What do you think about mindfulness

I’m quite normal and while I don’t find those words triggering, they are an absolute turn-off.

seeker. My anxiety effects my ability to be successful in this practice. A (white) noise maker has helped me in times of distress. Simply to block out unwanted noise and the psychotic symptoms of which I think you are speaking.

Thank you for advice. And you're right, I also find listening to nature sounds helpful. Mainly birds, rain and ocean however ocean sometimes makes me feel like I'm drowning under the wawes and I'm going to die. However I try to stay with it and hold on until it goes away.
I was mostly talking about my fear of spirituality. I very much need to believe in something helpful and safe but I'm not able to. I've discussed this in the spirituality forum several times. I will not allow myself to see any kind of spirituality or mysticism in MF because that would ruin all psychological and physical benefits for me. Obsessive thinking about religion is very bad for me.

There are a lot of free guided relaxation/meditations and outdoor sounds on youtube etc that have nothing to do with religion (I am absolutely not religious in any way) or spirituality as such.

The suggestion of mindfulness is a trigger for me at this stage in my life. To be brief, I sincerely practiced the Buddhist Vipassana, (Insight, before mindfulness became a buzzword for it) for many years. I thought I was in good practice and doing something beneficial for myself. Today I'm not so sure.

If not suggest this applies to all, and respect and support everyone's personal journey. For me, years of practice at feeling everything in the moment and letting it pass almost semed to have conditioned me to not actually deal with anything in a processing sense. It became easy to justify not holding on to anything and I really was using it as a way to avoid everything unknowingly.

Today, I understand how much of a determent it was and am having to essentially figure out how to be in the moment and almost learn how to even express what I'm feeling again.

I don't mean to sound cynical, because I'm not. I just think that it's important to keep your eyes open to the large picture, and if you're using something like mindfulness, be sure you're balancing things with good therapy or outlet to actually process things as well.

Thank you so much for this insight! I've read about something similar in the past and I wonder how often does this happen? May I ask how long did you practise daily? I'm interested in how much of this kind of meditation caused that side effect?


Thank you. Yes, I've tried those in the past. But I don t feel safe with any kind of imagination or visualisation. I only prefer paying attention to my physical senses. I've lived in an imaginary fantasy world for basically my whole life. I have/had an imaginary identity and spend hours daily pretending that I live a life of someone else. I'm absolutely not interested in building new fantasy worlds where I can escape.

In fact, I was so dissociated from reality that my first attempts at paying proper attention to my physical surroundings caused a strong depersonalisation and vertigo.

What I mean is... I looked functional to other people. I finished uni and I've never been unemployed. However for me, these activities were on the absolute periphery of my life. The centre of my attention and energy were fantasy, religion and useless philosophy :/

I have never found the guided meditation or relaxation exercises I listen to create a fantasy world - more like just talking through relaxing each muscle group. Also, I often just find the tone of voice relaxing without really listening to the content. But I realize they don't work for everyone.

I know what you mean stopdog. I tried that, too. However just when I search for such relaxations or meditations they often contain what I consider extremely triggering images (auras, white light, referrences to universe. Or creepy music.) I know there are probably some that would be trigger-free and safe for me, but until I would find them I'd surely see the triggering ones too. When I listen to the ones with muscle relaxation, sometimes they move too quickly or too slowly and then I feel out of control because I can't do what I need at the moment.


When I'm in the mood for a relaxing video I watch ASMR, those are helpful to me.

I'm generally a very weird person :/

I find just focusing on breathing, noticing what passes through the mind and letting it go, the simplest and purest form of meditation.

There are lots of breathing techniques you can try (in through the nose, out through the mouth or whatever) but my most recent try was box breathing. Used by the Navy SEALS and I thought it might be tough enough for me. j/k

This is just an image with the ocean in the background that explains the simple technique. I think it was helpful to me because after you exhale, you hold your breath for 5 seconds (last leg of the "box") and this helps you relax when the body thinks it needs to panic because you haven't inhaled yet.

box breathing - Saferbrowser Yahoo Image Search Results

I have been into mindfulness and meditation for >15 years now. It was very useful in the beginning to find a compatible teacher/guide and style. For me it was Alan Wallace, whose interests, style and personality clicks with me very well:
Alan Wallace – Author, teacher, lecturer

Alan is a very intelligent and creative buddhist scholar / meditation teacher who practices worldwide. He wrote a few really good books and organizes various classes and retreats - I have attended a few. I do not consider myself a buddhist or a follower of any particular tradition and do not care for the esoteric aspects much, but I find the teachings and values in many far Eastern systems very appealing, the way Alan approaches it especially. It is much more than just relaxation, breathing techniques etc and has some quite deep introspective and spiritual elements that are highly compatible with my generally secular views. He also has videos and meditation audios available online.

I am not always consistent with my practice and could definitely improve in that area but it's been an important part of my life. Simple mindfulness techniques can be very useful in every area really, a lot of it is about self-awareness and awareness of the larger nature of reality, which are essential for me. It has definitely contributed to my development much more than therapy ever has. Also very helpful for emotional regulation and not being a slave to ever-changing emotional states.

I spent well over 6 yr practicing under the guidance of a Buddhist monk in a Theravada temple setting. I conclude that the world of a monk would be very different than mine, and the approach he taught was maybe too simplified in that it unintentionally drew me into not really addressing the past or present trauma. It may have been a very different outcome had I also been in therapy during that time. My error was that I used that practice as my therapy. If I were a monk living a monastetic existence and not exposed to the things lay people are, then I could see where my practice alone would have had the effect I was going for.

I have come to really enjoy mindfulness exercises although it took me a really long time to get comfortable with that. Now I really like it and practise mindfulness many many times a day in all manner of situations... any situation really. I have never been very connected to my body or even the present, but always dissociating and living in the future (worries) or the past (flashbacks and memories). Now mindfulness helps me in SO many ways... calming anxiety, helping younger parts feel grounded in the present and helping them learn the past is over, abuse is never going to happen again, and just being aware of my body and feeling comfortable living in it.

Mindfulness to me is like... a lifechanger.

I also dislike the word and I definitely don't actively try to practice "mindfulness" but I try to find ways to act in my daily life so that would make me centered, so that I would know who I have and what I'm doing and for what.

For me, my default operating mode in the past has been (figuratively) to project into some far away point then try to reach that point in one hop (to make sure that I actually get there) and then start to figure out how to fill in the gap that was supposed to be instead of the hop - small steps following each other logically and consistently moving into certain direction. It is typically impossible to do that backwards when I am in this new state because I have sort of reached the goal but I don't feel that I have approached in naturally, I'm not immersed with it and thus it creates anxiety and confusion and not knowing how to proceed (other than to project the next far away point and trying to hop there).

It's a confusing description but anyway I've been trying to not to do these hops anymore but rather search from myself what I'd like to do at this point and in which direction I'd like to go. The consequences have been that my general anxiety levels have gone down dramatically.

As far as the body goes, I have found some yoga practices to be doable for me. Some time ago I totally disliked yoga, I tried it but couldn't do it because it was too boring and slow and I hate meditation (my totally useless father is a "new age guru" and meditated at home daily when I was a child).

Then about a year ago I tried a more physically demanding yoga and I discovered that for doing that I really have to concentrate on my body and I don't have to worry about letting go of thoughts and other meditative stuff. The stretching pauses are good moments to try to relax a bit from the otherwise demanding physical exercise and the physical exercise itself forces me to pay attention to my body. So that's my mindfulness.

I find the description of these hops quite interesting - would you mind elaborating a bit more? Or maybe describe an example in more detail? Because reading it, my first thought was that I tend to do more that slower, systematic, logical and strategical goals setting and working towards. But sometimes I feel this strategy is exactly what slows down some of my processes that could potentially progress faster but it is exactly my anxiety that typically prevents me from jumping too far in one step, to skip intermediate steps, to cut corners in ways I see from many other people. It mostly affects my work and there are certainly many benefits to this natural strategical processing and moving forward. I am not saying what I tend to do is always (or even most often) linear process but I do keenly feel the contrast with many people I know who prefer to make bigger leaps or are less aware of the many elements and stages leading up to a decision or change. I am not even sure we are talking about the same thing but this thought occurred to me reading your post. Also, can you truly reach a goal in a satisfying and stable way when skipping many steps of the process? This is a question I often ask other people as well and they give me all sorts of answers from simple yes to that it often backfires later and in sum they waste more time because they need to start over and actually do the detailed processing and troubleshooting. I let myself influenced by some people like that in the past to cut corners and pretty much always regretted it later, if for nothing else, because it is unnatural for me and I never feel comfortable (again, my anxiety keeps me aware and can't even enjoy the result fully).