Can I just say, and I'm just being honest...

[Edwardo Piet]

Oh I absolutely know what mindfulness is... I just think that everyone is just lucky when they do it right. I think that the only way for it to be a skill is for us to consciously think something but that's the opposite of mindfulness. Thinking is purely automatic.

I get lost in a negative train of thought... I can notice that... but I can't stop the negative train merely by observing it. Either as I observe it the negative thoughts stop or they don't. And if I intervene with a conscious thought that's not mindfulness.

Mindfulness is indeed, observing thoughts without judgement. But that either happens or it doesn't. Being aware of my judgements is just being aware of them.

TL;DR: we either unluckily observe a negative train of thought without judgement and it continues or we get lucky and it ends.

I don't think there's anything to practice. We can't control our minds. When we think we control them we're mistaken. And I know mindfulness is not about controlling our thoughts but instead about observing them but observing automatic thoughts is just observing automatic thoughts. We're wrong to ever take credit for any of our thoughts because there is no locus of control.

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It's not that there isn't a method to it. It's that you're supposed to be removing yourself from judgment. Mindfulness is a non-judgmental head space. It's observing what is actually happening without thinking of it in terms of good or bad, so yeah, saying you're doing it "wrong" is kind of doing it wrong. lol That's why there is no "wrong" way to do it. You know? Another part of it is that meditation is showing up for yourself, so just sitting there doing it is doing it right.

Let me put this in terms of a mindfulness session:

You're sitting and all of a sudden a negative thought flies through your head. Having achieved mindful awareness, you would be able to observe this thought without judgment, so you wouldn't say "fuck, I'm doing this wrong because I had a negative thought." You would ideally either think nothing of it or think something like, "Oh, look. A thought." and move on with your practice. Meditation is NOT about clearing your mind. It's about sitting apart from the shit that floats through it. It's hard and you will "do it wrong" every time you sit. You make corrections, look for ways to observe non-judgmentally and move on. This is practice so when the shit hits the fan in real life, you are better at going "Oh, look. A thought."

Another example:

Say I'm walking along a trail and I come across muddy sludge. I can either choose to radically accept the muddy sludge by simply acknowledging its existence and finding a way around/away from the sludge without feeling bad or good about it or I can think, "Oh, great. There's fucking gross sludge in my path. Isn't that just like life? This sucks. Fuck this sludge. Fuck this walk. Fuck my day." Instead of labeling these things and increasing our suffering through negativity, we're better off just realizing the mud simple is. There is nothing good or bad about it. It's just mud that's there. Not liking it will change nothing except your mood.

That sounds like what I already do a lot and I never formally practiced or learned about meditation, except from the little I heard about it from Sam Harris. I'm sure Ham is familiar with that as well.

Yes. And he doesn't believe we can control our thoughts either.

I don't personally see how it's a skill that can be learned.

Unless mindfulness is the awareness that we don't control our thoughts and we're merely observers of them. But in that case I'm already successfully engaged in mindfulness all the time because I don't even observe the so-called illusion of free will. There's no illusion there, people just think there is. It's a delusion and an incoherent concept rather than an illusion.

Of course I'm talking about ultimate free will and ultimate moral responsibility. Not any of that relabelling uncoerced choices with "free will" side-stepping compatabilist shit.

So that might be why I am confused. Because mindfulness is my default state, lol.

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@ Shell B

So to take your muddy puddle analogy... either those negative thoughts about the puddle come or they don't, and there is nothing we can do to prevent them coming.

And we either observe them when they come or we don't. And there's nothing we can do to force ourselves to observe them.

Personally I think we automatically believe all our automatic thoughts and our own automatic narrative 100% of the time. It's only our deliberate thoughts that we don't necessarily believe, and we can use them to observe the automatic thoughts that we do believe and we can then realize they're false. But either we do that or we don't. Ultimately our deliberate thoughts are as automatic as any other. So I should say effortful or purposeful thoughts perhaps. They're the thoughts we think on purpose. So we can use our purposeful thoughts to observe our automatic thoughts if and only if the idea for us to do so occurs to us. But we have zero control over what occurs to us.

And of course every time we have a purposeful thought about our own thinking... purposeful thinking is effortful and strained. It's only worth the mental tension if what we observe is making us even more miserable. So we can catch ourselves when we really need to. But we don't get to choose when the idea for us to catch ourselves occurs to us.

It could be a habit we could get better at. But thinking about my own thinking is a habit I used to have that made me miserable, because, like I said, purposeful thoughts cause tension. I'd rather be less aware than more aware before it overdrives my O.C.D.