“Stress less, Accomplish More” by Emily Fletcher

“We don’t meditate to get good at meditating, we meditate to get good at life”

This literally runs contrary to thousands of years of meditation practice. The vedic religions didn’t teach meditation as a tool to achieve or accomplish something external. Neither did the buddhists, nor the taoists after them.

I vaguely detest this neoliberal new-age marketplace version of meditation. The ridiculous apps. The books like the one you’ve apparently read. The idea that all it is is some sort of breathing exercise to get you to file more efficiently at the office or whatever. What you’re proposing is a thoroughly modern & western concept.

Of course there is a slight clarification needed about my initial remark. It’s never been that meditation is used “to get good at meditating”, but rather that meditation is used simply to meditate. It is, necessarily, it’s own conclusion. It is the practice simply of observing the fact that observation is occurring. Once you bring thought, expectation, reward, or attachment into the equation you’ve already begun wasting your own time.

If you have a goal in mind with it, and that goal is to “get good at life”, you’d be better served walking out into the woods and staring at some birds. Because clearly all you want is to therapeutically sit for a while. There’s no need to bring arbitrary faux-“meditation” techniques into the situation.

/r/Meditation Thread