[Al-Khwarizmi]

Is this not a form of meditation? I've never been able to keep a meditation habit, but my understanding is that meditation techniques often feature closing your eyes and focusing on breathing, body parts or some other irrelevant thing, it sounds like staring at a wall would serve the same purpose.

[reg_dunlop]

As someone who's maintained a meditation practice since 2013, this is definitely meditation.

And by "maintain a practice", I mean it's more like something I return to with frequency and less a daily compulsion.

Focusing on the breathe or ambient sounds is "easy", and is precisely the reason meditation is seemingly difficult. The mind craves more than simplicity; for some this occurs after a few seconds, for others after a few minutes...it all depends on the day. Learning to observe when the mind wanders is one part of the practice. Labelling the quality of thought that caused the wandering (planning, worrying, visualizing, replaying, etc)and returning to the simpler act of focus on breathe or sounds is another part of the practice.

This article is very much the author discovering some variation of meditation; if they feel the need to "invent" something and share it in a blog post...then here's hoping it promotes more people to give it a shot and maybe it'll lead to at least one person developing a new practice for themselves.

[smeg_it]

I was taught basic breathing meditation from a Vietnamese nun; but I'm not an expert. There are so many variations that I don't understand. I don't know much about Zen or it's take on meditation or mindfulness. On meditation, I know when I do it right, but have trouble helping people learn. I have trouble when I most need it (highly stressed), as I have the most trouble taking the time to relax without feeling too guilty.

As far as "inventing". I know what you (@reg_dunlop) mean but I don't see too much real harm. My father was into a book that talked about "not thinking". It was just a re-framing of part of mindfulness. If it helps... I'm not going to fuss about it.

As far as eyes. I was taught to not close my eyes completely but most of the way. I saw a documentary that explored Tibetan monks and their meditation. From what I recall, one of the monks said to use the eyelids as adjustable window blinds(or a valve... I'm paraphrasing to my understanding of what he was saying) so that if they got a bit sleepy they would open them more.

Personally, I'm a big believer in mindfulness but I do have some questions on some finer points. I might even aspire to teach it, but need further help myself first. Let me know of any resources that helped you (anyone)

[krunck]

A meditation practice(in the Soto Zen tradition) over the course of five years changed my life. Daily 40m of sitting facing a wall watching the breath and returning the mind to the present moment when it strays. No judgement. Just returning the mind to the present, again, and again, and again.... The BS starts to drop away. No enlightenment moments. But later, away from the practice you have more patience, more acceptance, more little moments of joy, less fear.

[smeg_it]

I've been doing it on and off for years. Trouble is my "career" is dead. I think I'm technically "middle" aged, but really over "middle" of life. It's harder to relax the mind and body right now. When I do it "right", I feel more relaxed on both fronts. My body doesn't sit for hours or anything but 15-30 is my norm when it works. It's hard for me to continue, if I hadn't relaxed by say 5 min. I think mine is basically the same except I try and return to paying attention to my breathing when my mind wonders. I know my breathing is in the "present"; so this might just be a semantic difference. *I don't like the word "concentration" because, I think, it throws people off (so that's why I didn't use it)

[dijksterhuis]

> When I do it "right"

i get the scare quote usage. but still feel like it’s a good time to point out.

there’s no right zazen. there’s no wrong zazen. there’s just zazen. sitting down and taking what comes. that’s all we’re doing. sitting down and getting quieter.

emphasis on the -er in quieter.

30 minutes of “crap” zazen is probably the most rewarding zazen. i just don’t appreciate it at the time.

something that helped me recently is just giving myself a day off. it’s okay. i’ll come back to it. as someone said to me recently — the worst way of maintaining a practice is to force it / control it.

[dijksterhuis]

something was bugging me so i’m adding a second comment.

i often end up crying during zazen. i’ve done it for a couple of years. i was never really sure why. it was just a thing. i cried for 5 mins after about 20 mins and then just got back on with the last 5 mins.

i (eventually) sat with an online group and they talked after sitting once about how zazen and zen aren’t there to deal with mental health issues. that’s what doctors, therapy etc are for. i had been definitely trying to “fix” some stuff that can’t be fixed through the practice for a while there.

this is why having a group or a teacher to practice with is important. i can get stuck in believing my own “crap” because i can’t see outside my own “crap”.

then again, sometimes “crap” zazen is just “crap” zazen. but having a group or a teacher helps with it — at least you’ll know you’re not the only one struggling! xD

[samplifier]

Oh this reminds me of The way of Zen by Alan Watts.

[post-it]

The worse it feels, the more it's helping. It means you're surfacing and dismissing thoughts that would otherwise plague you when you're trying to get things done.

[randomNumber7]

This is something I want to try. Does the time where the mind stays in the present before it strays away increase when you practice this?

[whtrbt]

Yes.

[praptak]

> Let me know of any resources that helped you (anyone)

For me it was "The Mind Illuminated" by Culadasa. A meditation textbook which tells us what to practice, how to practice and why. Especially useful if you need the finer points.

[reg_dunlop]

Yeah, I think the actual "invention" I originally attributed to the author of the blog post should be attributed to the YouTuber. But if this version of meditation is helpful for the YouTuber and/or the blogger, then fantastic. That's 2 people who are benefiting from it.

I'm reluctant to say more about my own mindfulness practice; I feel the finer points about how or when to meditate are open to interpretation. Anyone can be as superficial or dogmatic as they'd like when it comes to choosing a practice, and how they adhere to it.

The point, for me, isn't strict adherence; It's both simpler and more interesting to let go of the preconceived notions of attempting to achieve something.

One thing I will say: If I believe I can't meditate for 5 minutes, I meditate for 15. This makes me more open and receptive in life when I find myself saying "....I should meditate".

[mlboss]

The meditation I practice is based on non-duality techniques. Mind needs a problem to solve so ask the question "Where am I ?". Anything that you can see both physically and mentally is not you. You are not the table, the chair, your hands, your legs, your face, your sensations, your feeling, your thoughts, your emotions. Neti-Neti (not this, not this).

You are something beyond all this. Try find it.

By going through the mind goes in a trance unable to think any thoughts. I find it better approach compared to try to disciplining the mind.

[SeriousM]

For my clients I put it that way: The mind is like a search engine, it can find everything. So don't ask "what did I wrong" but instead "how can I progress".

Usually that's an eye opener.

[wonnage]

Aside from sleepiness, closing your eyes shut also tends to make daydreaming worse.

[microtonal]

There is nothing wrong with that though. At some point, observation comes back. When practicing regularly, that happens more quickly.

I should pick up practice again. I feel very lucky having discovered Vipassana meditation when I was 19 and having had some great teachers throughout my twenties. It helped me accept parts of my youth that were not great or safe. In hindsight, going to a psychologist would have been a good addition, but that never occurred to early to mid 20s me, but in lieu of that Vipassa helped me a lot.

[bitexploder]

Staring does something interesting. It does slowly reduce brain waves, but it is harder to hit theta with eyes open. And it works very differently initially. With eyes closed meditation where we, say, follow the breath we use the salience network to slowly chill the DMN for a bit. When you stare at a wall the salience network is what deactivates letting the DMN rip to try and figure what predictions are useful. But it runs out of steam and slowly the state converges with a traditional meditative state. With one important difference: your visual field is still active. Traditional meditation lets you hit theta brain waves. Eyes open is harder to hit theta with but you can definitely hit alpha waves.

So I agree it is meditation, but its quality and mechanism is interesting and different by a bit. It does make me wonder. When we traditionally meditate we grow the salience network (physically). Wall staring trains the brain to simply not seek attention in the first place. Wall staring doesn't strengthen the Salience Network's ability to act as a manager. It recalibrates the Salience Network's threshold for alarm. It trains the dACC to stop firing when nothing is happening.

So both are useful. And provide different neural wiring and myelination.

[reg_dunlop]

I'm curious what is meant by

> ...recalibrates the Salience Network's threshold for alarm.

Superficial googling reveals superficial information about the SN.

And more specifically, i'm curious what sort of physiological signals could verify recalibration.

[bitexploder]

Basic a high priority stimulus arrives. It is actually fascinating how this get sorted out, but the salience network say, gets a signal like, user stubbed toe, massive spike of cortisol along with pain signals filtering in from that part of the brain that manages them. When your brain gets bored it is effectively lowering its threshold to trigger "do something" <time wasters, phone scroll, etc.>. The brain is just wired up to constantly process predictive activity. By staring at a whole it stops registering stillness as a thing to activate this process of hunting for stimulative activity. This effectively lets your brain be more calm with no stimulation as it has learned this is not a "threat" state.

Being a modern human is hard. We were not really built for our life post industrial revolution. We evolved to always be ready for threats. The fact that our brains have adapted so well to modern life is amazing and why we have gotten to where we have as a species vs. others. However, it has costs. Our brains our wired to run the DMN loop non stop. So you can do two things. With traditional meditation you make your salience network stronger. Every time your DMN interrupts your meditation and you flex your salience network muscle so to speak you are training it to shift back to the lower DMN activity state. And with wall staring you are changing the brains calibration of what no stimulation means. Both contribute synergistically based on my understanding. (contribute to being less distractible).

[ammmir]

staring at a wall is basically the zen practice of shikantaza [1], except you’re not staring, it’s more of an eyes half closed yet alert gaze. you don’t do anything, not even counting the breath. you just sit, that’s the entire practice. in my experience, the more you intellectualize it, the more difficult it becomes!

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shikantaza

[ganymedes]

It is, but just sitting can be a little deceiving in its brutal simplicity and I think some thought has to be put on the technique. I would often would just sit and think, not just sit. I wasted a lot of time sitting and thinking I am meditating. It's more like "just sit and be extremely watchful, alert". I also found it useful to have a timer nearby and evaluating how slow the time passes. The emptier the mind, the slower the passing of time. It also helps to tap into feeling the body, I would find that it's completely impossible for me to focus, if I do not have a good sense on feeling my body. Posture also plays a very important role. It's something to note that the average modern day person has posture that would take weeks or even months of focused practice to fix, especially one browsing this site. It's just sitting, but there are many things involved. * If you tell a beginner to just sit, they will drown in their own thoughts. Something more practical is, stare at the timer and try to not think, just perceive each second passing by, do not think, see how long can you last without a single thought **. Shikantaza is basically willful suppression of the thought process and pretty much the opposite of what the wikipedia article describes as a "similar technique" - "Do Nothing Meditation".

As for the article, I am actually doing 1 - 2 min shikantaza regularly while working. I'm staring at an empty screen. I do it multiple times per hour regardless if I feel focused or not.

* Don't try to fix the posture while attempting shikantaza.

** Obviously something even more practical for a beginner is to gain focus by counting breaths and then breath awareness, before trying the most difficult type of zazen. I'm just describing what would be a way for someone that does not practice to imagine what correct shikantaza feels like.

[lanstin]

>The emptier the mind, the slower the passing of time.

In a good way :) like the present moment opening up into pure stillness/infinity - slightly different than sitting and having the thought pop up "It must be 20 minutes now" and then glancing at the incense to see its just the beginning :)

I personally wondered if the growth in general goodness over the last 100 years has been at least partly because some jobs, like driving, involve more practice at evenly suspended attention; good driving is at a surface level like sitting; maybe the uptick in general wickedness recently is because we are distrupting our evenly suspended attention thru networked addictive devices. Just idle speculation of course.

[ErigmolCt]

Maybe the useful framing is: just don't optimize the break

[teeray]

Reminds me of the “Wallfacers” in Cixin Liu’s “The Dark Forest.” I believe the term was derived from that meditative practice you refer to.

[twilo]

Precisely

[raincom]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trāṭaka

[suyash]

Very powerful but takes much practice

[lanstin]

There's two aspects to meditation: focus and insight. Focusing the attention on one specific thing, whether a statue, flame, the breath, a mantra, increases the ability to direct focus. When focus is reasonably steady and one relaxes into just being a bit, then the insights about how what we think of our unitary self is a composite set of conditions and how composite sets of conditions constantly change, and so on, start to affect our understanding of our body/mind and life and all that. This practice sound like a focus based practice, which are useful and give rise to all sorts of enjoyable mental states (and can indeed be very instrumentally useful for managing anxiety or increasing performance or that sort of thing), but not really the same as loosening attachment to the ups and downs of each moment.

[swah]

How so? Compared to the mindfulness focus-on-breath that we hear about?

[throwforfeds]

> Is this not a form of meditation?

It could be, but it depends on what you're cultivating. If you're spaced out, day dreaming, then you're practicing distraction. Meditation is practicing the opposite of distraction, to become aware of the mind's true state.

[FrustratedMonky]

I predict this thread will now spiral into a dozen different definitions of meditation.

[IAmBroom]

And Zen.

You are correct, in just 4 hours.

[SeriousM]

No wonder despite the increasing AI pricing. People must find a way to handle the situation.

[timacles]

it almost is but meditation, is done with more intent.

In Zen Buddhism for example you are always striving to increase awareness, by constantly monitoring your internal monologue, pulling yourself back from day dreaming, expanding from focus on the breath to all near by sensation and phenomena.

True meditation, in the zen sense, is an order of magnitude more difficult to do consistently, and takes intense willpower.

[CPLX]

I am a practicing Zen Buddhist and I wouldn’t agree with this description, at least not in my experience and the community that I’ve participated in.

Specifically I would say the concepts of “striving” and “intent” aren’t ones I would use.

What it actually is takes a little more to pin down (famously) but I would consider the concept of surrender to be more applicable. In fact I would say the absence of striving would be a good sign you’re on the right track.

I would consider staring at a wall without intent to be completely compatible with Zen practice.

[timacles]

Ah nice to meet you!

This is where Zen gets tricky and most people drop out.

All spoken words have duality and as a Zen practitioner I’m sure you know the ultimate goal is non duality, so you can never say it directly

But to your point, yes non - striving is the ultimate goal also, but you cannot ever aspire to it without striving in the first place. Being a zen practitioner is all about understanding nuance, so some level of striving is necessary.

The most famous zen trap is trying to not try, which is inescapable and also impossible to explain to a layman. The discipline I speak of is being committed to walking that fine line of trying to induce not trying… for years.

Staring at walls is compatible yes. But true zen is a difficult discipline. We have to be inclusive though, so yea 5 minutes of mindfulness is good if it works for them

[dijksterhuis]

i’m not sure but they may be speaking about rinzai zen. watched a few bits and bobs about rinzai and some of the practices are kinda of that “willpower” ilk. dunno, never practiced it, not my vibe.

they definitely were not describing soto-zen tho, that’s for sure.

edit — i find it almost koan-esque that there’s two schools referred to as “zen”, both of which generally dislike the label “zen”, both of which have very different practices and methods.

[cogman10]

> it almost is but meditation, is done with more intent.

> True meditation, in the zen sense, is an order of magnitude more difficult to do consistently, and takes intense willpower.

There are different forms of meditation and the one with the most evidence is also the easiest to do, mindfulness [1].

Very little intent is needed to get the majority of the benefits from meditation. I don't know that zen meditation offers more benefits, perhaps it does. But I do know that the "fake" forms of meditation are still beneficial.

[1] https://www.apa.org/topics/mindfulness/meditation

[timacles]

They are beneficial on a superficial scale. It says a lot about the state of society when quietly sitting for 5 minute can bring about positive effects instantly

But I’m speaking about the discipline of meditation on the scale of years in order to change your character

[adolph]

> True meditation, . . . takes intense willpower.

This seems counterintuitive. Maybe I'm doing it wrong but in my newbie practice it seems to be like resistance or cardiovascular training where there is effort in the moment and a sense of one's limits and a sense of unfolding and gains toward more depth and weight and duration. Like the gym it can be disappointing to lose ground after a break but there is also the contentment of regaining strength similar to rereading a familiar book and seeing it in new light.

There have been times that required more purposeful scheduling and preparation that is my default mode and times when whatever was in my head made me just actively hate sitting there and fail to realize that sensation as an ephemeral state. I accepted the door was closed that day and came back the next to pick up at the stopping point.

[timacles]

There’s sitting quietly here and there and there is the practice and discipline of meditation.

You’re on the right track, keep it up for 5-10 years and you will understand.

The willpower aspect is maintaining a discipline, for years. With no motivation.

[FrustratedMonky]

But also. Is there really a 'true zen'?

I have heard of zen described as 'just sit down and shut up' and stare at a wall. With no goal, no purpose.

[quantumink]

This! The famous Zen Koan of the Master, the Professor, and the overfilled tea cup illustrates this beautifully... I'd highly recommend checking it out! (Overall, the Blue Cliff record is a treasure trove of Koans, for anyone keen on the theme comes highly recommended)

The Zen approach, more than any other, seems to precisely emphasize the purity of 'sit down and shut up'. Shikantaza - literally means 'simply sitting'. It fundamentally involves no staring at walls, no koan to grasp and struggle over, even following your breath is not really a part of it... It really, really is 'just' sitting, in every systemic sense. A practice which has no clear goal or intent, instead focused on removing anything that could act as such, act as any tether over awareness. Awareness untethered, unbounded, past distinction.

Lao Tzu comes to mind... he said it much more succinctly: Wei - Wu Wei (do - not doing). The action of effortlessly being adrift with the flow, the action of surrender of your 'self' and the infinite schemes/designs/narratives that it builds (as someone in the discussion above here aptly suggested). Another quote comes to mind from elsewhere: 'Let go your earthly tether, enter the void, empty and become wind.'

[antiframe]

No need to gate keep meditation. The wall stare does have intent: to increase focus and calm the mind.

[lanstin]

The effort to still the mind moves the mind so much. Zen also teaches one to stop fiddling with the mind/body so things unfold into a natural smoothness. One may have stupid thoughts filling the monologue without becoming upset and without having the current moment obscured - busy monologue is just more color like the clouds above or the ants around.

[saimiam]

After reading your comment, I was reminded of my first and last visit to a zen meditation center where we had to meditate by staring at a wall sitting on some sort special cushion designed for this sort of meditation.

I think your parallel is spot on!

[TacticalCoder]

> ... but my understanding is that meditation techniques often feature closing your eyes and focusing on breathing, body parts or some other irrelevant thing

It's more like the opposite. If you think about your breathing, you'll be "controlling" it (which funnily enough is not the case when you don't think about it). Meditation is the opposite: you have to be in a state where you can think about your breathing and yet you're not controlling it.

I can tell that, from doing it since a long time and from talking to people about it, even many people who practice meditation cannot reach that state (thinking about breathing without controlling it).

And you also really don't focus on body parts: you "disconnect" them all until you don't even feel them anymore.

And you also shouldn't focus on irrelevant things: you have to focus on absolutely nothing.

There are many different techniques to "pass on through to the other side": some visualize thoughts ("words" or the "internal monologue") as if it was a sea. The more thoughts, the more hectic the sea (and you want it all calm: no words, no internal monologue). Some imagine a lotus flower opening and when the last leaf opens, you can be in. Some imagine diving.

I meditate on and off since a long time. There are benefits, for example I definitely can lower the intensity of headaches (or at least how I perceive the pain). What I tell my friends is that Buddhist monks are actually on serious trips beating any psychedelic drug that does exist.

[jeffscottwise]

Yes indeed! These are (or are related to) common meditation techniques. The proper way to understand the practice of meditation is "training your attention." There are many, many ways to do this, but the most direct form is to put your attention on some object and keep returning it to that object over and over again. This builds steadiness of attention (concentration) and has some nice side effects of clarifying the object of attention as well as keeping attention balanced relative to other objects (equanimity). Ideally, the object of attention is non-conceptual. Thoughts and emotions are the main objects that are constantly distorting and interrupting our attention, and ultimately the crux of the "training" is in finding harmonious ways to use/manage/embody them.

Unfortunately, it's very hard to understand how training attention in this manner can provoke dramatic improvements in attitude, happiness, and even conventional life goals. This is where a lot of the work in modern Buddhism is being done, and I personally believe we need to integrate these techniques into our everyday systems and ways of living. Otherwise, it's perfectly reasonable to dismiss them since good, objective evidence of their efficacy is hard to come by.

Perhaps a useful framing for readers on here is in reprogramming your self. We often accept that we cannot change or even that we want to change. By training our attention, we can focus it on the way the mind itself functions, and this eventually gives us the power to rewrite or rework core parts of our selves. The body contains the source code to our perception of reality, and when we can truly let go we find that we are free to be the person we want, and it is in fact our destiny.

[dec0dedab0de]

It sounds exactly like meditation, but a boiled down, modern technique that doesn't use the word.

[klik99]

Literally regular Zen practice, in fact where I used to go we always called it “sitting and staring at the wall”, to remove any woo associations or any idea that you’re doing something grand.

I remember sitting in an intro session and the teacher asked everyone for what they expected - one of the guys there was a dude bro who was obviously there because his girlfriend dragged him. He said all the fancy things about reaching higher consciousness, like he thought the whole thing was stupid but he was playing along. Then after sitting for 15 minutes he was more into it than his GF. He clearly had an experience and excitedly struggled to find the words to describe it. I honestly think the less you expect out of sitting, the more likely you are to get something, weirdly.

[aselimov3]

I don’t practice meditation so I couldn’t tell you. I do find that when I do it, there are two regimes.

In the first regime the time goes somewhat quickly and it isn’t as difficult. I call this the zoning out regime. There usually hits a sudden point where zoning out is no longer quite as easy. This is probably the meditative regime where I have to be more mindful about keeping my mind blank.

I set a timer just to train my will, but I don’t prioritize spending a ton of time in that second regime. Just anecdotally, once I’m past the zoning out regime my focus is usually back.

[vidarh]

A creation myth of Zen meditation and Shaolin Kung Fu claims that Bodhidharma meditated for 9 years facing the temple wall, and eventually caused the wall to crack.

[nickvec]

Yep. You don’t have to have to have your eyes closed to meditate. You can keep them open to focus on the flame of a candle or something else… in this case, a wall!

[dwd]

It's maybe more along the lines of some of the mindfulness protocols, which are a form of meditation.

There's one where you are at rest and slowly shift the focus of your gaze from near to middle distance to far away, and back.

It's supposed to be a grounding exercise to bring your mind back to a state of rest and just observing.

[brandonmenc]

Blanking out is afaik the exact opposite of "mindfulness".

This is almost exactly like Transcendental Meditation, even down the to the length of time of ~20 minutes.

[feb012025]

I've never liked the way meditation makes me feel, but I really like doing "guided relaxation". To an extent that I think they have to be different somehow, even though a lot of people would probably say they're the same thing.

I feel like staring at walls is similar.

[throwforfeds]

> I've never liked the way meditation makes me feel

This is common. A true meditation practice brings up a lot of stuff, from general body aches and pains to deep emotional things you may be unconsciously suppressing. With time and persistence, and with the right teacher, it becomes liberating though.

[feb012025]

I don't think that's it. I've never been one to shy away from any difficult emotional experiences I have (maybe I'm wrong though who knows)

I just end up feeling emotionally "flat" after doing it. Which sometimes feels like that's the goal, but I don't like the feeling

[throwforfeds]

Ah, I see, that's also very common. Taken all the way it can develop into nihilism, which is one of the two extreme views in Buddhism [1]. I fell into that early on and abandoned my practice for many years. I found that once I found the Mahayana teachings on emptiness [2] and then the stories of the Vajrayana masters [3] the practice became joyful again and not bogged down by some narrow view of what meditation is.

[1] https://www.rigpawiki.org/index.php?title=Two_extremes

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C5%9A%C5%ABnyat%C4%81 and particularly as formulated in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prajnaparamita

[3] for example Saraha: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saraha and Tilopa: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tilopa

[SeriousM]

Did you noticed the Sri Yantra pattern in the Prajnaparamita article?

https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Yantra

[jakeydus]

How would you describe the difference between them?

[jimbokun]

The Three Body Problem has the Wallfacer project, named after a form of Buddhist meditation.

[erelong]

I'd consider them to be pretty dramatically different; meditation can be associated with deliberate focus and a kind of religious devotion, while just staring at a wall can be the absence of focusing or any kind of defined practice

[robertclaus]

I was taught to aim for "mind blanking" when meditating, so does seem like it!

[hk__2]

This is what I do when trying to sleep, and often wonder what’s the difference with meditation.

[Cthulhu_]

I think there's many forms of meditation in that regard, some intentional, some cultural, some spiritual. Going to church on sunday can be considered a moment of meditation, no tech around etc.

[ErigmolCt]

Yep, I think it's basically meditation with the branding stripped off

[distantsounds]

is meditation just not a form of staring at a wall? i've never been able to keep a staring at a wall habit, but my understanding that staring at a wall often features opening your eyes and focusing on breathing, body parts or some other irrelevant thing, it sounds like meditation would serve the same purpose.

[rainmaking]

Definitely.

Interesting twist- notice dark shapes in your color spectrum for a while, then switch to light. Trippy.

[pstuart]

That immediately came to mind (no pun intended but still welcomed).

[perfmode]

zazen is often practiced eyes open facing a wall

[dr_kiszonka]

Look up "wall-gazing meditation".

[Graziano_M]

One of the top comments on the video is "Bro accidentally discovered meditation"

[dkenyser]

Yes. I swear every day I see a "new" fad targeted at fixing one's attention and every time they're doing so much mental gymnastics to not use the word "meditation."

[strken]

The problem with the word meditation is that, if this counts as meditation, then I meditate every time I take a long train trip or go for a walk.

That might actually be true! But there are people who claim they cry, or experience infinite bliss, or that meditation gave them long lasting mental health problems and is dangerous. When I've emptied my mind and let the trees and houses fly past on train trips, I've neither cried nor experienced infinite bliss nor broken down mentally.

[kombookcha]

Meditation, like exercise, can be a lot of things.

Choosing a brief walk can be exercise, or a brisk walk that's a little longer - maybe doing some forms of housework can be exercise. But exercise can also be running marathons, swimming laps, playing street hockey, dancing in your kitchen, skateboarding or messing around on the monkey bars. Those would all make you feel your body in various ways, both during and after the fact.

I do think your empty mind train rides can be meditation. The fact that much more intense or demanding forms of practice exists does not invalidate that.

(To belabour the metaphor a bit, regarding potential dangers - if somebody has a knee injury, some forms of exercise will be safer for them than others. Take care of yourself!)

[strken]

If someone wrote about how taking a twenty minute walk in nature made them more productive, I don't think anyone would reply 'I swear every day I see a "new" fad targeted at fixing one's mood and every time they're doing so much mental gymnastics to not use the word "exercise."'

Who cares if they're doing exercise or not? The person who takes walks presumably knows it's a form of exercise. They're not talking about the other forms, they may not be able to do Crossfit or go skiing, and they might not feel confident expressing opinions about the entirety of all exercise, but they definitely know that walking works for them.

[kombookcha]

Yeah, I think that's probably correct.

I do somewhat see the value in promoting specific, accessible meditative practices without necessarily using the word meditation for it, simply because it can be needlessly intimidating and put some people off because they come carrying a number of assumptions.

Maybe that same principle does also apply to exercise - some people will do it by accident and have a good time, but still balk at idea of doing capital E Exercise as a distinct activity in itself. Sometimes it really is just a mindset thing.

[sbretz3]

this is known as trataka meditation in the yogic tradition. trataka falls under the umbrella of kriya (purification) techniques which is why it helps with focus and intention