Ask HN: Mindfulness for Hackers
I&#x27;m probably somewhat of an outlier with respect to mindfulness as a hacker—I&#x27;m currently in a full-time residential monastic training program. One way I&#x27;ve heard it put is that a monastery is a place where it&#x27;s permissible to arrange your entire life around something besides the ordinary things people are allowed to and assumed to live for, like work or a family. Say you really like knitting, then you can say, &quot;I&#x27;m going to put knitting at the center, and sacrifice anything in my life that can be sacrificed for the sake of knitting. I&#x27;m going to live for knitting, and if it comes down to it, I&#x27;ll also die for knitting.&quot; So, we&#x27;re doing that, except instead of knitting it&#x27;s meditating with the end goal of classical enlightenment in service to all living things.<p>I also worked for a year and a half on the C++ SDK for Muse, which is an EEG headband designed for meditation training. I&#x27;m still a big fan of them, and recommend them to people looking for apps for this stuff. I don&#x27;t Muse much these days, but that&#x27;s not because of any flaw with their program. It&#x27;s actually quite good in this line of work to create something that people stop depending on eventually.<p>In terms of techniques, these days I mostly practice a sort of focus on the breath in the belly, and during non-practice periods I generally practice merging with the task at hand, using the act of, say, writing an email as my focus space. But I also have worked with a lot of other techniques for a few days or a few months.<p>I second the recommendation for The Mind Illuminated. It&#x27;s a fantastic book. I&#x27;d also add Shinzen Young&#x27;s The Science of Enlightenment.<p>My main recommendation, though, is to do what I&#x27;m doing: join a community that&#x27;s devoted to practice. There&#x27;s a depth and rigor that comes from that sort of accountability that I haven&#x27;t been able to find any other way. Of course you could decide to commit to an extended period of training—say a year or more—but it&#x27;s generally not necessary. It&#x27;s also good to come for a few weeks or a few days, or even to come by for lunch some time. There are lots of places that are good—maybe you have a local Zen center or Shambhala center. There are also lots of good secular meetups, like Consciousness Explorers Club in Toronto.<p>In case you&#x27;re interested in visiting me at my place of training, we have a website: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.monasticacademy.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.monasticacademy.com&#x2F;</a> and you should also feel welcome to email us: info AT monastic DOT academy. We welcome guests, and one of our specialties is in creating space to practice integrating mindfulness into your existing work and life. So we operate as a sort of coworking space, with free wifi and unlimited coffee.