Category Archives: posture

Reboot Day 77: Things On My Mind

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A com­bi­na­tion of drowsi­ness, think­ing about my cousin’s wed­ding yes­ter­day, and think­ing about my first half-marathon tomor­row, all dis­tracted me from my sit­ting today. I found it very hard to focus. I kept try­ing for the first half, but in the last half of the ses­sion, the drift­ing­ness of near-dreaming got to me too often for me to keep my mind on the job.

Still, I sat for the whole fif­teen min­utes, back­ache and dis­trac­tion and all, and I’ll sit for fif­teen min­utes tomor­row, prob­a­bly in the morn­ing before I head out. If I try and sit cross-legged for fif­teen min­utes after I’ve done a half-marathon, the chances are fairly good that I won’t get up again…

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 62: Directing the Mind

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[First off, some house­keep­ing: any­one who was read­ing a tech blog and has sud­denly found it’s turned into a med­i­ta­tion blog: sorry. My fault. I split these sites a long time ago — because peo­ple were unlikely to be ter­ri­bly inter­ested in both — but I only just noticed that the RSS feed for one was still point­ing at the other.

If you’re read­ing this — and doubt­less slightly sur­prised to find a bunch of excep­tion­ally dull journal-style posts about med­i­ta­tion — I rec­om­mend you dump this feed and go over to gothick.org.uk/blog and sub­scribe there instead. That’ll be the one about Macs and pro­gram­ming and other tech stuff.

This site, gadflymind.com, really is sim­ply a per­sonal jour­nal at the moment. It might turn into deeper thoughts on med­i­ta­tion once I’ve got a decent prac­tice built up, but that’ll be a few months yet, I’d’ve thought…]

Any­way. Tonight my mind was quite busy, but I did have some lim­ited suc­cess in turn­ing it to a more reflec­tive, calm state. Espe­cially toward the begin­ning of the med­i­ta­tion. Towards the end, my nor­mal tired­ness kicked in a bit. I com­bated that with opened eyes and more upright pos­ture, but again, only lim­ited success…

And that’s all I’ve got time to say, really, see­ing is it’s just gone mid­night! More tomorrow…

Reboot Day 59: Breathing or Calm?

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I think falling asleep for an impromptu nap a half-hour before my med­i­ta­tion helped this evening. Cer­tainly I wasn’t as sleepy as I could have been.

Today’s ses­sion prompted me to won­der if count­ing breaths is the right thing for me. I had some real moments of calm mind­ful­ness, good lit­tle chunks of time — before, inevitably, I thought “hey, wow, I’m really calm,” and broke the spell :)

Any­way, those moments seemed to appear when I stopped count­ing breaths. They actu­ally seemed spon­ta­neous; I’d feel like it was a good idea to open my eyes, and just be calm, right there, and I did, and it felt… right.

Per­haps this is one of those times where I have to deploy the fac­ulty of dis­cern­ment and decide whether to go with what feels right, or to stick with the count­ing breaths, or both — per­haps count­ing breaths can help to get me into a state of mind­ful­ness, but then it helps me to give up the count­ing in order to expe­ri­ence it.

Hmm. Food for thought, any­way. I shall con­tinue exper­i­ment­ing tomorrow…

Reboot Day 55: Different Distractions

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Today I kept my pos­ture fairly well, and didn’t seem to drift off sleep­ily. But I did drift off, into thoughts of other things. Partly this was gen­eral day­dream­ing. A chunk of it was a bit of excite­ment as one of my favourite Bris­tol events starts today, the Bris­tol Inter­na­tional Bal­loon Fiesta, and I’m going to walk up to the Ash­ton Court estate in a minute and watch the night glow, where twenty or thirty teth­ered hot air bal­loons fire up their burn­ers in time to cheesy music. It’s fab.

That was also the phys­i­cal dis­trac­tion that cut short my sit­ting a few min­utes early, as a friend called to talk about the fes­ti­val, and how to get there, and when the launches were. I don’t turn my phone off for my med­i­ta­tion ses­sions, because I don’t get many calls any­way — this is the first time anyone’s inter­rupted me by ring­ing, I think, and I can live with that hap­pen­ing once every 54 days!

Any­way. Bet­ter go. I’ve got bal­loons to see.