[Method] No Bullshit guide to meditation | If you keep getting stuck in your head all the fkn time, it's time you start taking control. Meditation is easily the beast way to regain control of your mind and stay grounded brothers

I figure this is a good place to write this.

I've been meditating for about 3 years now, was someone who was very anxious and always stuck in my head. I am very introverted and also tend to overthink a ton.

Let me say that meditation is being commercialized and whored out like Yoga has been. There is great benefit in developing concentration through awareness of the breath, but "mindfulness" meditation (which is just a meaningless catch all term now) originally was referring more to a traditional practice like vipassana in which you choose an object to focus on primarily and note any distractions that arise.

The gist is that there is a very common and predictable pattern of "insights" that occur to people after practicing this technique long enough and earnestly enough. These insights are not some hippy dippy shit, and can depending on the individual, lead to great joy and then great awareness of suffering. There is a reason that buddhism has a value system to some extent, it is because certain actions after developing awareness almost unanimously lead to suffering of some kind.

What I want to mention is that if you treat meditation as simply a concentration exercise that is fine, but if you actually want utilize the technique properly there must be some understanding that to treat this as just another linear activity with progression and benefits will only hinder you. It is counter intuitive.

That being said, the benefits of meditating is essentially learning to disassociate. In practice, we come to understand that we are NOT our thoughts, and that our thoughts are just that--thoughts. They lack any substance and are not "real". What happens to a person is that thoughts arise, and we have many conditioned responses to thoughts built up from our lifetime. In fact, much of our behavior is a reaction to what we feel and think. The real question is, where do these thoughts and feeling come from? You can get lost in the logic of it and trying to deduce that, but really, they come from nowhere.

If you develop focus and stability enough, you may see that while meditating you can observe precisely WHEN a thought arises. Simple, I know. But typically people do not notice that, by the time many people notice a thought they have already been taken under its spell, its story.

So, if you focus on the breath, on breathing in...and out, and really just observe all the little sensations, you are building focus. Now, a thought comes and distracts you, many times it pulls you, but this time you catch it, you notice it arising from nothing and observe the thought without adding to it...then it just...goes away. You could have latched on to it and dwelled on it distracting you in great amounts, but you didn't.

Meditation is like this, you observe phenomena arising and passing and come to wholly understand that if you can observe these things without being involved in them, then who are you really? We tend to put great stock into our thoughts and beliefs, and so they control us. Every time you find yourself distracted and return to the breath or some other object, you are developing a habit of not immediately grasping at what arises. This grasping in truth is the problem, because when you grasp unconsciously you make foolish mistakes that only hurt you due to ignorance.

If you suddenly feel a welling of anger, and ordinarily you would grasp the anger immediately and act on it. Why? Because you identify with it. You think you are the anger. But you're not, that's just an emotion that arose as a reaction to another thing. If you are practiced you will learn to--as a matter of habit from hours of just observing and letting go, immediately observe the anger and see that it is just a thing passing through. Once you observe anger it has no hold on you, because you do not feel that it relates to you. You are not angry, you feel angry.

So at the very least, meditation is a practice in which you learn to observe all the tiny things going on that you ordinarily do not notice, but have immense impact on your behaviors and actions. When you observe the breath you build focus, and when you notice a distraction butting in you develop awareness to consciously choose to focus on one thing without neglecting that the other occurred. Eventually the technique becomes routine and you can just let go at a point and observe the stream of phenomena while relatively untethered to it.