Tynan I love your writing and your site, and I weigh in here with all due respect. I'm currently studying to teach meditation, and dude it sounds like you had some really bad instruction at vipassana. The biggest myth we try to dispel at my meditation classes is the idea that you are supposed to (or would ever be able to) extinguish thought. NOBODY doesn't have thoughts -meditation just helps you realize that all your thoughts aren't necessarily right, require action, or are even yours. It's big stuff.

Here's a really better explanation than the one it sounds like you got:
1. Take a comfortable seat. Whatever that means - cross-legged, on a chair, laying down.

2. Focus your attention on where you most acutely feel the breath in your body - nostrils, abdomen, throat, wherever.

3. Just breathe normally, and when you notice that your attention has left the place where you were focusing it on the breath (i.e. wandered into thought, which it will within seconds), return the attention to the breath.

4. Lather rinse repeat - your attention will follow off on some thought every 1, 2, or 5 seconds, and just keep returning it to the breath. It's powerful mojo muscle training that feels sometimes great, sometimes challenging, sometimes neutral.

True Vipassana welcomes each thought as an opportunity to practice. What are you practicing? Developing the awareness that is the "attention" that notices that your attention has wandered - that's the capital-A Attention that helps you realize what you really are, who you really are, and how much of what you think you are is really just a hodge-podge of conditioning, habit, and cultural impulse.

No matter how bad-ass we are at how many things, without getting into the core shit of what we're really about (which is only possible through a regular daily practice) you're functioning from a script that isn't entirely your own.

What you describe at your party sounds more like a cool and useful exercise in partner dialogue , but it isn't meditation.

Meditation is about simply developing awareness of your greatest self, friendliness with your mind, and removing layers of invisible crap to reveal even more of the amazingness of who you and the people around you are.

That's a great post, intriguing idea. I think I'll try it!

Interesting post - I was initially very shocked!

After previously reading
about your experiences in the Vipassana retreat and then saying how you said you never really understood meditation, and then came the dialogue between Luke and Minda. Minda is Australian slang in my city for 'intellectually disabled', so I thought you were having a dig at it! (No offence intended at all).

But this type of meditation sounds very interesting!

Dude, I will most definitely have to give this a try.

And as someone who enjoys freestyling also, I think there's also another link to meditation: the more you can quiet your mind, the easier it becomes.

When I freestyle, I find that I always choke up when my mind is cluttered. And 99% of the thoughts cluttering my mind are along the lines of, "Dude, you're gonna fuck up! People are gonna think you're a joke! You're gonna make a fool of yourself!"

The times I can freestyle the best are always when I can quiet those voices, clear my head out, and just flow. (Oh, and just like anything else, practice makes a huge difference also)

I've heard it said that when a man of great action is ready, he will naturally turn inward and become meditative. I see this happening for guys like you, Tim Ferriss and others who constantly are taking conscious action.

~Mike

I find this interesting, because as others have said, Vipassana is *not* about extinguishing thought. There are forms of meditation that are (Zen, for example, includes a lot of pure concentration practice), but in Vipassana, the concentration is just meant to be developed to be strong enough to help you avoid *following* a chain of thoughts, not preventing them from arising in the first place.

What you experienced with this form of pair meditation is actually pretty consistent with vipassana - it's a technique called mental noting, that is used in vipassana and others in part exactly to hone concentration by acting as ways of "shortcircuiting" the thought chain before it takes control.

Vipassana is a very different experience from concentration meditation - give it another go, but instead of a retreat, go to urbanharma.org and download "Mindfulness in Plain English" (free e-book; also available in print version from Amazon) and Gil Fronsdal's "Introduction to Meditation" podcasts (the latter includes a number of ca. 10 minute long guided meditation sessions covering a number of aspects of vipassana).

Just remember: Thoughts during vipassana meditation does not mean you're failing; just nudge your attention back to your breath whenever you notice you got caught up in some of them.

On the contrary, thoughts are part of the value of vipassana - you will frequently "observe" thoughts arising that will be surprising and teach you new things about yourself and about how your subconscious controls or influences your decisions in way you're rarely aware of when following along your thought chains.

Over time they will be fewer and your mind will be more still, but thoughts will still come and go.

i would disagree with reading eckhardt tolle. i tried to read it and it annoyed the crap out of me because everything he was saying was either stolen from buddhism or jesus or some other place, but he wasn't citing it as being ancient wisdom, he was claiming it for his own, which irked me. probably the best practical guide for meditation i've ever read is "a gradual awakening" by stephen levine.

one of my meditation teachers, who primarily does theravaden meditation, gave me an analogy that i find useful to hold in my mind when i'm trying to meditate: your conscious mind, which is the one you're trying to access when you're trying to meditate and be mindful (it's the "still place" that observes thoughts, but does not, itself, have thoughts) and the "monkey mind," which runs around in circles having thoughts and making lists and daydreaming and planning and trying to do the right thing all the time. for a long time, i quasi-meditated and held my monkey mind still by imagining me holding an actual monkey in my arms while i was sitting. at least instead of having a million thoughts, i was able to hold the one picture in my mind, and meditated on that. and the first thing i discovered was just how *exhausted* my monkey mind was. monkey mind isn't meant to be left in charge, monkey mind is supposed to be an assistant. i had been living in my monkey mind for so long that when i gave her a break, the first thing i did was start crying (not sure how i stuck through that, really--every single time i sat on the cushion for six months, i started crying halfway through. everyone talks about meditating for relaxation, but sometimes before you can get to that, you have to wade through a lot of pain). you never stop having thoughts, but after awhile, you feel like an observer of the thoughts, rather than an experiencer.

on another note, tynan, yr "LIKE THIS POST?" banner is, on chrome at least, not hiding correctly. i click on "hide" or "never show again," and the banner disappears, but i get bumped back to the top of the page and when i scroll down it pops up again. just fyi.