So, I’ve not blogged since last Sun­day. I did med­i­tate once more on hol­i­day, but only once.

I don’t think I’m going to count that as a fail­ure. I said on Sun­day that my hol­i­day mood was “not the best frame of mind to med­i­tate in”, and I think, on reflec­tion, that I was right. My self-examination on hol­i­day was almost too intense to deal with as it was, and I think part of my avoid­ing med­i­ta­tion was a fear that it would become even stronger if I did meditate.

I think I’m going to count my lack of med­i­ta­tion on hol­i­day as two things: One, a hol­i­day, from med­i­ta­tion as well as every­thing else, and two, as the end­ing point of my “reboot”.

That’s not to say I’m going to stop med­i­tat­ing. But hav­ing reached the 90-day point just before I left for Crete, I’d say that three pretty solid months of med­i­ta­tion prob­a­bly counts as a suc­cess­ful “reboot” of my prac­tice. And this is a good point to say that that’s done with, that I’m now prop­erly back in the habit, and that I’ll con­tinue daily med­i­ta­tion from here. It’s time to say that med­i­ta­tion is, now, a nor­mal, daily part of my life.

I’m also going to bump up the length of med­i­ta­tion a lit­tle — I’m going for twenty min­utes now, rather than fif­teen. Five min­utes extra isn’t much, but it’s a third as much again as I’m cur­rently doing, and I don’t want to over­stretch myself, just build up grad­u­ally. I’ll review in a month or two, and see whether I want to add another five min­utes, and so on, until I reach a half-hour, which is my tar­get for a min­i­mum daily practice.

So, today was my first twenty-minute med­i­ta­tion, and it was okay. I got dis­tracted by lots of dif­fer­ent thoughts, but I did keep bring­ing myself back. And hav­ing slept fairly thor­oughly and fed myself a cof­fee and show­ered first, at least I wasn’t falling asleep.

I think this blog will now change a lit­tle bit — there will be more empha­sis on the ways I want to change my life, for exam­ple, as prompted by my self-examination on hol­i­day. The 90-day reboot seems to have done the trick of shak­ing some things a bit loose inside me, and mak­ing me want to reach for change. So I may well start blog­ging about the efforts I’m mak­ing to improve my life — to improve myself, frankly, among other things.

But I think I shall still check in daily, after my med­i­ta­tion. I may just men­tion the med­i­ta­tion in pass­ing, or not at all, and talk instead about other aspects of my life, as they relate to progress, improve­ment, Bud­dhism, and spir­i­tu­al­ity in gen­eral. I think it’s impor­tant to keep those thoughts in my mind — you become your thoughts, after all — and blog­ging is a good way of doing it.