Monthly Archives: July 2007

Day 33: The Big Monthly Review

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So. I just read back all the entries so far. I’m going to try to sum­marise the big­ger events and recur­ring themes, then I’m going to decide where I should go from here.

The month as a whole has been a bit of a roller­coaster ride. Med­i­ta­tion first, I think.

Med­i­ta­tion

I’ve had insights and obser­va­tions and changes that seem to have hap­pened just because I’ve been try­ing to med­i­tate for just fif­teen min­utes every day.

So, on the plus side, I’ve had moments where I’ve felt quite deep insight; I’ve had a series of bizarre dreams; I’ve slept more deeply; I’ve had at least one moment of bliss­ful con­tent­ment, where I’ve felt that every­thing was right with the universe.

I’ve had more aware­ness, cer­tainly, although often it’s been aware­ness of stuff which isn’t so good: aware­ness of my own tired­ness, and the high lev­els of ten­sion I seem to be feeling.

On the neg­a­tive side, I still don’t seem to be much bet­ter at med­i­ta­tion now than I was at the begin­ning of the month. I’m still quite dis­tracted and dis­tractable. I’m feel­ing maybe a lit­tle more focused, but not much.

I do feel like I’m on the brink of some­thing, though. That’s less­ened some­what since I went on this stag do and tired myself out com­pletely as well as skimp­ing on the med­i­ta­tion, but I think I’ll be walk­ing back towards that brink if I carry on and throw myself back into it.

And I think it’s the brink of some­thing that’s going to be interesting.

Fun­da­men­tally, I’m not sure I can really describe or quan­tify it, but I feel that I’m just fun­da­men­tally hap­pier, more at ease with myself and my mind, my emo­tions. I feel more… inte­grated, I suppose.

And that can only be a good thing.

Other things: I’ve decided not to carry on with Sri Chin­moy, but I’ve not yet found any other teacher. I could prob­a­bly use a teacher. They say that when the stu­dent is ready, the teacher will appear, but I’m think­ing I may want to give that process a bit of a kick-start :)

I’ve found out that walk­ing med­i­ta­tion can some­times work for me, but that I’m not very good at keep­ing up my prac­tice when I’m away from home.

Oh, yeah: and I’ve found out that incense makes me sneeze.

Writ­ing

On the writ­ing front, I started the month with the arti­cle on Sec­ond Life, I fol­lowed up with WiTric­ity, and I’m just about to start work on an arti­cle on super­sti­tion. I also came out with a big essay on pens ver­sus key­boards. And I took a half-day course in free­lance jour­nal­ism… Basi­cally, things have been moving.

The med­i­ta­tion, I think, has helped me be more aware of sto­ries out there in the world that I could use as a basis for my writ­ing, too.

I think I’ve also decided what I want to write, the gen­eral direc­tion I want to go in.

And here’s an inter­est­ing thing: I wanted to write every day, but I didn’t — except that, of course, I’ve been writ­ing in this blog every day. I’ve writ­ten more than 12,000 words since I started, aver­ag­ing nearly 400 words a day.

Which is good, but fun­da­men­tally, it’s not sus­tain­able, and it’s not ter­ri­bly inter­est­ing for any­one else. This “blog” so far has been a medi­a­tion diary for my own use, and it’s been on the web sim­ply because that’s the eas­i­est place to diarise these days — you can do it from any­where and you’ve auto­mat­i­cally got an off-site backup.

But I don’t think I’ll need to be so detailed in the future.

The Future

So. I’m def­i­nitely going to con­tinue with the med­i­ta­tion. I’m going to carry on as I am, at least, and try to do bet­ter, in fact, mak­ing sure I do my 15 min­utes every day, and maybe throw­ing in an addi­tional, longer ses­sion now and then.

But what I’m not going to do is blog about it in great detail. I’m going to do a weekly med­i­ta­tion catchup, to keep myself on track, and I might make very brief (offline) notes to chart my daily progress.

What I’m going to do, you see, is to take the time I’ve been using to write three or four hun­dred words about the med­i­taiton every day and use it to write arti­cles, blog entries, maybe even sto­ries. I’m going to get into a real writ­ing prac­tice, I’m going to write arti­cles for the Null, I’m going to expand lit­tle obser­va­tions into big­ger pieces, I’m going to write lit­tle chunks of fiction…

I’m going to write things that might inter­est peo­ple, in other words, as well as giv­ing me decent writ­ing practice.

I don’t know how much of that will hap­pen here. I think my first “alpha” audi­ence will be my friends on Live­Jour­nal, although what I may end up doing is pub­lish­ing more pol­ished, fin­ished prod­uct here. Only time will tell.

I’ll still use this as an out­let for talk­ing about my writ­ing, for track­ing my pub­li­ca­tions, and for record­ing any impor­tant thoughts and insights on med­i­ta­tion that I have. But for now the exper­i­ment is over, and it’s time to con­cen­trate on writ­ing about some­thing other than meditation.

Day 32: Not Quite the Monthly Review

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Today’s morn­ing med­i­ta­tion ses­sion didn’t go well at all; too tired, still, too much pro­cess­ing to do from the week­end, gen­er­ally just too drifty and droopy-eyed.

As for the month-end review, I’ve let myself off the hook for today. I noticed that my first med­i­ta­tion entry said that I’d give myself until the end of July, and con­sid­er­ing that I’m still run­ning on too lit­tle sleep, I’m going to post­pone my review until tomor­row or Wednesday.

That being said, I fig­ured I should at least give a frame­work for the review. What I want by the end of my review of the month is:

To know whether I’m going to con­tinue with med­i­ta­tion, and why To find out what the recur­ring themes of the month are Some rules for help­ing myself med­i­tate Any rules for life in gen­eral that seem to have occurred as a result of my prac­tice How often/how much I’m going to blog about med­i­ta­tion in the future

That’s what occurs to me at the moment, any­way. I’ll leave it in the back of my mind, and also see what pops unex­pect­edly up when I get around to read­ing back the story so far…

Now I’m going to fin­ish this (decaf) cof­fee and try a walk­ing med­i­ta­tion on my way home from the Watershed.

Days 30 and 31: Sleep Deprivation and Content

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I’ve been at a stag week­end all week­end. I med­i­tated yes­ter­day morn­ing, and it wasn’t bril­liant, but I was in a hotel room, out of my usual envi­ron­ment, and under time pres­sure. Today I’ve not med­i­tated yet, but I may try, sim­ply to see how well I do con­sid­er­ing how lit­tle sleep I’ve had and how many unprocessed things are still whirling around in my mind. I’m not expect­ing mir­a­cles, but it may be an inter­est­ing expe­ri­ence. And I sup­pose I feel a bit obliged to make some effort on day 31, which I could call the end of the month.

Good news, though, in terms of my men­tal state in gen­eral. I had a great time, and I remem­ber one moment in par­tic­u­lar, com­ing back from the toi­lets in the pub we went to after the Turk­ish restau­rant (insight often strikes at the most banal times), where I sud­denly realised that I was sur­rounded by amaz­ing peo­ple, tons of my friends, hav­ing a com­pletely won­der­ful time, with every­one seem­ing happy and that I felt utterly con­tented and at peace. And that it wasn’t the arti­fi­cial con­ge­nial­ity of alco­hol mak­ing me see the world through a rose-tinted view — because I haven’t had a drink since Feb­ru­ary. It really was that I just felt relaxed and present in the world and sur­rounded by… Well, love, I sup­pose. To have a moment like that, feel­ing con­fi­dent and at peace and fun­da­men­tally happy and know­ing that there was noth­ing arti­fi­cial prop­ping it up was really special.

I can’t help but feel that the med­i­ta­tion may have helped me get more in touch with my feel­ings, and pos­si­bly made me more socially con­fi­dent as a by-product. I cer­tainly seem to have been more relaxed around the peo­ple I didn’t know than I would oth­er­wise have been — espe­cially when sober.

Any­way. On a lighter note, it’s also pos­si­ble that my med­i­ta­tion helped my con­cen­tra­tion and aware­ness for the archery we were doing — the big event of the stag week­end was spend­ing Sat­ur­day at an archery activ­ity place and learn­ing how to shoot bows & arrows! I felt really engaged with it, and con­cen­trated on what I was doing when I was actu­ally shoot­ing (is that the right word?) and I did pretty well. I def­i­nitely improved a lot dur­ing the course of the day, any­way. Good fun all round, really…

Hope­fully I’ll get enough sleep tonight and be able to do a monthly roundup of my med­i­ta­tion expe­ri­ences so far tomor­row. I was lis­ten­ing to one of the Intro­duc­tion To Med­i­ta­tion lessons from the Zen­cast on the way back in the car, and Gil Frons­dal said that he rec­om­mended that med­i­ta­tion stu­dents take a week off med­i­ta­tion to see what kind of a dif­fer­ence it makes — after their first six months’ prac­tice, that is! That inspired me to think of this exper­i­ment in the rather longer-term, and what changes I might need to make to keep that up (like shorter daily post­ings and less ram­bling, for exam­ple!) More on that later in the week, I think. Right now I’m run­ning on about 10 hours sleep out of the last 48, which is not a happy place to be.

Day 29: Am I making progress?

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This is a nec­es­sar­ily brief update from my desk at work dur­ing the last few min­utes of my lunchtime. This morn­ing I did sit down and I did try to med­i­tate, but I’m not sure I achieved any­thing.  And as I sit here at Day 29 I’m aware that it’s now been nearly a month since I started.  I think I should do a monthly review soon, and see if I can see progress, or the lack of it.  And, if there seems to be a lack of progress, whether I should plough on for another month, and if so what changes I should make in my practice.

Also in scope for the monthly review will be a review of how I’m doing with writ­ing, and what plans I have to improve that side of things, too.

But that’s for a day with more time.  Today suf­fice it to say that I’m mod­er­ately tired, that my mind doesn’t feel par­tic­u­larly focused, and that I’ve got a lot of dri­ving to do this evening which I’m not par­tic­u­larly look­ing for­ward to.  And while I think “dri­ving med­i­ta­tion” could work, that today prob­a­bly isn’t the day to try it…

Day 28: Tiredness and Touchstones

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I’m start­ing to realise that med­i­ta­tion is a fine touch­stone for your state of mind. I think pre­vi­ously I’d have known I was a bit tired on some morn­ings, but then I’d have dragged myself through the shower and poured caf­feine down my throat until I didn’t notice it any more.

This morn­ing, the med­i­ta­tion cer­tainly allowed me to notice how tired I was. A scat­tered mind, with par­tic­u­larly ironic inter­rup­tions this morn­ing — not least of which was Adult Net’s Tomor­row Morning’s Day­dream on repeat in my brain. I haven’t played this track for years; it was surely picked by my sub­con­scious for its com­edy value.

What’s impor­tant in the future, though, is for me to pay heed to this warn­ing sign and be a bit more care­ful dur­ing the tired days. If I can’t go back to sleep (feh! Who’d work for a liv­ing?) then I need to guard my words a bit, con­sider my responses. I think I was a bit abrupt today, and I cer­tainly wasn’t very cheer­ful. I wouldn’t want to be arti­fi­cially cheer­ful, but I may need to plan my work so I don’t come into con­tact with as many peo­ple, for exam­ple. Tired days are not days to talk con­tentious things through with any­one important.

Not that any­thing par­tic­u­larly ter­ri­ble hap­pened today, it’s just that I want to recog­nise and note down this learn­ing experience.

Any­way. That’s enough for this evening. Updates may be few and far between over the next few days, as I’ve got a very busy week­end com­ing up.