>since I started to smoke weed.

There are some similarities in the effect, yes. But the problems with weed is it's effect is temporary and it messes up your awareness. Also you can not do in in many public places. Should I mention that certain types of meditation make you even more intoxicated? :)

And also, the effects of weed do not appear to be temporary. I still get the benefits (minus the drawbacks) hours and days after the last joint.

I am curious, like what types of meditation ?

I'm sorry I will not give direct answer simply because it should not be taken lightly and without proper atmosphere and an experienced guidance can go out of control.

But if you keep your interest and intention to try experience something different - I'm sure you will find out.

Mindfulness is easier than getting weed. You can be mindful of your breathing for 5 seconds, right now. That's all it is, you just sit there letting thoughts come and go, trying to bring focus back to your breathing for 20 minutes. IMO it's better than coffee for acquiring focus and lasts the whole day.

I will try mindfullness some day

Weed does open the eyes to how much more relaxed you can be, both emotionally and physically: turns out that normally I have muscles tense that I never even knew about.

After that, you begin listening to your body and the brain more, and to track the state of them both instead of taking it for granted. That's how the way to ‘mindfulness’ starts. You learn that the two states are in a feedback loop: if you're tense, you get angry and anxious, which gets you more tense. To break the loop, you could of course hit a blunt, but that's not always an option, or at least not always the best one. Alternatively, you can take some time to free the brain from being hung up on the worries and to free the body from being contorted by tenseness.

Mindfulness is a lot cheaper :)

Depends. I get better effects from meditation after having just completed a ten day course. But it takes a lot of time to get there and to keep doing it on a daily basis. If you used that time for something that earned you money I doubt it would work out cheaper.

And portable too.

Both things change how you think temporarily. I think they both do so in such a way that you can identify and emotionally deal with stuff that would otherwise remain unresolved.

I'm sorry, but there is a fine line between dealing with stuff and smoking weed, one of which involves dealing with stuff, and the other postponing dealing with stuff.

That's simply not true. I've dealt with hard stuff in my life (ie very long term relationship went into tough sudden breakup) with weed. It gave me a good perspective on it that holds to this day, it made me close the whole topic completely very quickly (1-2 weeks at max) in a rather pleasant way.

I've set my life priorities with help of weed. They still hold to this day. I've done some of the best decisions on direction of my life with weed. Looking back +-10 years ago, damn those were some fine decisions. Weed gives me, when alone, often semi-constant stream of very creative ideas just popping out of sub-consciousness. I've come up with ideas for startups at least 50x, often to find later somebody is already well into executing it (often in areas I normally don't touch, ie self-belaying machines for climbing, or self-shaping moving wall for climbing - I never ever saw/heard about any of those, but it seems they are quite popular in US).

The rate, amount and depth of those ideas just isn't there when sober. The rate is so high that I sometimes don't manage to record them all.

All this was done alone, just me and my emotions. YMMV, but for my introvertish personality type, it works wonders. There are drawbacks of course, like with everything else. But postponing dealing with issues is more of an alcohol style effect.

Okay, so I won't try to rob you of that experience. I've felt creativity and perspective when doing psychoactive drugs, too.

The rate of good ideas (or rather, the feeling of that, as it is) was called "interpretation madness" by one podcaster.

When you relate alcohol with postponing one's emotions, perhaps this is because you've seen that happen. So have I.

But I've also seen dozens of friends get stuck in their emotional (and educational) development for years because of weed.

Don't forget the hashishins - the drug is literally named after a bunch of assassins who smoked to forget.

Yeah, that's why I mentioned YMMV. I've seen people turn aggressive on weed, but then again they were broken personalities to start with, and alcohol wasn't faring much better. I've witnessed one lady mentioning seeing blood run down the walls during whole trip. Tons of people just giggle with little additional insight. Don't know, maybe mindset thing.

It's a mind altering drug, can be quite powerful, can create (easy to shed) psychical dependence. As we say back home about fire - good servant, bad master.

>But I've also seen dozens of friends get stuck in their emotional (and educational) development for years because of weed.

Weed has different effects on different people. Assuming that weed will have the same effect on everyone is obviously a bad assumption.

There are tons of stories about many different things (gluten, msg, sugar, caffiene, coffee, tea, ice cream, tylenol, etc. etc.) having different effects on different people. Sometimes those differences are completely perceptional, and sometimes they are physical, but the outcomes are definitively different.

It's a deep cognitive bias to ignore this fact.

I think different people use it differently. Certainly a lot of people use it to postpone dealing with stuff.

I do think it’s possible to use it as a tool to help you deal with stuff though, and I think that’s what the person I was replying to was doing.

This statement , "postponing dealing with stuff.", is not true, at least not for everyone. At least in my case and according to several testimonies I read/heard.

I have never been more apt to deal with issues than since I started smoking weed.

That’s fine but doesn’t mean people can’t get benefits from mindfulness! Both could be good