As a learning exercise, and because it was something I wanted to have, I created a simple meditation timer application for Android called JustSit.

The name is derived from a quote attributed to Zen Master Unmon:

If you walk, just walk, if you sit, just sit, but whatever you do, don’t wobble.

This quote is a tongue-in-cheek admonition to focus on the task at hand. There are plenty of timers for Android already, but this one does something special — it optionally helps to shut out the outside world by silencing the phone’s ringtone and/or turning off all of the network connections.

There are still a few things I want to add to the application, namely, options for sounds marking the beginning and end of the meditation period (currently mandatory), and options for vibrating notifications or no notifications. I’d also like to allow users to select the sounds to be used — currently they are hard-coded. Finally, it would be nice to allow people to save various profiles and timings. Nonetheless, at this point I find the application perfectly useful for its intended purpose.

For now, I’m not putting it on the Android Market. I don’t feel like it’s been tested enough to withstand the brutal onslaught of the Market users, and I am waiting to charge a small fee in order to recover my developer registration. The application will always remain open source, and will always be available for free on the project website. However, the majority of users will neither know how to nor want to download and install the app from there, so I’ll make it available with the aforementioned ‘convenience fee’ from the Market. The ability to charge for apps is not currently available on the market, and one is not allowed to charge later for an app that is initially given away for free. I may post it to other Android application sites.

Please let me know if you try this and find it useful, and submit any feature requests or bug reports on the project Issues page.

(This is the first in a series of unknown length on my thoughts on Buddhism’s Five Hindrances and their relationship to the concept in psychotherapy of Cognitive Distortions.)

I was first introduced to the psychological concept of cognitive distortions by Maria. Per the linked Wikipedia article, cognitive distortions are thought processes that “maintain negative thinking and … emotions”. Learning to refute them is termed “cognitive restructuring”.

On reading Maria’s old post, I was immediately reminded of Buddhism, and had in fact just listened to a series of podcasts on the “Five Hindrances”. However, there is no simple mapping between cognitive distortions and the hindrances. I’m tempted to try to make a Venn diagram on the relationship between the two sets.

My readings so far in Mind Over Mood have reaffirmed my suspicion that the two concepts are inter-related. Take, for example, this statement from the book’s introduction:

Mind over Mood teaches you to identify your thoughts, moods, behaviors, and physical reactions in small situations as well as during major events in your life … you learn how to make changes in your life when your thoughts are alerting you to problems that need to be solved.

The major function for me of meditation has been to find a baseline. Our thoughts build up during the day like layers as we work on something, are interrupted, hear interesting news, spontaneously think of things that were bugging us days ago. Sometimes we follow a train of thought for a while, based mostly on assumptions. Gil Fronsdal calls these bits of imagination ’stories’. We create stories, often about the intentions of others, build up long conversations in our heads imagining confrontations and how other people in our life will react to what we say. Aside from getting lost daydreaming these stories, we tend to accumulate feelings about our imagined conversations and conversation partners, even though the conversations have never occurred. Gil usually calls the state we arrive in after this as being ‘caught’.

Here are some examples from intueri.org of people building stories in their minds:

She’s tired of working at the coffee shop. She expected so much more for herself.

Her mother is a real estate agent, hawking million-dollar homes to the contemporary gentry. Her father is a entertainment lawyer. Her older sister manages her own ballet studio. Her younger brother designs computer games for a major software corporation.

And then there’s her. A barista at a small coffee shop. Between a tall Americano and double-shot espresso, her mind wanders—

I’m the failure of the family. They were embarrassed to talk about me at the wedding; everyone else is so successful and then there’s me, the coffee girl. I hate spending time with my family. I’m trying the best that I can to get back on my feet, but they will never understand. They’re too busy with the expensive details of their lives—

She calls out, “Tall Americano!” and offers a warm smile to the elderly woman who approaches the counter to pick up the steaming beverage.

(From The Things That We Hide)

A man walked past her on the sidewalk. His dark eyes darted to her face before snapping back to an invisible point in the distant horizon.

She saw his surreptitious glance.

He thinks I’m hot, she thought to herself. He wants to ask me out, I know it.

Her stiletto heels clicked loudly against the concrete catwalk and, after he passed her, she swiveled her hips with more panache to offer him a teasing view of her backside.

They all look back—what’s there not to like?

With a gentle toss of her head, her long hair floated over her shoulder and landed softly on her back, revealing more of her voluptuous figure. Throwing her shoulders back and pushing her chest out, she continued to sashay along the sidewalk while the crowd parted around her.

I’m so gorgeous that everyone wants to look at my delicious body.

(From Perception Spectrum.)

The interesting thing about the Perception Spectrum post is that it contains several other examples of stories that could be built from the same situation. I suggest you read the whole post and think about how the stories are being built based on assumptions.

In order to extricate ourselves from the state of being ‘caught’ in our stories, it’s helpful to understand how we feel when we are not caught. Meditation gives us practice at identifying our ’stories’ (complexes of distortions?) in a controlled environment. Having practiced in a controlled environment, we find it easier to identify story-building that occurs during our daily lives.

Can you think of an instance in which you built up a story and later found it to be far from reality?

I’ve started reading a blog called Get Rich Slowly. I’m not typically in a tight financial spot most of the time these days, but I’m trying to be more aggressive about (a) cutting costs and (b) actively saving more, in a savings account. In that vein, I posted a little while ago about my view that ads are often mental poison.

Today, I read a great post from Get Rich Slowly, entitled “Beware the Insidious Power of Marketing“. In it, he highlights a book called The Consumer Trap, which discusses product management techniques such as planned obsolescence, and talks about tricks retailers use to get us to buy more. In particular, he points out an example of how displays are placed to slow us down in grocery stores (from Why We Buy).

Supermarkets are just rife with tricks designed to get you to buy stuff that you don’t need or even want. As I mentioned in my last post on the subject, Fravia’s Anti-Advertisement and Reality Cracking pages detail a number of these. In particular, see Supermarket Enslavement Secrets. Essayists on Fravia’s site tend to use over-the-top titles, partly intended (I think) to “reverse” the benign views we tend to have of people’s attempts to trick us into buying their crap. The Supermarket page dates back to 1997.

Most of us really need very little to get by on. I am not talking about the minimal to survive. I mean to live a pleasant and fulfilling life. We need healthy food, things for preparing food, a place to live, furniture, toiletries, cleaning supplies, clothes, maybe a computer. We need exercise, but at the very least that costs little more than a pair of running shoes and a piece of floor on which to do calisthenics. It certainly does not require expensive machines that you’ll use twice and forget about.

How is it, then, that people end up with so much stuff? Is it because more stuff makes us happy? Well, beyond basic needs, not really, although people seem to think so. Some people like to collect things. Others keep stuff around in case they might need it later. However, I think a lot of things that people buy, they neither need, nor really want.

Why do we think we need so many things? Advertising. Aggressive, manipulative advertising. Ads that make you think that you’ll be happier, or stronger, or better liked, or sexier, or you’ll be more powerful, or your life will be easy and carefree if only you buy this thing! The odd thing is that even though we brush this off consciously, somewhere in our minds, it sticks.

I quit watching TV when I was about 12. I’ll still catch the occasional show via DVDs from Netflix, but the commercials are just nauseating (and an annoying interruption) when I happen to see them at a bar, passing by someone watching, or whatever. The same goes for Internet ads. I’m astonished when I see them at a cybercafe or on a friend’s computer. I use Adblock, so I pretty much never see them any more. My desire to buy things has decreased enormously because of it. However, outright ads aren’t all of it.

As part of my Zen practice of trying to be more mindful of my, uh, state of mind, I’ve gained a sensitivity to the impulse to buy. When I feel it, it now sets off warning bells in my head. I stop, and think about why I want to buy whatever, and whether that’s really what my rational brain wants. Often, it is not. So, what besides ads triggers this impulse to buy? Blogs that review items. These include (and I won’t actually name or link them) blogs related to my smartphone, those related to useful gadgets to have around the house, etc. Browsing my Amazon.com recommendations is also dangerous. Catalogs and circulars of any kind are a bad idea. I don’t surf certain geek-related tech sites and I don’t browse brick-and-mortar stores to kill time (i.e. while waiting for someone). Basically, I’ve sworn off “tech porn” and “consumer porn” as I call them. It’s amazing how much stuff I don’t know I need until I see it.

There are ways to go a step further than avoiding ads. I use Freecycle periodically. It’s also possible to find things you really need for free or cheap on Craigslist. (Disclosure: I found my apartment, my car, and my wife on Craigslist.) The reverse is also true — it’s easy to get rid of stuff you don’t need on these sites. It’s tempting to sell those things, but ask yourself: is it worth your time to post, sell, and maybe ship those items, or is it worth more just to have them out of your space and your mind? Some things will be worth selling, but most will not. A couple of good sites on living simply and avoiding ads include the unfortunately-named Live Simple and Fravia’s reality cracking section. The latter can be a bit… off at times but it’s still chock full of goodness.

I practice a modified form of Zen meditation. Typically thoughts that come up while sitting should be let to pass by, somewhere off away from your conscious attention.

This is complete anathema to the Getting Things Done methodology.

When I’m meditating, a lot of times things that have been bugging me, things I need to do or take care of, that have been hiding beneath my conscious level of thought come up. So, I do what any good GTDer would do. I write them down. I keep a notebook in front of me and write them down immediately, and then go back to meditating. This way I really get them out of my head, rather than trying to somehow forget or ignore them, and they’re recorded so that I can properly deal with them later.

Once my dictaphone arrives I may try leaving it recording while I meditate, and reviewing it afterward. That way I could simply speak rather than having to move my arms from the proper posture.

I noticed tonight, and have noticed on other occasions, that things build up when I don’t meditate daily. I may think that everything is out of my head, but when I sit down to actually meditate, all kinds of stuff comes forward. Today it had only been 4 days since my last meditation. I filled an entire page of college-ruled paper (one item per line) with items I needed to somehow address. When I went a week without meditating, I filled one and a half pages at the same density.

Part of me wants to keep track of how many items come up while meditating and relate it to my inter-meditation interval or minutes of meditation per week. I’m pretty busy right now, but I’ll probably do it at some point. From my sample where n = 2, it seems to be a nonlinear relationship. 1.5 pages for 7 days, 1 page for 4. I guess it could be linear, but the y-intercept is not zero. (I think it’s 1/3?) If I always have 1/3 of an idea in my head immediately after meditating, that could be valid.