Mindfulness in Plain English
Presents an introduction to meditation according to Buddhist principles, describing the advantages of the practice and addressing some of the difficulties that can come up.
Stats for nerds
99recommend
179mentions
122people
2008–2026years
82% recommend17% neutral1% critical
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- If you're the sort of person who ignores parts of a book you're reading, try Mindfulness in Plain English by Bhante G.
- The karmic traditions developed this most completely and thoroughly. You don't need to buy into the supernatural claims to benefit from them.
A great starting point can be Shinzen Young's The Science of Enlightenment and/or Sam Harris's Waking Up.
After that, you might look into Why Buddhism is True or The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali or Mindfulness in Plain English.
The Healthy Gamer Youtube channel also has great videos going into this and how they tie into psychology.
David Chapman's https://meaningness.com/ is also pretty great.
- I was reminded of my all-time favourite book on meditation / mindfulness: Mindfulness in Plain English by Henepola Gunaratana. The article had a similar style. Gunaratana’s book is full of humour and beautiful writing and I’d recommend it as a brilliant guide to anyone interested in this stuff.
- The "new-age hippy trash" impression kept me away for years. What finally got me to try was "Mindfulness in Plain English" which is available both for free and paid versions, and Gil Fronsdals audio recordings (his introductory series), which are also available for free.
They're both more like "how to" guides than spiritual, and mention Buddhism or other practices only in passing (both have much more explicitly spiritual material too for those who want that), and Fronsdal jokes about the "B-word".
What I get out of it varies, going from just 5-15 minutes of calm and relaxation to multi-hour deeper meditation, to tumultuous sessions where I get no calm but all kinds of issues or ideas force themselves to the surface. I feel I benefit from all of it, but it's a method or a tool for me, not spiritual.
- Meditation isn't really about minimizing thoughts. You can't stop thoughts from arising, its just something that your brain does. Meditation is more about training yourself to not attach to those thoughts, to let them go. And that has huge benefits - a lot of the stress and suffering in life we experience in life is due to becoming attached to our thoughts.
The book Mindfulness in Plain English is a great introduction to mediation if you are curious.
- There is a lot of nuance to this and if you are really curious, you should check out Mindfulness in Plain English... you can find it free online.
But, a quick, short answer - meditation is like going to the gym for your brain. In meditation, you practice detaching from thoughts. A practical example: Let's say you have a rocky relationship with your boss or a colleague. Maybe they say something you perceive as a slight while grabbing a coffee in the morning. Instead of fixating on it all day and letting it disturb your work, you just let it go. Not attaching to our thoughts doesn't mean we can't focus very hard on things - in fact, letting your negative thoughts go is what is going to allow you to focus hard on your work the rest of the day!
(Also, there are many types of meditation, this is just one form of meditation... again, lots of nuance here that is hard to get across in this format.)
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