Zen Buddhism

[Angrboda]

Interesting.  But I think mindfulness is something to be brought into as much of your life as possible .. cooking, walking, whatever.  I think of it as being in a receptive/noticing state rather than a directed/expressing state.  The idea of doing specific repetitive but essentially meaningless motions (or no motion) in order to achieve an effect seems kind of desperate.  Or like going on a short term diet to lose weight.  Much better to just change the way you eat or live.  Or maybe I'm just covering up for lack of discipline?

My personal view of meditation is that it differs from simple mindfulness.  Mindfulness in ordinary activities does little to restructure the way our brains process information.  In ordinary consciousness, the different centers of thought in our brain compete for overall attention, firing off largely unrestricted.  My view is that in intense meditation, the brain is learning to focus activity in a few select portions of the brain.  It is a form of training our mind how to do that.  Once the skill is acquired through intense meditation, it can be harnessed in less rigorous circumstances.  Mindfulness to me is like meditation lite -- it can alter the way the brain processes things for that short time period, but does little to retrain the mind overall. (in my opinion)  So in my view there is a reason for the rigors of practice which are not met by simply trying to live mindfully.

In psychology, the Stroop effect is a demonstration of interference in the reaction time of a task. When the name of a color (e.g., "blue", "green", or "red") is printed in a color not denoted by the name (e.g., the word "red" printed in blue ink instead of red ink), naming the color of the word takes longer and is more prone to errors than when the color of the ink matches the name of the color.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stroop_effect

In one interesting experiment, test subjects were hypnotized and given the post-hypnotic suggestion that the words they would be viewing would be in a foreign language which they did not speak. When tested under these conditions, the Stroop effect did not happen. They responded to mismatched word/color pairs as fast as matched ones. One of the theories about the Stroop effect is that different cognitive centers in the brain process each half of the word/color pair, with one center processing the word and another center processing the color. It's thought that when there is a mismatch, the two centers compete for attention, thus slowing the response. Under this theory, in the hypnotized subjects, the word center would remain silent as the subject did not believe they understood the language, thus the disappearance of the effect.

It's my theory that in meditation, we learn how to turn off those centers that are associated with processing input and only engage the centers responsible for attention. In that way I feel meditation is a form of training for the brain which teaches it how to do this.