Reddit reviews Hardcore Zen: Punk Rock, Monster Movies and the Truth About Reality
We found 4 Reddit comments about Hardcore Zen: Punk Rock, Monster Movies and the Truth About Reality. Here are the top ones, ranked by their Reddit score.
I don't know about the greatest, but here are a few I've found enlightening:
I Just read Hardcore Zen by Brad Warner, currently working on Sit Down and Shut Up, also by Werner. After I finish the other two books in the series, I'll settle down with Shobogenzo. I'm just getting into Zen, it looks amazing!
I have not meditated in several years, but there was a time where I was doing zazen multiple times a week. There are certainly a lot of books out there that could be helpful guides: Zen Meditation in Plain English and An Introduction to Zen Buddhism would be good for the philosophy and practice, but my favorite book to recommend is Hardcore Zen: Punk Rock, Monster Movies, and the Truth About Reality by Brad Warner. That last one is a brilliant treatise on Zen philosophy as it pertains to a modern, Western life.
The toughest part about meditation is getting the mind to do the right thing. As you said, it's about being more mindful of the moment that is happening while letting go of the past and not concerning yourself with the future. Generally, most practices center around counting breaths, focusing on the sensation of breathing, and generally getting the brain to shut off all of the extraneous things that are bumping around in there. For BPD sufferers, that would be all of the negative thoughts floating around, making their lives tougher.
Imagine that your mind is actually a little person manning a big control room with thousands of monitors. Each monitor shows a memory, a future plan, current sense data, emotions, etc.; basically everything that makes you, you is up on those screens. Zazen is about learning how to temporarily shut these monitors off at will, either individually, by category, or wholesale. The ideal is to shut all of them off and just be left with the mind alone (this is the idea behind the Buddhist notion of "watching one's own mind". When your mind is not distracted by past memories, by future plans, by sense data, by emotions, it is in it's most pure state: Emptiness. This is not to be confused with little-e "emptiness" but is a Buddhist concept unto itself.
It's tough to get to that point and it requires lots of practice. There will be many times when you are counting breaths and thinking about how stupid the whole thing is, or how you have to run errands later that day, or how your back hurts, or how that one time your friend called you fat in middle school and it really hurt. This is ok! It's normal! That's what your brain does all day every day, you can't expect it to not do that just because you are meditating. When thoughts and distractions arise, let them. Observe them. Then let them fall away and start counting your breaths again. With lots of practice, you will eventually get to the point where you can let all the excesses of your mind fall away and achieve relaxation, knowledge and mastery of the mind, and plenty of other benefits.
Anyway, these are just some scattered thoughts. Just start reading about it! The Brad Warner book is a great place to start because it summarizes lots of Buddhist philosophy in a really palatable way. Good luck!
This is what caused me to have irregular heart beat (and feel like it was pounding), dizzy spells, anxiety, and a variety of other problems. It also made my blood pressure unusually low - on the low side of normal. Alcohol makes it much worse. I also had a strong adverse reaction to trees in the past, where I would have panic as it was wearing off.
I was able to connect it to food because fasting was the only time I felt better. Since I've been paying attention to this and monitoring my diet for this, I'm not having anxiety attacks - at all.
Read this or listen to it and see if it might resonate with you. I find a lot of relief from doing ashtanga yoga with meditation, but that's kind of girly, I know - though my current teacher IS a man. Regular old meditation might help you, though. It might sound crazy but this also helped me during a really high-stress time.