Category Archives: effort

Reboot Day 84: Slightly Improved

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I’m still feel­ing that I’m not really in con­trol of my med­i­ta­tion. That I haven’t found whichever tech­nique could help me apply effort in the right place to over­come drowsi­ness. But today’s med­i­ta­tion was bet­ter, even though it was done in the evening. (I did think about doing it in the morn­ing, but in the end I did my Morn­ing Pages and then ran out of time before I needed to get out to pick a par­cel up from the deliv­ery office.)

Tomor­row I will med­i­tate in the morn­ing, either just before or just after the Morn­ing Pages. And we’ll see how it goes.

Per­haps I should take some “home­work” with me on hol­i­day — I should have plenty of time to read, and maybe I can buy some­thing to take with me on the Kin­dle… There must be a book on “how to improve your med­i­ta­tion”. Of course, the problem’s likely to be that there are 3,000 books on “how to improve your med­i­ta­tion”, but only three of them are any good. Nev­er­the­less, I’ll take a look.

Reboot Day 83: Still Drifting

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Okay, another med­i­ta­tion ses­sion that I started when I got home from work, ear­lier rather than later. But I’m still miss­ing any feel­ing of still­ness, or concentration.

I didn’t try the Morn­ing Pages this morn­ing. I should have done. I will tomor­row. Tomor­row being Sat­ur­day, I should have time to write my Morn­ing Pages, and to med­i­tate in the morn­ing, when I’m not feel­ing so tired.

It feels like I’m not focus­ing enough effort on med­i­ta­tion at the moment. I’m putting in the minutes/hours, sit­ting down daily, but I think it needs the sup­port of the rest of my life to work prop­erly. I was doing bet­ter when I was eat­ing prop­erly, and when I wasn’t so busy. Hmm.

I don’t want to lose the path I was on — that seemed to be head­ing in the right direc­tion. Maybe I should try a longer med­i­ta­tion tomor­row and Sun­day, when I have a lit­tle more time. Per­haps that might help influ­ence the rest of my life — it def­i­nitely works both ways, and I could do with some pos­i­tive feed­back right now…

Reboot Days 81 and 82: Morning Pages

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Still feel­ing quite dis­con­nected from my med­i­ta­tion. Yes­ter­day was worse — I left the med­i­ta­tion too late again, sadly. Today I med­i­tated when I got home, but I was still feel­ing quite tired, and didn’t con­cen­trate well.

A lot of my life feels like it’s spi­ralling out of con­trol at the moment. My eating’s gone a bit mad in the last fort­night — the half-marathon at the week­end led me to not worry too much about what I ate last week, but that seems to have car­ried on into this week. Plus I’m feel­ing like I’m rush­ing to get every­thing done before I head off to see my Dad in Crete, which is com­ing up soon.

One thing that’s inter­est­ing: I’ve not been doing my Morn­ing Pages. My Morn­ing Pages are def­i­nitely an out­let for me, and part med­i­ta­tion, part ther­apy, too. I won­der if I can urge myself back into doing them tomor­row morn­ing? Maybe a few days of con­sis­tent Pages writ­ing would help get me back on track…

Reboot Day 76: Still A Bit Rubbish

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Still a bit rub­bish today, despite med­i­tat­ing at 10:30 in the morn­ing. Although that means I did pro­cras­ti­nate about it for quite some time, which prob­a­bly didn’t help. Still, at least I’ve sat before the main event of the day — my cousin’s wed­ding — kicks off, and made sure I don’t skip it completely.

Dis­tracted, thoughts every­where, count­ing breaths but then real­is­ing I’d got to eleven, twelve, even six­teen out of ten. Tried to make my pos­ture more upright and atten­tive to com­bat resid­ual sleepi­ness but just ended up with back­ache that dis­tracted me more. In the end, I quite a cou­ple of min­utes from the end of the sit­ting, because it really didn’t feel like it was going anywhere.

Next time I get that urge, I’ll have to strug­gle through and see if I can get to the end any­way. The dis­ci­pline is impor­tant, and I don’t want to start giv­ing up early; that’s a bad habit to develop…

Reboot Day 66: Let’s Give It One More Try

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So, yet again, I have to report tired­ness and fatigue got in the way of my med­i­ta­tion. Droopy-eyed and drift­ing, I didn’t get much out of this evening’s ses­sion. It wasn’t that I left it too late — I med­i­tated while my part of my din­ner was reduc­ing down, sim­mer­ing on the hob for twenty min­utes, not long after I got home from work.

No, I think it’s sim­ple, cumu­la­tive fatigue, brought on by the fact that I never ever go to bloody bed early enough.

I really think it’s that simple.

So, yet again, I’m going to try, this week, to get to bed before 11pm, every night. There’s noth­ing that should really keep me up at any point in the next seven days, there’s no gigs, no evening vis­i­tors, no late-night photo oppor­tu­ni­ties, no travel, no des­per­ate we-must-finish-this evening work.

There’s just a week of pretty clear evenings after nor­mal work days, spread out in front of me.

So, as I said, yet again, I’m going to try. It’s time to apply some right effort to the right place in my prac­tice, and that place isn’t on the zafu, it’s in the rest of my life.

We’ll see how I do. This week I’ll be jour­nalling my bed­time and the qual­ity of my sleep, as well as the meditation.