Category Archives: caffeine

Reboot Day 49: Slightly Better Breath Counting

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Although I’m still not sleep­ing enough, and I felt fairly tired this evening, the med­i­ta­tion went bet­ter. I counted breaths rel­a­tively reli­ably, though I was also drift­ing and day­dream­ing a bit in par­al­lel. Cutely, a lit­tle girl walked past in the street out­side while, and while I was count­ing to ten, she was show­ing off how she could count to twenty.

So, not so much nod­ding off, and I’m still restrict­ing the caf­feine. Went to a cafe at lunchtime and was sen­si­ble enough to have a decaf, which was good. Maybe this is a bit of progress…

Any­way. This is day 49, but I’m not giv­ing up the daily blog­ging just yet. I think this is still a fairly frag­ile prac­tice for me, and it’s chang­ing day to day and week to week, so I think it’s worth keep­ing at least brief notes for every med­i­ta­tion ses­sion for a while to come. So — more tomorrow!

Reboot Day 47: How Hard Can It Be to Count to Ten?

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Good­ness. I went to bed on time last night, and I think I slept fairly well, too. And I med­i­tated soon after get­ting home from work. But that didn’t seem to help this evening. I strug­gled to reach ten breaths every time, instead slip­ping into sleepy drift­ing before real­is­ing I’d lost count, and start­ing back again from a count of one. And I did again and again, for the whole fif­teen minutes.

That was, frankly, just plain rub­bish. Hope­fully this is a side-effect of my recent cut-down on caf­feine — today I had one cup of cof­fee in the morn­ing when I woke up, and one cup of green tea in the after­noon. Which is an awful lot less that I was drink­ing before my holiday.

I think the only thing to do is keep going and see if things get bet­ter. Hope­fully my body will reset itself to some degree, and maybe I’ll start sleep­ing more deeply as the caf­feine slowly dis­ap­pears from my sys­tem and my brain gets used to the lack of it…

Days 40 and 41: Ups and Downs

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My habits still seem to be quite shat­tered by being on hol­i­day. On the whole, though, while this hasn’t been good for the med­i­ta­tion, it’s been good for the caf­feine intake, and I’m down to one cup of cof­fee a day and feel­ing pretty chip­per about it, too. Although I think some choco­late late last night (which I always for­get con­tains caf­feine) might have hurt my sleep a bit.

Day 40 was a bad day for med­i­ta­tion; too busy and I didn’t ever find the right oppor­tu­nity for a proper time out dur­ing the day­time, so I instead tagged my med­i­ta­tion on to the end of an already-late night. But at least I did it.

Today, I’ve already med­i­tated. That went well, except that I was wor­ried I was going to miss out on a group walk that would be start­ing — or at least be dis­turbed by some­one com­ing to get me — and that made me a bit too jit­tery, and I ended the med­i­ta­tion a cou­ple of min­utes early. I did at least twelve min­utes of the nor­mal fif­teen, though.

And that’s about all I’ve got time to report. More when I get back home, prob­a­bly — trav­el­ling back tomor­row, and I imag­ine I’ll be med­i­tat­ing at home rather than here, so it’ll be fairly late again. But it should be in my nor­mal sur­round­ings on my zafu at home…

Reboot Day 36: The Notebook Version

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20100725-DSC00325.jpg

Not much time for writ­ing up my med­i­ta­tion, in between walk­ing and an anniver­sary party, so here’s a sim­ple tran­scrip­tion of my notes for reboot day 36:

Med­i­ta­tion 24/7:

  • Sleepy. Lit­er­ally nod­ding off.
  • Tried to stay with breath.
  • Drift­ing a lot at the end.
  • Blank wall.
  • More dif­fi­cult to stay awake once you’ve lapsed the first time

And here’s a photo of the view from the win­dow, although as you can see from my notes, I was mostly look­ing at the blank wall below the win­dow. I’ve been med­i­tat­ing eyes-open just to try and stave off the tiredness.

Today I’ve (so far!) had one fewer cof­fee than yes­ter­day. Hope­fully I’ll stick with that, and then I’ll try to get down to a sin­gle cof­fee tomor­row, and try to stick with just the one cof­fee for a few days.

Taking Hints from the Universe

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So, should I cut down on my caf­feine this week, to see if it’ll improve my sleep­ing, tired­ness lev­els, and there­fore med­i­ta­tion? That’s what I was pon­der­ing on the drive up to the Lake Dis­trict. It would be a good oppor­tu­nity, being in a dif­fer­ent place, and not pass­ing the usual cafes, and being able to get up later if I needed to.

As I was dri­ving, I was lis­ten­ing to an episode of <a href=”http://www.zencast.org/”>Zencast</a> where Andrea Fella men­tioned some­thing I’m sure I already knew, but had for­got­ten: one of the stan­dard West­ern trans­la­tions of “Bud­dha” is “awak­ened one.”

Now, I’m not sure how much this trans­la­tion is rel­e­vant to actual sleep and wake­ful­ness; pre­sum­ably it’s intended metaphor­i­cally. But I’m not one to pass up hints from the uni­verse. I think I’m going to take this reminder that the Bud­dha was fully awak­ened as a hint that I should try to get very lit­er­ally more awak­ened myself.

So far, I’m not doing so well. Although I’ve had less cof­fee today than I nor­mally would, I think. And I want to back off slowly, lest the with­drawal hit me with the headache ham­mer. We’ll see…