Hey all I've recently been experimenting with mindfulness exercises to help me cope with and manage adversity. It's been going pretty well but every once in a while I'll get one that asks me to talk to god or pray and it takes me right out of it. Does anyone else here do mindfulness stuff and if so would you be able recommend resources that use less religious language? Am I just missing the point of the ones that do?
Quality mindfulness resources from an atheist perspective.
- Thread starter Timmus
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Are you able to just do it or do you use guided meditation resources such as videos or recordings? I'm super new at this but I think it has potential to be helpful for me.
I've been doing it a long time so I don't need any aid now, but I started with transcendental meditation. The old school way, using a mantra. I no longer need a mantra, but I found it helpful when I was new as a way to focus my mind.
Focus is really all you need, it's entirely possible to meditate while gardening, or anything you can concentrate on as a way of releasing and reflecting your thoughts.
My sister has started doing meditation recently as well, and she uses an app and has had good success with that route, so it might be something to look into.
I will add, it feels silly when you first start. This is perfectly normal.
I think the tendency to tie mindfulness to religion is because it's "on brand," so to speak. Most religions encourage some kind of meditation or contemplation, and so my guess is that the majority of publicly available guides to mindfulness just assume you are doing it for religious reasons so as to become closer to [enter deity name(s) here].
The best advice I can give is, if you find a flow that works well for you BUT which breaks immersion by getting too preachy, sit down and spend some time rewriting it to be more neutral, then work from that.
The person in this video obviously has some strong personal beliefs. But that is not what the video is about. The video is an instruction towards meditation, and nothing more.
--Patrick
The best advice I can give is, if you find a flow that works well for you BUT which breaks immersion by getting too preachy, sit down and spend some time rewriting it to be more neutral, then work from that.
The most useful advice I think I ever got was from this video:
The person in this video obviously has some strong personal beliefs. But that is not what the video is about. The video is an instruction towards meditation, and nothing more.
--Patrick
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