You made a good point. I didn't have any particular motive for meditating at that time except that I did it because a lot of people in my native Theravada Buddhist country encourages everyone to do that (to attain Nirvana).
I meditated to find Nirvana back then. But as I grew older, I realize that Nirvana is interpreted very differently even among Buddhist scholars, and thus is a relative/personal term. Nowadays, my definition for Nirvana is just to have a day without a lot of bad karma (hate, jealousy, anger, fear, anxiety) in my head. If I don't meet that daily goal, that's okay as well. For that, I find myself not needing to meditate and just need to be aware to distract my mind if I catch it in a state of bad karma. Maybe meditation will help some people catch their mind of dealing with bad karma, and maybe that approach might yield better results than me simply trying to be more self-aware and be more stoic. :)
Certainly. Question is, now that you are at your current age, don't you feel that if you practice meditation now, it would you bring more benefits compared to back then?
That seems like a very different question than the point of the comment that I replied to. In my short reply, I made it about you and me, but my point was that lots of kids have real "conflict or hardship". If I told you about the stuff that was going on in my house at that age and replaced "family" with "roommates" and "school" with "work", you'd probably think of it as pretty rough. My life is much easier now at 31.
But enough about me. About 1 in 7 US children are food insecure [1] and will go hungry at some point this year. One in 9 girls and 1 in 53 boys under the age of 18 experience sexual abuse or assault at the hands of an adult.[2] There is a lot of pain experienced by the world, and there's no age cutoff.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hunger_in_the_United_States#Ch...
[2]David Finkelhor, Anne Shattuck, Heather A. Turner, & Sherry L. Hamby, The Lifetime Prevalence of Child Sexual Abuse and Sexual Assault Assessed in Late Adolescence, 55 Journal of Adolescent Health 329, 329-333 (2014)
I meditated to find Nirvana back then. But as I grew older, I realize that Nirvana is interpreted very differently even among Buddhist scholars, and thus is a relative/personal term. Nowadays, my definition for Nirvana is just to have a day without a lot of bad karma (hate, jealousy, anger, fear, anxiety) in my head. If I don't meet that daily goal, that's okay as well. For that, I find myself not needing to meditate and just need to be aware to distract my mind if I catch it in a state of bad karma. Maybe meditation will help some people catch their mind of dealing with bad karma, and maybe that approach might yield better results than me simply trying to be more self-aware and be more stoic. :)