DISCLAIMER • I havebeen meditating for a bit more than two years now which, in terms of meditation practice, is very much considered as a beginner level. • I am not a teacher. I am just here to talk about the practice. Should you need some guidance to meditate, it is safer to do so with the help of experimented teachers.
SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT IS HARD •Discipline which requires lots of focus. • So much so that the usual way to parody Developers’ behaviour in the movies is to play a nearly autistic one. • The discipline requires this state of mind.
SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT IS HARD •Human (regardless if they are intro or extroverts) need Social Interactions. • Hyperfocus, Racing Thoughts, Social Isolation, Irregular sleep patterns can lead to Depression which is really common in our industry.
SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT IS HARD •The qualities a Developer needs to have are many: • Curiosity, Discipline, Patience • Adaptability • Willing to leverage existing code (why invent the wheel) • Passion
WHAT IS MEDITATION? •Meditation is not a religion. It is not about preying any Deity. • Meditation is a technique whose main goals is to increase awareness and equanimity. • Meditation could be considered as a spiritual practice: happiness regardless of external circumstances. • Several forms of meditation exist (Zen, Vipassana…) • Let’s talk about what they have in common.
WHAT IS MEDITATION? •The goal is not to retrospectively think about what happened in your day. • It is a training of your mind to quieter it. • In lots of meditation books, our mind is described as a little monkey which jumps everywhere. The more the monkey jumps, the more the ropes around him are getting tied to him. Let’s quieter the monkey.
WHAT IS MEDITATION? •We make the conscious choice to follow our breath and only our breath. • Every time our mind looses its focus to think of a given thought, let’s put our attention back to the breathing. • Many techniques can help following the breath: • Visualising the point where the air enters our nostrils. • Counting the breath…
MEDITATION IS EASYAND YET VERY HARD • Describing the technique is very easy: just follow the breath. • However it is also very hard for the very reason it is hard to think about nothing. • It is also hard because it is new. When one wants to learn a new skills (playing guitar, learn a language), it is challenging because we are not used to it.
BENEFITS OF MEDITATIONFOR A DEVELOPER • By training our minds to stay focus on the breath, we sharpen our focus in our every day life. There has been countless studies which show experienced meditators being able to stay focus on a given object for hours while others could stay only a couple of minutes. • Since I meditate I personally noticed a huge gain in the time I needed to put myself in this state of mind needed for programming.
BENEFITS OF MEDITATIONFOR A DEVELOPER • Meditation can also help in getting out of your thoughts. After a day programming, mosts developers go home with a mind full of thoughts. • Having dinner with your wife / friends could be challenging as you remain in your thoughts. (Hyperfocus, Social Isolation) • By training your awareness and you capacity to let thoughts come and go, you allow yourself to not dive in them and to be right here, right now. By observing something, you are not part of it.
BENEFITS OF MEDITATIONFOR A DEVELOPER • We live in a very sophisticated world. • It would be impossible to survive this complexity without some tools. One of the tools that we have are concepts. • When I see an apple on a table, I notice it internally: ‘this is an apple’. Same thing when I see cars in the streets: ‘these are cars’. Yet, we all know cars and apples could have many different shapes and characteristics. • The language is an interesting tool to help building these concepts. However it is worth noticing that by saying internally ‘this is an apple’ and then move on to the next object, we let the concepts define the reality. Unless we use some adjectives, we are going to grasp the reality with the same level of focus that this concept carries.
BENEFITS OF MEDITATIONFOR A DEVELOPER • In Computer Science, we use concepts a lot too. • When we create an Application and define the Objects, their relationships, we use concepts. • When we try to understand an existing Application, we also use concepts. It is worth noticing the concepts used to understand an Application at a high level are often not the concepts used to create it.
BENEFITS OF MEDITATIONFOR A DEVELOPER • When meditating, we train our mind to not identify ourselves with our thoughts. • By removing ourselves from the equation, we free ourselves. • By doing so, we also cease to identify concepts with Reality. We start seeing things as they are (Vipassana): concepts are just one of the many descriptions of a Reality with a given focus. • This is really helpful when it comes to maintaining and developing an existing codebase.
BENEFITS OF MEDITATIONFOR A DEVELOPER • When adding a feature, debugging an application, it is often the case developers who need to maintain the code, grasp it with an overall level of details not as deep as the developers who authored it. • The ultimate low level of understanding being: ‘this looks terrible, let’s rewrite it.’ • With meditation comes programmer modesty. Instead of using judgement as a concept, as a way to grasp reality, one starts to use understanding. (This saved me so many troubles)
BENEFITS OF MEDITATIONIN YOUR LIFE • These different levels of concepts also apply in our day to day life. • We tend to see our friends as good and our enemies as bad. But obviously no one is inherently good or bad. However, interestingly these high levels concepts tend to change our vision of the reality. There were many studies which showed the following: • when a friend of us behaves not correctly, we tend to understand his behaviour by noticing the external circumstances which generated it. • when an “enemy” behaves not correctly, we believe that it is his true nature at play.
BENEFITS OF MEDITATIONIN YOUR LIFE • Emotions like Love, Hatred, Compassion, Jealousy, Joy have different impacts on ourselves. • When experimenting Joy for example, it is not rare to get a feeling of warmth within our body, and we are open to the outside world. • On the other side, when we experiment Hatred, we usually feel tense, restricted, our throat is tied. • It is impossible to be angry outside and to feel really good inside.
BENEFITS OF MEDITATIONIN YOUR LIFE • Thoughts generate Feelings and Feelings generate actions. • Would not it be nice to be able to select only the given thoughts that make you feel happy and let go of the others? • By selecting our thoughts, we can change how we feel and change ourselves (increasing our empathy and compassion for example). Compassion = Strength
SHOULD I DOIT? • A lot of people that I talk to say they are not willing to meditate, because they do not want to change. They need to be accepted as they are. • This view as seeing ourselves as an isolated, permanent thing is flowed. Almost nothing of who you were at 5 years old is still you: your body fully regenerated, your feeling, emotions, behaviour are different. That’s One of the Three Marks of Existence: aniccā. Every thing is impermanent. • Secondly, no-one can really argue they are behaving the best possible way, there’s always room for improvements. • Finally, it is not because something is natural that it is always good. Humans naturally get diseases: it does not prevent us from trying to find cures.
EXPERIENCE DOING A VIPASSANARETREAT • 10 days living an experience similar to Monks doing between 5 and 10 hours of meditation a day. • Segregation between male and female. • Two Vegetarian meals a day. • No Books, no movies, no music. • Absolute Silence.
EXPERIENCE DOING A VIPASSANARETREAT • One should not seek for those, as this will bring thoughts and judgment which will make the practice harder. However, this is what I experienced: • Could vividly feel any parts of my body by bringing my attention to it. • Could remember all my dreams, every night. Could notice I was in a dream. • Experienced the difference between pain and suffering which helps me in Freediving. • Education: found it hard to realise that the whole field of mind training was completely unknown to me at 30 years old. Need to educate. • But Education here is only talking about the subject, it is not practicing.
SOME REFERENCES • TheArt of Meditation - Matthieu RICARD (Book) • http://www.amazon.com/Art-Meditation-Matthieu-Ricard/dp/ 0857892746 • Buddhism and Modern Psychology - Online course from Princeton University by the excellent Robert Wright: • https://www.coursera.org/learn/science-of-meditation/ • 7 takeaways after a 10 days Vipassana retreat: • https://medium.com/@opichon/7-takeaways-after-a-10-days- vipassana-retreat-ac44511b0dcb#.dikrwp2gk