HappyMans
Others above and below have pointed out a few great points about “meditation” that I find relevant:
- It serves to introduce a delay between stimulus and action
- It gives you the time to discover subconscious thoughts that you haven’t noticed prior that may be causing negative emotions like anxiety
I personally meditate by taking the time to think extensively about things people say to me and things I feel when I’m not in some urgent situation. Also, my extremely supportive and mindful wife and therapist are highly involved in this and I’d never have found success without them. I have a history of anger and anxiety issues. The mindfulness I describe has been my ticket out of the personal impulsive hell I built into my early 30s. Others discovered their ticket via meditation of the breathing, etc.
For me, meditation is sitting at my desk, sometimes idly and sometimes not, contemplating everything I feel, why I feel it, if it’s valid, what others feel, what my goals are (most important part), what my next steps toward those goals are (other most important part), etc.
Hope this is insightful. I think meditation is a very weakly defined term in the US.
Edit: and not come out as human paste
Do you think it's a waste of my time to be learning this in 2021?
I love articles like this that break it down. The biggest challenges so far have been getting the assembler to output the correct format (ie, 16 bit real mode) and learning inline assembler in C (and getting GCC to output the correct format).