When I went an actual Zen meditation service I had much better results than trying it on my own. It's hard to keep the right posture and to focus on your breathing for even twenty minutes but if you accompany it with a reflection on the 8 fold path it can help you find a positive direction in life.

It's actually really hard work. I'm too lazy so I cheat with weed.

With weed? That just makes me think even more, f that noise.

Yeah. Weed isn't the same direction but it gives me a singlemindedness. I can't clear my head when I'm stoned but when I listen to music I'm more focused on it and more fascinated by it than I am when I'm sober.

I'm selling SPACE keys and CAPS if anyone is interested.

Try meditating with your eyes open. If thoughts come, don't fight them or try to ignore them, just focus on counting your exhalations (up to ten, and then start over from one). After that, try counting your inhalations. Supposedly, this helps you to learn to concentrate without exerting a great deal of effort, and eventually you'll no longer need to count breaths.

Try to remember that the goal isn't to experience a "vision", but rather to feel what it is like to exist without any mental outflows (i.e. as matter rather than a living being).

concentrate on what, my breath? i'll give it a shot but so far i find my breath to be pretty uninteresting.

mental outflows = thoughts?

edit - but yea my intention wasn't to experience a vision. i've just seen stuff saying there are benefits to meditation and i wanted to give it a fair try

one time when i was pretty high i tried to "meditate." it wasn't meditation as described by any traditional practice, more what i assumed was meditation while i was stoned without doing any real research on it.

basically i just felt like there was energy in my brain and i tried to push it all to the front of my brain. it felt like i was pushing liquid or something towards the front of my head by just concentrating really hard. i dunno what i did but honestly it did something.

it felt like a religious experience or something, everything turned really bright and beautiful for a moment and i thought i had made some sort of breakthrough. honestly the closest i've ever come to that feeling was by doing cocaine (at least i assume it was cocaine).

but then i came down from that euphoria and realized it wasn't nirvana or any **** like that, just a drug experience. but i dunno wtf i did because marijuana has never made that happen to me and honestly it seemed like i caused it with my 'meditation.'

I like the idea of meditating but have never gotten the hang of it. I don't like the idea of losing an hour of my day doing nothing, so I stick with doing things meditatively. Helps with my anxiety for sure.

I don't meditate, but I looked into it awhile ago (as most modern teens/young adults eventually do, out of curiosity). Hopefully I can shed some light on what I meant.

You have to hit a target before you can hit the real thing. Concentrating on your breath is just a way of honing your focus. Natural functions like breathing seem uninteresting at first, and there's a long way to go before meditation really makes sense. There's a reason why Buddhists/Taoists have a fascination with dust/dirt/matter: the smallest things in life at first seem uninteresting as hell, but they're absolutely fascinating at the same time, being the fundamental building blocks of existence.

If it helps, many monks-in-training find it useful to think about a certain type of poem/riddle, often referred to as a "Koan", in their free time. If you look some up, you might find them helpful, or at least good food for thought. One of the most famous Koans is "What did my face look like before I was born? What will it look like after I die?". Another well-known one is basically a short story, where a famous monk is asked whether or not animals like dogs can attain immortality/enlightenment, and he responds with the word "Mu", which translates roughly to "The question can not be answered, as there is no correct answer", or "all possible answers to the question are simultaneously correct and false". What do you think he meant by that?

My favorite Koan is a paraphrasing of a story about an infamous monk called Puhua, who was very eccentric and basically the Batlord of Buddhism. When a fellow monk asked how his day was, Puhua responded by flipping over a table of food. The next day, the same monk asked him again how his day was going, and Puhua flipped the table over again. After that, half of his peers regarded him as a genius who could say a thousand words with a single action, and the other half were convinced that he was just flat out crazy.

It is cool brother.I was apprehensive at first. I didn't want to wake up like the Manchurian Candidate...But it feels like acupuncture afterwards.