Yesterday there was another discipline / self help thread, some user recommended joining a monastery. Of course I wont do that, but I will do it practically. So no internet at all, no food binges, and no TV or vidya. I will just study and read throughout the day.
Is this a good plan? I really need to buckle down and focus for the mcat in a few months but I can't do it yet.
I can do it for one or two days but then I just slip back. I also can't seem to finish what I start at all.
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Better reconsider that if you're coming from a non-trad background.
You must exercise.
Ive started meditating to help cultivate mindfullness so I can fully focus when studying. Start meditating then no phone, tv or anything else during study time. Do 50mins on 10 mins off. You can do it op
Pretty trad
Exercise is the same as studying. I can work hard for one or two days but then I relapse.
If I fully commit I can study for 3 to 4 hours but the situation I'm in requires me to do the hardworking chad 10-12 hours.
...
I've done that for the same reason. I went into a silent vipassanna meditation camp in Thailand for 14 days. It gives you insight into being that no literature can replace. Also it gives you the ability for the rest in your life to use this new wisdom. For example: stress reduction.
I reckon that doing it by yourself will work as well, but having a mentor really helps. Your mind is very weak and you probably lack the discipline to do this properly alone.
I think fit chads have cracked the code of discipline, because exercise requires a lot. Any good archives?
So the basic question is-can I get that insight in my dingy apartment or do I have to visit the exotic hills of Thailand?
oh look another pseudo buddhist xDDD kill yourself
What do you recommend? I think this is the central question of my life. Self discipline. If I can figure this out, it'll change my life.
I know most anons here are not monks, but I'd really appreciate anything you have gathered over the years. Books, Methods,etc
Exercise doesn't actually require that much discipline beyond the period of habituation. In that sense it's actually quite similar to meditation (at least in the act of sitting down) as once context dependent (e.g time, location) habituation sets in the process becomes unconscious. Like the creation of a new river from a single stream, once the initial track is cleared, the water gathers its own momentum.
Due to this kind of exponential decay, most of your effort, if not all of it, should be directed toward making the habituation period as easy, seamless, and painless as possible. Many people make the mistake of using 30 days or a month or even three months as a time cut-off for habituation. In reality, research shows that habituation periods vary from person to person and even from activity to activity.
Instead what should be tracked are emotional states, with the cutoff being a state of neutral automatic behavior (e.g the order in which your brush your teeth, or the method by which you tie your shoelaces). What ultimately inhibits habit formation are negative emotional states that create a feedback loop in the mind to downregulate the activity. This is why people can sustain something for 30 consecutive days and then suddenly quit after one or two day's slippage. The feedback loop in that case is ironically reinforced every time the person tries to force themselves to stick to the "30 days plan" forcing the brain to seek out the first opportunity to quit.
Fortunately, there are some solutions to this (some of them counterintuitive) which have some decent research behind them. I can discuss them if anyone is interested.
Depends on the person.
Please elaborate
>go to easy asia
>monasteries are either inaccessible FOR A GOOD REASON or they are tourist traps
>go to europe
>bunch of elderly dying and begging for people to join their monasteries
>but at the same time gate keep it behind 3 years waiting/evaluation times
I have the impression that monasteries just want to die out now that organized religion isn't just cool enough
You've got to be committed to join though. This isn't just some fun thing you can do during your vacation so you can talk about it while high on coke at some party. This is serious stuff
Sorry but I have some resentment toward you, as I do every traditional medical student. Only non-trads are worthy of my advice.
>This is serious stuff
yes
because it's dying, and some autistic monk decides at the end of trial that you don't "fit the community" after wasting 3 years is as much of a reason why it's dying as the fact that nobody is interested
have you bothered looking at the qualifications, resources and time one has to spend to join an order or monastery
it's pretty ironic considering how monasteries historically came about
I think what that user was implying was that the access to a mentor, not necessarily the location itself is the main thing.
I've recently begun a practice of doing a "personal retreat" every Saturday. Essentially trying to follow the guidelines set forth here (see bottom for schedule) dhamma.org
My experience in brief:
1. It's very difficult to resist the temptation of entertainment or distraction because your computer/phone are right there. My advice is to actually hide them, at least in the beginning.
2. It's very important to maintain awareness (or at least try) throughout the whole day, from the moment you wake, to the moment you fall asleep, not just during the meditation itself
3. It's equally important to mix sitting with walking meditation and to keep maximum times to about 90 minutes per session. Beyond that there are diminishing returns.
4. It's extremely important to temper expectations and minimize friction (related to my other post ) so that unwholesome emotional states don't get coupled with what should be a purely neutral activity (remember also that even samatha and jhana are not the same as vipassana, that they are useful for reversing the feedback loop in your favor, but must eventually be let go, for full awakening)
Sure. The first solution is based on research done by BJ Fogg. In brief the model describes habituation as a three step process:
Trigger: A prompt must tell a person to “do this behavior now.”
Motivation: A person must have sufficient Motivation when the Trigger occurs. Three core motivators exist: Sensation (pleasure/pain), Anticipation (hope/fear), and Belonging (acceptance/rejection)
Ability: The person must have the Ability to perform the behavior when the Trigger occurs.
Note that motivation and ability are inversely (and exponentially) correlated. i.e The harder something is to do, the more motivation required to make a habit out of it. Put another way, the harder something is, the more likely it is that negative emotional states will become associated with that activity, creating the undesirable feedback loop I talked about before.
Practically this means that difficulty should be minimized as much as possible, to the point where you have a neutral or positive emotional state toward the activity. In other words, make it easier to do it, than to not do it. The paradox here is that, although the activity you may want has a much higher desired intensity for an end goal, a minimal intensity is far more effective at reaching that goal than starting with an equivalent or lesser intensity.
An example will make things clear. (see next post)
Let's say you want to start a meditation habit. You think, 90 minutes a day is the ultimate goal so I'll start with 30 minutes or even 15 and work my way up. I'll do this for 30 days and by then it will have become a habit. 30 days later, you miss one session due to unavoidable circumstances and suddenly the habit undergoes rapid decay until you're back where you started.
We already know what happened. The feedback loop was lurking in the background waiting for an opportunity to downregulate your meditation habit. Usually it manifests itself in procrastination, excuses, substitutions etc. It happened because of two reasons, first because the starting point was not a minimum (15-30 minutes is too high) second because the minimum increased over time arbitrarily (due to time instead of emotional state).
A better plan is this: I want to form a habit of 90 minutes of meditation every day. So I'm going to commit to 5 minutes of meditation every day, using a stopwatch that counts up (rather than a timer) and only change that minimum if the change retrains a neutral emotional state. What ends up happening is, even with such a low intensity, once habituation sets in (which will happen much faster with such a low intensity) the higher intensities are automatically accomplished anyway.
If youre not going to the gym and you have worldly ambitions you dont have my respect.
Look into Third Orders at Catholic monasteries. They are groups of lay people who live by the same rules as the monks, but secularly. Members meet once every few months or so.
Thanks, chief. This seems like useful, actionable advice.
This is good advice.
Monasteries have always been extremely strict places, the fact that you won't submit to the decisions of the elders and superiors tells me you don't belong there. You're probably one of those "spiritual but not religious" subhumans.
Historically, monasteries came about because of teachers of unrivaled brilliance. These are few and far between nowadays.
>is doing x thing that has been proven for thousands of years to be good for me good for me?
make sure you exercise too