At one point I was really, really desperate and caved in, decided to look for a meditation app as a last resort. I settled on an app called Brightmind, by a certain Shinzen Young, a monk heavily influenced by Zen in particular. Surprisingly, it's one the least popular out there, but people referred to it as being very serious stuff. I spent on it about about forty minutes daily for two months straight, so that's the one I can talk about.
It has three types of practice: seeing, hearing, and feeling, with two basic dimensions. "See out" is focusing on something outside of you, like a nail on the wall. The idea is to take in the entirety of the object, all of it that you can see, the depth of every detail, and to do only that. If your mind wanders, if you look elsewhere, you have to bring yourself back to the object and continue to concentrate on it. "See in" is about the images inside your head. Not like the mind's eye in an supernatural way, just the stuff you visualize like whenever you imagine a scenario of anything, that kind of inner vision. You focus on that too. It's kinda like the real practice of staring at a candle's flame, later closing your eyes while retaining its image. The idea is that you'll develop your mental muscles by doing this repeatedly, in the simplest terms.
Hearing is the same, things like the cry of faraway birds, the rhythm of the fucking construction site next door, or your inner monologue. But the really weird one was feel, feeling your body. It was interesting, concentrating on my arm for example, feeling the pulse in my veins, my nerves, or the contour of my heart, but especially zeroing in on pain to the point that you mostly stop feeling anything but hurt. If I recall correctly the other one was about emotions, and man, focusing on your anxiety is even weirder than pain. It also tasked you with mixing all this previous stuff with other practices, like meditating while walking (kinhin) or while doing a task such as washing the dishes.
Then there was "rest," about concentrating on relaxation or something like that (like a certain muscle that's relaxed), and later the nothingness. Seeing nothing, closing your eyes and looking away even from darkness. It was, as the saying goes, an abstract kind of feel. The end result is "just x," letting all sensations flow through you and taking them in but without directing your attention to them, a sort of anti-meditation where you stop yourself from actively focusing on things while still appreciating/grasping them (can't think of a better word to use). They call it "auto focus," which appears to be based on shikantaza. The "just" would certainly seem to refer to its first half, 只管.
It hadn't helped me focus on what matters to me and any effect stopped being there once I got up, so I ended up dropping it, but in retrospect I think it's influenced my current approach to ADHD as it aligned with absolute despair. I don't get mad at distractions anymore, I simply let them go through. There's no escaping it.
>>115240Meditation is supposed to be intensive stuff, doing it purely for the sake of relaxation is a tad shaky. You're peering into the nature of reality, not taking a nap. Here's a great video on it by a guy with an actual PhD on study of religion:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y85xBebpnwoIts popularization in the west is tied to the "Vipassana movement" from the 20th century, which is
not synonymous with the eponymous practice it centers on, nor is the productivity-oriented gabidalism :DDD hijack. There's a ton of other stuff the video covers.
Side note: I heard somewhere that Jewish meditation actually starts out contemplating emptiness from the get-go, because they believe it's important to understand nothingness before things. Don't quote me on that, though.
>>115245 (RIP)If you're genuinely looking into the spiritual, I doubt they'd be offended. Otherwise, depends on how open they are.