Category Archives: habit

Reboot Day 29: The Fifth Week Begins

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Today I med­i­tated right after my shower. Sadly, though I spent a decent amount of time in bed and asleep last night, I seemed to sleep quite lightly, and woke up with a headache — some­thing that has plagued me since a car crash a cou­ple of years ago. This prob­a­bly didn’t help my con­cen­tra­tion, which I found quite fragile.

Still, today marks the 29th day of med­i­ta­tion for me, and it’s an unbro­ken record as far as sit­ting down — or occa­sion­ally walk­ing — and med­i­tat­ing goes. There’s not been a sin­gle day where I’ve not med­i­tated in some way, or at least sat on my arse for fif­teen min­utes and given it a shot, which is a rea­son­able sum­mary of the worst days.

It’s been a bit up and down. I think I started see­ing some real progress in week 3, but this week has been a bit wiped out by stress, lack of sleep, and my pos­si­bly unwise attempts to try some­thing dif­fer­ent with walk­ing meditation.

So, what’s next? Well, I still don’t think I’m ready to increase my time. But I do think I’ve learned what I need to con­cen­trate on. Specif­i­cally, con­sis­tency and sleep.

First, con­sis­tency. I should sit and med­i­tate at around the same time every day, as early as I can. I need to help build my habit by mak­ing my prac­tice more con­sis­tent. I also need to keep to the same kind of practice.

It’s okay to try exper­i­ments like walk­ing med­i­ta­tion, but they should be as well as the steady, daily habit of seated med­i­ta­tion, not instead of it. That way I can try new things while still build­ing up a solid, con­sis­tent practice.

Sec­ondly, sleep. My most com­mon prob­lem with med­i­ta­tion is sleepi­ness. Med­i­ta­tion has helped me dis­cover how tired I am, but I’ve not yet man­aged to build up a habit of get­ting to bed ear­lier to get enough sleep. This doesn’t mean I need to be tucked up in bed with my cocoa by 8pm, but if I can grab a decent chunk of extra sleep every night, a half-hour, or an hour, say, then I think it would help a lot. And there’s only one way to find out, and that’s by giv­ing it a shot for a two or three weeks and see­ing how it feels.

So, those are my plans for the next few weeks: Try to develop a more con­sis­tent habit: med­i­tate ear­lier in the day, not last thing at night, and do it at the same kind of time, and do a seated med­i­ta­tion, prefer­ably focus­ing on the breath, every time. And get to bed a bit earlier.

It doesn’t sound hard, does it? We shall see…

Reboot Day 28: Later and Later

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Although the walk­ing med­i­ta­tion exper­i­ments this week have been inter­est­ing, I think it’s been a bad week for my med­i­ta­tion, on the whole. This is mostly because I’ve gen­er­ally been med­i­tat­ing late in the day, and pretty ran­domly. This feels like an unsta­ble week in a num­ber of ways.

It’s the fourth week of my med­i­ta­tion “reboot.” Per­haps I’ve been com­pla­cent, after I seemed to be get­ting on top of things in week three.

Either way, I’m going to try two things for the next week. Firstly, med­i­tat­ing as early as I sen­si­bly can — tomor­row and Sun­day, for exam­ple, I can med­i­tate after my morn­ing shower, so I’m awake as can be, and on the week­days I’m going to try med­i­tat­ing when I get home from work. That was work­ing well before. Sec­ondly, I’m going to recom­mit, yet again, to get­ting to bed by 11pm. This week’s TV-related shenani­gans rather blew that out of the water, but it was a good idea, and I was start­ing to feel better.

Any­way. It’s late. In fact, thanks to Tex­tEx­pander, I can tell you it’s exactly 10:58 PM as I’m typ­ing this. I’m tired, and I’ve not med­i­tated today. So I’m going to med­i­tate as soon as I fin­ish this entry, then go straight to bed. More tomorrow.

Edit to add: Well, that, as you might expect, was a bit of a dis­tracted, sleepy mess. Off to bed with me, I think!

Reboot Day 27: Solid Foundation

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I’ve med­i­tated twice today. This morning’s walk­ing med­i­ta­tion was an inter­est­ing exper­i­ment. I caught the boat as nor­mal, then med­i­tated for the last half of my jour­ney — effec­tively med­i­tat­ing for the last half of yesterday’s walk, rather than the first half.

That turned out to be a smidge under 15 min­utes, so about my nor­mal time, and it worked out bet­ter than I thought it would.

I started off with quite judge­men­tal thoughts in my head — my nor­mal mode, it seems. I started off try­ing to stop them, to sup­press them, but that didn’t work very well.

But I remem­bered that that’s not what mind­ful­ness is about. So instead I just tried to watch them, to see them arise and observe where they took my mind.

And they pretty much went away. I felt them start­ing to arise about as often as usual, but they seemed to wither on the vine then. I guess just watch­ing was enough.

So, that was a good experiment.

But I med­i­tated this evening, too. I felt the need to, and I think this is why: I’m not on a firm enough base yet.

My med­i­ta­tion prac­tice can’t really cope with being too dif­fer­ent from day to day. I think the only way I can start off with a solid foun­da­tion and, maybe more impor­tantly, build up the right habit, is to keep sit­ting down in the same way, every day, for a long time. A long time.

Don’t get me wrong: exper­i­ment­ing with walk­ing med­i­ta­tion was a good idea and a good expe­ri­ence. But I think I need to do things like that on top of a solid base of seated med­i­ta­tion, to keep build­ing up those habit mus­cles, and to keep exer­cis­ing the same med­i­ta­tion muscles.

Oth­er­wise the kettle’s never going to boil.

Reboot Day 25: Losing It

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A few days ago, my med­i­ta­tion was going pretty well, on the whole. This week, it’s really gone to dis­trac­tion in a dustcart.

Why? Well, the main rea­son, I think, is that I’ve not been giv­ing it pri­or­ity. Because my life’s been unavoid­ably quite busy, and because I’ve been a bit stressed out, I’ve been leav­ing it until the last minute. While I’ve had some pretty nice moments of med­i­ta­tion in some of these indi­vid­ual sit­tings, late at night, some­times out­side in the cool sum­mer evenings, I don’t think this week has been good overall.

For starters, I’ve been going to bed late, pretty much every day. And the whole point in me set­ting myself a bed­time and stick­ing to it was to help with the med­i­ta­tion, because oth­er­wise I was get­ting too tired. Last night that really started show­ing up as a prob­lem, as with­out the agi­ta­tion of the pre­vi­ous days, all perked up by the BBC stuff, I was drift­ing off pretty quickly dur­ing the meditation.

And when I’ve been med­i­tat­ing, it’s been right at the end of the day, com­pet­ing with sleep, and done as an “oh, shit, I for­got to med­i­tate, I’d bet­ter sit down” last-minute chore, rather than the sim­ple reg­u­lar daily prac­tice, that, if I remem­ber cor­rectly, I was going to do just after I got home from work.

Good things, though: at least I’ve kept up some kind of med­i­ta­tion every day. Some­times just stay­ing on your arse for fif­teen min­utes is enough. Enough to give me some kind of con­ti­nu­ity, keep some kind of habit going, get in touch with how I’m feel­ing, and alert me to the dan­ger that I’m stray­ing off the path — before I get too far away from it.

But hey, it’s only Wednes­day. And the past and the future really don’t exist, so I shouldn’t be stress­ing about them too much. Maybe I should do a walk­ing med­i­ta­tion this morn­ing; walk to work instead of get­ting the ferry, and not dis­tract myself by lis­ten­ing to stuff on my iPod. Given that I’m likely to be very tired by this evening, that might be the best approach to stop me doz­ing off dur­ing my med­i­ta­tion, and it means I won’t be risk­ing leav­ing it until the last mintue…

Reboot Day 5: Not Quite So Late

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…but still too damn late. It’s 11:45 PM. Which means I started medi­at­ing at 11:30 this evening, which is, oh, about five hours later than I prob­a­bly should have started. I just pro­cras­ti­nated with excuses like “watch­ing the foot­ball” (which was a bloody good game, Japan ver­sus Den­mark, very excit­ing, but still…)

I won­der if this is me try­ing hard not to suc­ceed at get­ting into this new habit? There’s often a bit of resis­tance at habit-forming, isn’t there? Well, tomor­row I shall med­i­tate when I get home from work. If there’s some­thing on telly I shall hit the “record” but­ton and watch it time-shifted. Or choose not to watch it at all. When it comes down to it, I do feel that med­i­ta­tion is more impor­tant than tele­vi­sion to me. Even if it’s that much harder to see that before I’ve med­i­tated and while there’s some­thing inter­est­ing on the screen.

Any­way. Tired one tonight, and I think I might have actu­ally been asleep sit­ting down when the final bell went. Meh. But at least it’s not mid­night yet, and there were a cou­ple of moments when I felt like I was head­ing in the direc­tion of greater concentration.

Inci­den­tally, talk­ing of the bell going, some notes on the prac­ti­cal­i­ties might be use­ful. I use a med­i­ta­tion mod­ule in pzizz on my Mac for my medi­a­tion, because it’s got a nice bell sound, and because I already used pzizz for sleep­ing and power nap­ping, when I need a bit of help.

I’m not too fussy, though; I don’t think get­ting too pre­cious about the prac­ti­cal aspects of med­i­ta­tion is that sen­si­ble. As well as pzizz, I gen­er­ally use a decent zafu and a rug, and, cur­rently, a can­dle. But if I were to be stay­ing in a hotel, say, I’d be happy enough with a rolled up towel, a wall to look at and a radio alarm or a kitchen timer. Any job, pas­time, or idle fancy can be fetishised to the degree that you just spend all your time buy­ing new toys rather than actu­ally fuck­ing doing what you’re meant to be doing, and you’ve got to be care­ful of that…