Category Archives: habit

Abject Failure, Desire, and Compassion

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I’m pro­cras­ti­nat­ing right now. I’m pro­cras­ti­nat­ing, I think, because report­ing fail­ure is never that cheery a prospect. And my “month of desire” — to analyse, work with and per­haps help myself over­come my grasp­ing at food, at con­sumer good, at any­thing — failed.

Not only did it fail, but it failed quite spec­tac­u­larly, with me overeat­ing like a par­tic­u­larly hun­gry ghost, and even giv­ing up med­i­ta­tion for a cou­ple of weeks.

And this is where I would prob­a­bly, in the past, have given up. And sunk back into despair.

But not this time. I have, instead, bought a cou­ple of par­tic­u­larly good-looking books on overeat­ing. I’ve also bought and have been lis­ten­ing to (I bought the audio ver­sion) Alan Watts’ The Way of Zen, to get some inspiration.

(Don’t fear, gen­tle reader, I know Zen is not about read­ing books. To para­phrase the emi­nent Mer­lin Mann, read­ing a book about Zen is like buy­ing a chair about jog­ging. But I’m hop­ing to find some point­ers in the right direc­tion, at least.)

And I plan on pick­ing myself up after this fail­ure, and get­ting back on with things. Because I think that this fail­ure may be part of the process. I’m def­i­nitely feel­ing dif­fer­ent things as a result even of fail­ing to let go of my desires. And I’ve been more emo­tional recently, which I think is a good sign of change.

So, I’m going to read these books, and try to get to the bot­tom of my desires, and specif­i­cally my prob­lems with overeat­ing and other addic­tions. Partly I’m going to try it through thought, and partly I’m going to med­i­tate. Because sim­ple daily med­i­ta­tion did seem to be tak­ing me in a good direc­tion in my life, and I don’t want to lose that.

The first thing I’ve found to use as inspi­ra­tion are these words from Zen mas­ter Hiakajo, quoted by Alan Watts:

“When hun­gry, eat, when tired, sleep”

That’s a def­i­n­i­tion of Zen. And it’s two areas I’ve been hav­ing such a prob­lem with all my life — for decades, at least — that it really hit home when I heard it. It sounds so sim­ple. And yet it feels so, so dif­fi­cult to do, for me. Even the sleep­ing, but espe­cially the eating.

But I’m going to bear those words in mine. And start­ing tomor­row (I’m too tired today, and it’s gone 10pm, so I’m going to head for bed right now) I’m back on the med­i­ta­tion, and I’m going to focus on sim­ple eat­ing and sleep­ing, and get­ting them right. Because I think those two key areas could specif­i­cally help me lead a more mind­ful life than any­thing else I can think of.

See you tomorrow.

— Orig­i­nally posted by Matt Gib­son on Gad­fly Mind.

Reboot Day 42 and 43: Reflections on Return from Holiday

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This week has been the hard­est week of my reboot. The hol­i­day didn’t just dis­rupt my habits — though it did that pretty well — but also gave me some emo­tional ups and downs on top.

Yes­ter­day I trav­elled back from the Lake Dis­trict. I don’t like trav­el­ling. Think­ing about it today, though, I won­der how much of my hatred of trav­el­ling is self-inflicted. I never plan trav­el­ling well enough, I leave pack­ing to the last minute, I leave leav­ing to beyond the last minute, quite often. I always over­dose on cof­fee and car­bo­hy­drates. No mat­ter how my eat­ing habits are at the time of going on hol­i­day, it’s all out of the win­dow as soon as I hit a motor­way ser­vices or an air­port, or whatever.

This week has left me think­ing a lot about the way I do things, and why I do them, and how I might change them to be a bet­ter, hap­pier per­son. To suf­fer less, I sup­pose I’m saying.

It’s also inter­est­ing that at least a cou­ple of peo­ple in the hol­i­day group asked for my advice about liv­ing life. Appar­ently I come across as some­one who’s gen­er­ally happy and “together”. This really couldn’t be fur­ther from the truth, I think. Appar­ently, though, this is the air I project. Per­haps I project the best of myself, and hide the worst from peo­ple. I sup­pose we all do, to some degree.

I feel, fun­da­men­tally, on the cusp of some­thing. I feel it’s time to make some choices, make some changes, improve my life, improve the way I live it.

In the mean­time, I had a desul­tory and late med­i­ta­tion ses­sion last night, and a bet­ter one just now. In the bet­ter one, I con­cen­trated on count­ing breaths. Some­one I lis­tened to recently — I think either Norm Fis­cher or Joseph Gold­stein — men­tioned that he counted breaths for a cou­ple of years dur­ing his early med­i­ta­tion prac­tice, because that was what worked for him, got him on the right track.

Count­ing breaths seems to work to some degree for me, so I think I’ll try it. And when I say “try it”, I mean try incor­po­rat­ing in into my prac­tice for a cou­ple of months, and see how it goes. Because I believe this “reboot” is set­tling in for the long term, and I believe that med­i­ta­tion is a long-term prac­tice and that you should prob­a­bly con­cen­trate on one type of prac­tice at a time, and devote a lot of hours to it, to give it a fair test, to see if it really works for you.

I may make some changes to this blog over the next week or two. For starters, I think I may declare the “reboot” period over, maybe at a nice round-numbered point like 50 days — or maybe 49, which will be seven weeks. I think I’ll still blog every day — it’s partly the daily blog­ging that’s keep­ing me “hon­est”, even though there’s nobody actu­ally read­ing this — but I may change to doing very short updates, briefly describ­ing the med­i­ta­tion, unless some­thing impor­tant strikes me, maybe with a weekly review.

Any­way. It’s late, and I’m tired, and I should get some sleep so that tomor­row is a bet­ter day than today.

— Orig­i­nally posted by Matt Gib­son on Gad­fly Mind.

Reboot Days 37, 38 and 39: On Failure And Success

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I would prob­a­bly count Day 37 as my first proper fail­ure. I for­got to med­i­tate — there were a few moments here and there through the day where I con­sid­ered it, but I just thought, “later.” Then I got dis­tracted by other things.

Even­tu­ally the day was over, it was 1am, and I remem­bered that I hadn’t med­i­tated. The oppor­tu­nity was gone. I did sit down for a desul­tory, tired prac­tice, but I don’t think I can really count it as my Day 37 meditation.

On Day 38, things were worse, or in some ways bet­ter. I was very tired, but — stick­ing with my plan to cut down on my caf­feine intake — I’d only had one cup of cof­fee, at break­fast. At lunch, by the time I would nor­mally have had two or three cof­fees, I had a decaf latte. By the time we got back from our lunch trip, I was very tired indeed. And I went for a nap.

Five or six hours later, my friend Kavita woke me up, on the grounds that there was more chance of me sleep­ing overnight if I actu­ally got up before evening.

I think this is a sign of my under­ly­ing tired­ness, and how I’ve been using caf­feine to stave off my knack­ered state and keep myself func­tion­ing, if not at a high level, then at least at a con­scious level. And it’s good that I’ve now got in touch with my tired­ness, and slept when I needed to.

And it turned out that I really did need to. I did med­i­tate a bit last night, but again, gone mid­night, and mostly as a mech­a­nism for wind­ing down for more sleep, in the hope that I wouldn’t spend a rest­less night after my after­noon mega-nap. That seemed to work, but again, not sure I can really count it as Day 38’s meditation.

The good news is that I slept well last night, and I feel pretty damn good today, rested and relaxed. And I’ve already med­i­tated. It wasn’t my finest fif­teen min­utes, but it was fif­teen min­utes of med­i­ta­tion that I didn’t do too late in the day, and where I didn’t nearly fall asleep, so pretty good by my standards.

Let’s hope that this means I can stay caught up on my sleep, keep my caf­feine intake down, and med­i­tate more reg­u­larly for the rest of this hol­i­day. If I can get into the habit of only hav­ing a sin­gle cof­fee in the morn­ing, I think it’ll be great for me, and, from what I’m feel­ing so far, I should be a lot more alert, grounded and clear with less caf­feine kick­ing around.

Any­way. I’m going to have a cup of yerba mate. It’s odd, but I’m get­ting to like it. And it’s caffeine-free.

— Orig­i­nally posted by Matt Gib­son on Gad­fly Mind.

Reboot Day 35: Travelling In Mind

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I’m on hol­i­day, so these posts may become a bit spo­radic. I’m going to try to set the post­ing date to be rel­e­vant to the day of med­i­ta­tion, though .

The first day went well. I med­i­tated as soon as I got to the hol­i­day home. I used a com­pletely dif­fer­ent setup from home, with a rolled-up blan­ket and a cush­ion replac­ing the zafu, and a tomato-style kitchen timer replac­ing Pzizz.

It was a pleas­ant change, to sit down in front of a view with trees in the dis­tance, and the mur­mur of my friends talk­ing downstairs.

After the six-hour drive, I was, as usual, rather sleepy, but I seemed to do okay. The bright light from the win­dow might have helped.

So, over­all, not a bad start. More later, when I’m not in a busy kitchen!

— Orig­i­nally posted by Matt Gib­son on Gad­fly Mind.

Reboot Day 32: The Complexity of Mind

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Still a bit sleepy when I med­i­tated tonight, but I did go for a jog first to wake myself up a bit.

The main thing I noticed was some­thing noticed by med­i­ta­tors the world over: the mind really doesn’t like just sit­ting still, being calm, and observ­ing one thing. I actu­ally phys­i­cally got up about a minute in because my mind had con­vinced me that I might have put my iPhone in the wash with my jog­ging gear.

This isn’t just unlikely — I knew I’d checked the pock­ets, and I knew I’d used the phone since I put the wash­ing on. But also: so what if I had? What could I do about it? The phone would already be dead, it’s only a phone, it’s insured, and the last time I needed a new one — I lost my last one in the crowd at a Babysham­bles gig(!) — the phone com­pany agreed the claim over the phone, and my new phone arrived the next day.

So, why did I get up? Because my mind didn’t want me sit­ting down to med­i­tate. I really think that’s what it was.

Then it threw up all sorts of nasty stuff. I started off med­i­tat­ing on my breath, and then I’m sud­denly halfway down a train of thought where maybe I’ve got can­cer and I should go and see my doc­tor. And that was just one of the odd diver­sions from just plain sit­ting down and being in the present moment that came along.

So, what’s going on here? Maybe this is a sign of progress. The old saw of things hav­ing to get worse before they get bet­ter is, I think, true, espe­cially when it comes to habit, and chang­ing habits. So, I think the thing to do is to keep going, just carry on sit­ting down and draw­ing my mind back to the breath, and not get­ting annoyed, or angry or dis­cour­aged. It’s okay if my mind wan­ders, as long as I catch it — that’s part of what med­i­ta­tion is for. For learn­ing how to notice that your mind is wan­der­ing off, and prac­tis­ing call­ing it back to the present moment.

Right. Tomor­row, I sit again. And the day after, and the day after that…

— Orig­i­nally posted by Matt Gib­son on Gad­fly Mind.