Maybe here; I talk about structured and unstructured repetitive movement with a brief, informal model of mechanism or how it helps. meditationbook.page/#75
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Unlike in some systems, I think it's good to sharply differentiate between "practice" and "lost in life" and to not mix them, excepting when the blend naturally on their own, especially long run.
Walking is great. I bet other stuff has the same function, like doing dishes.
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from the link:
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Unstructured repetitive movement (e.g. long walks) tends to draw people into reverie, daydreaming, etc., and sometimes people find this initially unattractive if they’re "trying to meditate,"
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but sometimes reverie and daydreaming are the most important thing to be doing. People need almost as much unstructured reverie time as they do "meditation time," at least long-run, in order to "go all the way."
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Meditation masters take long, aimless walks, with no particular relation to their (body)mind, as long and as often as they have time for, and it’s unwasted time; it’s time well spent, in terms of their values and goals and hopes and dreams, as it were.
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If you do take long walks, a key piece is "nonvigilance," and so just make sure you’re in a safe environment, where you can naturally "space out." People are generally ok, if they’re undistracting strangers at a distance or just passing you on the trail.
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Cars can be more loud and disruptive, depending, even if you’re safely on the sidewalk.
If it’s hard to "sit down to meditate" or meditation has lately been "immediately going wrong" (in some very loose sense!),
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then often the right thing to do is to just take aimless walks, for hours and hours. One can also leave open blocks of time to do random chores at home and kind of slowly "back onto the cushion" and hop right back off again if things become problematic.
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This is close to what I’m thinking about, but I think adjacent. Stuff that requires active decision-making frequently enough that you are not in a reverie, but not so complex that you gave to conceptualize or verbalize decisions while making them. It can be phenomenological.
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Maybe a good way to think of it is: stuff where if supervisory attention wanders you make more silly mistakes, but they’re easily corrected. Like wearing a t-shirt inside out. You need *some* executive attention: notice if it’s inside out and turn it out if needed before wearing.
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For me, since conceptualizing and verbal attention are so cheap, it’s actually hard to defocus enough so trivial things like this *don’t* escalate from phenomenological to conceptual/verbal. Recently I noticed I could let p decision making run ahead if I inhibited c/v enough.
This is a pleasant state so I’m trying to be in it more, around more activities. Including even verbal activities like writing (which takes some weird doublethink)
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Playing Tetris is recommended for "trauma processing," and I suspect there's something like this going on, here. I watch netflix while meditating a lot, which is probably related, too.
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It’s a bit like taking a dog for a walk, and occupying its head as it runs ahead, but able to withdraw along leash to human head when needed. The dog isn’t exactly on autopilot, but is making decisions at p level since it has no c or v level escalations. So dog-mind basically.
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