Don’t trust your opinion about life or virtually anything, when your conditions and circumstances are terrible. If your mind is trapped, your thoughts will be trapped and restrained as well. Only through fixing your environmental and circumstancial issues and problems, that is, setting yourself free, will you be able to obtain a valid, accurate, trustworthy, reliable, opinion that deserves your attention and interest, about anything there is, including even figuring out that you were miserable and stuck, that your life sucked in its entirety, and including your thoughts and views about whether or not life is worth living, or whether or not it matters to pursue extraordinary quality of life, standards, and well-being. Your Suffering negatively affects and clouds your judgment.

The entire idea of shutting down your thinking because it is bad, negative mostly, and a huge source and contributor to our suffering is dangerous to say the least. If anything, meditation is more harmful than it is beneficial. It is based on suppression of your intelligence and suppression of the truth. It is okay to just sit there and relax while listening to music. But don’t stop or terminate every thought that arises. Instead, be on top of it, watch it, and be understanding of why it is coming to you. The only way to realize something new, get an idea, or come up with a solution to a problem is to either actively and consciously think about it or receive something about it (a preformed thought, result, conclusion, or answer) from your mind or brain that has figured it out on its own unconsciously. Arbitrarily suppressing or repressing that will hide all this from you, depriving you from knowing anything and depriving you from benefiting from your thoughts. Being able to relax while awake doesn’t make your entire day like a sprint without a moment of recovery or regeneration. It is so powerful to be able to decrease the amount of brain work and brain effort that is being exerted throughout your day, while you are awake (that is, outside of your sleeping or that is in addition to what occurs already during sleeping). We don’t have to mediate to reach that. There is relaxation or resting while doing nothing, really nothing at all, not even suppressing, repressing, controlling, caring about, or modifying your thoughts in any way. It is like creating without editing. Just do not exert any kind of mental effort, brain effort, brain work, or brain energy usage or spending whatsoever for quite some time (while you are resting but not sleeping). This is aside from the decreased brain working that occurs while sleeping. Any kind of benefit that comes from mediation might be attributed to resting that is a result of not being engaged in anything that requires any mental effort or energy (not even thinking). Do not inhibit the thoughts or inhibit thinking. Let the creation happen. Just don’t take it seriously or care about it. Do not edit anything. You will then rest and regenerate without sacrificing your intelligence and creativity in the process. Well rested people are capable of doing wonders. It is not because meditation made them better in any way. It is just that they got nothing to lose because they are so well rested that is it is almost impossible for them to be exhausted or fatigued or be energy drained and if they are anywhere near exhaustion or fatigue they would return or go back to mediation. At that time your brain actually repairs itself, in a way that is different from sleeping because your brain is shut down mostly while you are sleeping so it doesn’t fix and repair itself as efficiently or the exact same way. Resting while awake gives you the chance to recover at any moment during the day and catch your breath, and not just operate on maximum except when you are sleeping. You cannot hope to sprint maximally if you are not willing to really rest a little bit afterwords to catch your breath and calm your heart beating. You will not be able to initiate the sprint or massive workout without hope of totally resting and recovering from it afterwards. This is a major source of power and capability. People who are not like this are just jogging non-stop the entire day, and wonder why they feel tired all the time. They never rest except when they are asleep. How would they enjoy the beauty of the world or the beauty of life and have any kind of awareness or mindfulness or depth and richness of experience? They are barely making it through the day, just surviving.