My sleep last night started the same way as all the oth­ers so far this week: I felt too awake to sleep prop­erly. I lis­tened to a pod­cast to help me con­cen­trate on some­thing and calm down, Gil Fronsdal’s talk on Eval­u­at­ing Your Prac­tice, which had some great advice in it.

And then, accord­ing to my Sleep Cycle graph, I was out like a light for a solid six hours, right in deep sleep. I won­der what was dif­fer­ent last night from all the pre­vi­ous nights? Maybe my per­sis­tence is sim­ply pay­ing off.

What­ever hap­pened, I seem to be in a bet­ter place this morn­ing. I had a cup of cof­fee (pic­tured — that’s the actual cof­fee I drank this morn­ing) and then I thought about med­i­tat­ing. And, hav­ing maybe learned from pre­vi­ous mis­takes where I’ve thought, “no, I’ll do it later” and ended up cram­ming it in at 10:30pm, I sat down and meditated.

Another change I made today was a slight tech­ni­cal adjust­ment. I use pzizz as a med­i­ta­tion timer at home. Since I started this “reboot” of my prac­tice, I’ve had it set for a fif­teen minute med­i­ta­tion, with a chime every minute. When I first started, I found this was help­ful in bring­ing me back to the room. I’d often drift away dur­ing the course of the minute, and the deep, calm sound of the bell — it’s a real bell sound, not some com­puter chirp — would bring me back.

Recently, though, I’ve been find­ing that the bell has been feel­ing more like an inter­rup­tion. So today I stretched out the bell sound to once every three min­utes. And that seemed to work well.

I don’t know whether it was the good night’s sleep, the early med­i­ta­tion, the gen­eral per­se­ver­ance, last night’s pod­cast advice from Gil, the change to the “bong­ing”, or whether I just got lucky — prob­a­bly a com­bi­na­tion — but this morning’s med­i­ta­tion was really, really good. I sat, I counted breaths, I just kept on count­ing ten breaths and start­ing back over again. Sure, I could feel my mind being uncer­tain, and quest­ing, quest­ing for some­thing else to think about, for a dis­trac­tion of any kind, but when it drifted, I just brought it back to the breath and car­ried on.

So, pretty damn good, all told. I think I’ve made some more progress. This week’s les­son may be to make sure I stick to things — if I set out to do some­thing, like get­ting more sleep, and it doesn’t seem to be work­ing out, just stick with it, and see what happens.

More tomor­row, as always.