible impact on this world. e.g. Jonas Salk, the guy who invented penecillin, etc.
I just really dislike people framing it as "practicing gratitude". I guess it comes from the childhood feelings of being thankful to one's parents for stuff, which is then generalized to "any feeling that resembles that feeling".
I can accept "consciously acknowledge positive things in your life" and I can see why it would be beneficial to one's mental health. Depression and anxiety are often caused/worsened by focusing on the negative aspects of life.
I am making this question because I am trying to understand what exactly people mean when they say things. In this case, I'm trying to understand the full context of the phrase practicing gratitude.
A definition of the word "gratitude" I've found online is:
the quality of being thankful; readiness to show appreciation for and to return kindness
Which implies that someone has shown kindness to us, and we're feeling grateful for their kindness.
So when you say "I'm grateful for being alive", to whom exactly are you grateful? Who exactly has shown you kindness by letting you be alive? More generally, who exactly has shown you kindness by giving you everything good that you're grateful for?
The only entity that could possibly be responsible for everything is a hypothetical omnipotent entity - a god. So outside the religious frame of mind, the answer is "nobody", and the word "gratitude" here means something else than it usually means when used in everyday context. In that case, I'd like to know the exact meaning in this special case.
>I consider universe a random and chaotic place. In that worldview, there is nobody to be grateful/thankful to, so the practice of gratitude doesn't make sense.
Grateful for the outcome of the cosmic dice roll.
Or really just relief that things aren't a lot worse.
The dictionary definition isn't the only meaning of a word.
Practicing gratitude daily, e.g. giving myself reasons to be thankful for my lot in life is 1) really easy to do, and 2) takes about 5 minutes.
The rest of it felt like new-age hippy trash, if I'm completely honest.