The info i keep coming into is to just breathe in a rhythmic fashion and focus all your attention on your breath, trying to not think of anything other than yoru breathing. Is that the entire jist of meditation, just refocus thoughts on breathing?
What benefits would that bring i can’t figure it out. maybe it would center you by taking your mind off problems but aside from that i can’t figure out how/why its supposed to work for stress/anxiety.
I taught meditation in an intro psychology class during the lesson on stress and relaxation. Its New Age connotations aside, it’s a relaxation method, under which you de-stress by physically removing yourself from sources of stress and mentally putting distance between your stresses and yourself.
You sort of have the gist of it. You have to sit in a quiet and preferably dark room, away from distractions like the TV or phone. You can either focus on your breathing or a nonsensically single syllable (“Om”, if you want). Your breathing should be calmed and casual, not deliberately timed. If any thoughts come to mind, you gently push them from your mind and tell yourself you’ll think about it later. The first time you do it it’s not going to accomplish much because you don’t know what’s “supposed” to happen, but with time and practice, you learn how to sit quietly and calm yourself down. It’s not supposed to “center” anything or help you achieve nirvana or nonsense like that.
In Zen Buddhist meditation, you sit still and let your mind become empty of thoughts. The purpose of it is to sit still and let your mind become empty of thoughts.
Well…it also feels good to meditate ( once you get the hang of it), and supposedly lowers blood pressure and stress. Plus, it’s more interesting than TV, but less interesting than the straight dope, set your priorities where you will.
If someone starts talking to you about enlightenment or chi or chakras or psychic powers, put a protective hand on your wallet and walk calmly away.
Basically, I suspect that it’s good for the brain–a sort of isometric exercise of it. Talk of “stilling” or “emptying” and such are best recognized as imprecise descriptions of what it can often subjectively feel like, not any kind of literal thing–the brain is only “still” when it’s dead, after all. But the act of physically relaxed, alert maintenance of conscious awareness is an active process in the old gray matter as any other conscious activity is–engaging in it strengthens/reinforces the physical neural connections needed for relaxed awareness.
This chicken-and-eggs with stress reduction in general. Stress is really interesting stuff; in the short-term, at healthy levels, it sharpens up attention, boosts reaction times, etc.; animals have stress because the capacity to have stress is a winning evolutionary development. Stress reactions are pretty handy if you know that if you don’t pay attention to what the hell you’re doing, a tiger’s going to eat you. It’s not so handy when there’s a deadline bearing down on a writing project, or you’re stuck in a traffic jam, or you’re being misunderstood on some internet board, or or or.
But long-term stress wears out the machinery; memory and recall gets negatively impacted, overall processing speed drops, etc. That just compounds the civilization-problems of natural stress reactions just plain not being useful in many modern situations that trigger them.
At its core, meditation’s a good technique for some people to combat that. If your brain’s been trained over repeated regular “just sitting” that being consciously aware of your breathing is correlated with lowering-stress and maintained awareness both, it carries over to a certain degree.
Doesn’t let you rip apart vending machines with your third eye, though, or win the lottery. Can’t have everything.
Apparently you can reach a similar de-stressed level of peace if you, for example, read a pleasant book, or sit out in the garden with a nice cool drink, or have a nap, or be given a massage.
I guess it would depend on the kind of person you are, and what sort of things would make you feel relaxed.
This type of approach is called shikantaza and is proposed by the Soto school of Zen. In Rinzai Zen, different, koan-based exercises are used.
One of the teachers I studied with stressed that zazen is not a form of meditation. “Meditation” is associated with relaxation, witness some answers in this thread. However, relaxation is most certainly not the goal of zazen, though to a certain extent it is a requirement. Stress and tension will harm your practice of zazen more than zazen will help those problems.
Don’t think for one moment that letting your mind clear is easy. True shikantaza is extremely difficult to achieve and even more difficult to sustain. We’re talking years of daily practice. It is also incredibly draining mentally and physically.
If you’re really curious about what goes in your brain when you practice Zen, take a look at Zen and the Brain, a massive book, heavy on cites and such written by a neurologist.