Meditation is not just “sitting around not doing much but not trying to nap either”. It is also observing your own feelings and thoughts that arise while doing it. You try to to detach from your feelings and observe yourself objectively while having them and observe the thoughts and feelings that arise from observing yourself etc., recursively.
E.g. if you get itchy, then try to isolate and detach from the itchiness and make it an objective observation and find out how and why does that affect you, etc.
The way to get there is by trying to expel your inner dialogs and find other dialogs arising deeper and if you go on and expel them again. Iterating that, you can hope to be able to listen to your own even deeper (in a sense of “more hidden”) thoughts that were already there but were covered by the “much louder” voices on the surface.
This way you can learn a lot about your inner (hidden) problems, motivations, etc. by just patiently expelling everything you are so preoccupied with at the highest level of your consciousness.
Another side effect is that by doing that you can train the skill set of expelling undesired thoughts and feelings which can fight distraction when something inconvenient or boring has to be worked on.
I know it’s not just that. That is why I identified “sitting around not doing much but not trying to nap either” as a broader category.
Trying to observe and not scratch an easily-accessible itch sounds like such an unpleasant way to spend time that I would rather just be as akratic as I am than practice it.
I just end up clearing my head of everything but some random earworm that never goes away, or focusing on some background noise, or whatever. Stupid auditory cortex, running in circles and not wanting to shut up...
Meditation is not just “sitting around not doing much but not trying to nap either”. It is also observing your own feelings and thoughts that arise while doing it. You try to to detach from your feelings and observe yourself objectively while having them and observe the thoughts and feelings that arise from observing yourself etc., recursively.
E.g. if you get itchy, then try to isolate and detach from the itchiness and make it an objective observation and find out how and why does that affect you, etc.
The way to get there is by trying to expel your inner dialogs and find other dialogs arising deeper and if you go on and expel them again. Iterating that, you can hope to be able to listen to your own even deeper (in a sense of “more hidden”) thoughts that were already there but were covered by the “much louder” voices on the surface.
This way you can learn a lot about your inner (hidden) problems, motivations, etc. by just patiently expelling everything you are so preoccupied with at the highest level of your consciousness.
Another side effect is that by doing that you can train the skill set of expelling undesired thoughts and feelings which can fight distraction when something inconvenient or boring has to be worked on.
I know it’s not just that. That is why I identified “sitting around not doing much but not trying to nap either” as a broader category.
Trying to observe and not scratch an easily-accessible itch sounds like such an unpleasant way to spend time that I would rather just be as akratic as I am than practice it.
I just end up clearing my head of everything but some random earworm that never goes away, or focusing on some background noise, or whatever. Stupid auditory cortex, running in circles and not wanting to shut up...
Are you sure it’s completely random? :)