WellbeingSeeker

Is this the same as positive affirmations?

My educated guess is that you "change your values" by changing your habits. So from that point of view, you would need to focus your energy and effort on replacing old habits with new habits. And since changing habits is not a trivial task (otherwise everybody would have no problems leading healthy lifestyles), I guess you would need to learn and put into practice as many habit hacks and tricks to make the habit replacement process as easy as possible.

According to state-of-the-art Psychology research, what are the most successful techniques to cope with / overcome the emotional aversiveness experienced when one is faced with tasks outside one's comfort zone (which usually leads to procrastinating on those tasks)?

Is it possible for busy people to have a very healthy diet? Are there best practices to make healthy eating an easy, quick and efficient process, even for people with very busy and tight schedules?

Is this true even for frozen food? Say, if I meal prep for 6 days, and I put meals for days 1-4 in the fridge and freeze meals for days 5-6, would the latter lose their nutritional value (and how much so)? In fact, what if I freeze all meals right away, and move them from the freezer to the fridge one by one the night before?

I see. So is this pot much more efficient than conventional pots? And, are you proposing preparing and freezing most foods I'll need during the week on Sunday? Is this what @Charlotte calls "batch cooking"? And a last question: if I want to have a variety of different, healthy meals during the week (instead of just one meal for 6 days in a row), how long would it take to cook all that on Sunday?

Can you elaborate a little more? Do you mean drinking smoothies all day long? A smoothie-only based diet? And what ingredients should I make the the smoothies with?

Hi everyone, I'm new to this forums. Straight to the point: I'm looking to design a meditation plan for both the short term and the long term. There are several skills I'm interested in developing. For example, there are certain addictions and bad habits I want to overcome, so I want to develop more willpower, self-control and self-discipline, and I want to develop more equanimity as well, since this is the ability to remain still and at ease in the presence of sensations, urges, cravings, which sounds like a perfect skill to master in order to overcome any addiction. Additionally, I consider myself a very cold person when it comes to bonding with other people. I just cannot feel warm-heartedness within, so I tend to rely heavily on logic and cost-benefit reasoning to handle most of my social interactions. Therefore, I'm also interested in developing social-emotional skills such as loving-kindness, compassion and sympathetic joy (here I'm clearly borrowing terms from the Buddhist lore, where they are also known as metta, karuna and mudita, respectively). Developing all of these skills already seems like quite a lot of work, so I prefer to limit the discussion to these skills for now. If I want to develop all of these skills, how should I design a good meditation plan for both the short term and the long term? I know there is a plethora of meditation techniques out there. To name a few: Yoga, Kriya, Zazen, Vipassana, Mindfulness (of the breath, of the sounds, of the thoughts, body scans, etc.), Calm Abiding, Metta-bhavana, Karuna, Mudita, etc. There are also Positive Affirmations, "New-Age style" Guided Visualizations, Hypnosis. And much, much more .... Given this overwhelming amount of options, and given the fact that I am an average lay person with a relatively busy schedule who cannot afford trying out so many techniques randomly and expecting fair results from each one ... I would really appreciate any advice to help me design a well-thought meditation plan that I could stick to, say, for 1 year (short term), but also any insights that could help me have a clearer "big picture" of how I should approach meditation for the many years to come (long term) will be very appreciated as well.

So what is your point? Are you saying that I should focus on dropping off the sense of "I" instead? If that is the case, what meditation plan would you recommend and why?

Do you have any links to guided "mindfulness with labeling" meditations and guided "do nothing" meditations? I usually do better with guided meditations in which the instructor guides the process but without talking too much, like once every few minutes is fine. I don't mind if the guided meditations last more than 40 minutes, I'm Ok with that. I attended a Goenka's 10-day Vipassana retreat in which we had to meditate more than 10 hours a day so I can withstand longer sits now According to @ajasatya, "kindness, compassion, patience... all of these virtues show up when you're happy with this moment right now. when we practice "do nothing" all the reasons behind our discontentment become crystal clear", in other words, they are supposedly a natural byproduct of "do nothing". What do you @Space think about this? Besides, it would very interesting to know more about your experience using yoga, psychedelics and energy transmissions to develop love and compassion. Why do you think they are the fastest way? What about other techniques such as Metta meditation and Karuna meditation? Do you have any experience with those?

Usually you use strong determination sitting to enhance a certain meditation technique, meaning that given a certain meditation technique X, you enhance X by doing it with strong determination sitting. Which technique do you usually practice with strong determination sitting? How often and for how long do you do it? What type of Vipassana technique are you specifically referring to? For instance, I attended a Goenka's 10-day Vipassana retreat, where they teach you to observe your breath and your bodily sensations through iterative body scans (no observations of thoughts or emotions, just physical sensations). However, I did a little research and it turns out there are different types of Vipassana, check out this link: https://www.quora.com/In-meditation-what-are-the-different-types-of-Vipassana-What-are-the-big-differences-in-philosophy-or-practice/answer/Anh-Minh-Do

I'm certainly open to that possibility. Would you mind elaborating a bit more?

Please, feel free to share those links, they are very welcomed. By the way, according to @ajasatya the "do-nothing" technique is formally known as Zazen. I've heard of the existence of this technique for a long time but have never taken the time to understand it. So I just did a quick search and based on what I read it seems that this technique requires you to sit in the full-lotus posture with strong determination and remain aware of your breath as your anchor and let all other sensations happen in the background. Is that correct?

I see, so basically you advocate Zazen meditation. That's cool. However, before blindly committing myself to this technique for 6 months, I would really appreciate a more thorough discussion of the different meditation and mind training techniques out there, so that I can make a more informed decision. I would really appreciate for other readers to join the discussion and share their thoughts. Why Zazen? Why not Kriya Yoga? Why not Vipassana? Why not [insert any other meditation / mind training technique here]?

@ajasatya, what is the formal name of this "do nothing" meditation? Is this the only meditation technique you practice? What frequency (minutes/hours a day) would you recommend to experience palpable results in a reasonable time?

@ajasatya, could you elaborate a little more? For example, what is your take on the many meditation techniques I enumerated in my first post? Moreover, how would "doing nothing" help me develop loving-kindness and compassion?