Meditation for a beginner?

[Matteftw]

Hi all, I’m interested in starting to get into the habit of meditating and iv’e studied the subject for a while, but I have some hard time fully understanding it. When reading about it It’s obvious that meditation gives you tons of benefits, but I think my problem is sort of understanding when I start feeling the differences and what to look for. Because it feels so vague to get all these benefits from just controlling your thoughts for a brief period of time. And the goal - ? What am I to look for, to feel for, and what is considered as an achievement? The answers I find to these questions are all very loose-ish and vague and I’m not really sure what to make of it all! Kind of hard to explain but I guess I need to narrow it down and make it easier for me in the beginning. I think it’s natural for humans to seek immediate respone and to have clear goals in order to maintain interest and motivation. And for me when it comes to meditation i have some hard time seeing this i guess. My main goal with meditation except for all these claimed benefits are directly linked towards lucid dreaming and dream recall. That’s my main target, that is what I want to improve. So how would you set up a proper schedule that is easy to stick with, and would it be best to just go with the breathing-meditation? Like keeping your thoughts on one specific thing? I just need some clarification and a push in my arse i guess. And if you do have any must-read books just throw em at me! Thanks a bunch in advance, and if you by any chance disn’t fully understand my jibberish, i blame you not. I’ll try to sort em out for you better in that case. Yours Mattias

[nautilus]

Hi, I'm by no means an expert on meditation, more of a beginner really, but I've done enough to experience some benefits. If you're anything like me, my main suggestion would be to put the books down for the time being and just try it. I mean it, put the books down and back away slowly with your hands in the air Think of it like a low pressure experiment on yourself, you're just observing what happens without having too many expectations for a particular result. You might find that the concepts around meditation gradually make more sense the more personal experience you get under your belt - at that point more reading might become useful again. It's okay if meditation seems like a really vague concept at first. It's a new way of going about things. Maybe the best I can do in terms of providing more detail is to share a little of my own experience in case my beginner perspective is useful. I used to try to meditate once in a blue moon only to feel discouraged because I was "absolutely terrible at it". I was just doing a simple focus on your breathing exercise, where you allow thoughts to flow in and out of your mind, observe them but don't hang onto them or engage with them. I couldn't even go a full minute - I timed it - without forgetting about my breathing and getting completely dragged away by a random train of thought. Oddly I don't have any trouble with focus when it comes to working on more complex tasks, ex. I could work on a difficult math problem for 2 hours straight without getting distracted from it. So this discovery that I couldn't focus on my breathing was pretty disconcerting and frustrating. In any case, one day it hit me that worrying about not being good at meditation didn't make any sense. The fact that I had a mind that was constantly and stubbornly active, problem solving and analyzing, meant that I could stand to benefit more from the practice than someone who has a natural talent for quieting their mind. That was they key for me; I stopped putting so much pressure on myself to achieve a specific goal and started just observing. Observed benefits to date: During meditation sessions, usually 5-15 minutes focusing on breathing, I discovered just how habitually active my mind really is and noticed patterns of thought that I wasn't even consciously aware of. I noticed what types of thoughts were most likely to "pull me in". Gradually I started to feel more "space" in between the thoughts, but more importantly I felt more space between myself and the thoughts, like I'm not immediately and automatically invested in them. The biggest change in my daily life has been having more and more experiences where I start to think about something then quickly disengage from it by choice, or start to get upset or anxious about something only to suddenly realize that it's just a story I'm telling myself in my head and that I can choose whether or not I want to believe it. It doesn't feel like effort when this happens, it just feels like happening to be more aware of what's going on in my own mind. In terms of getting more lucid dreams, perhaps someone with more experience meditating with that intention can provide more feedback (I've taken a long break from actively lucid dreaming and I'm only recently getting back into it). Even so, I imagine just getting a little more "space" between yourself and your thoughts could be enough to get lucid more often. It tends to break the habit of automatically accepting things as fact just because they're there.