Category Archives: procrastination

Reboot Days 75 & 75: Not enough time

Posted on by
Reply

These two days have been pretty poor for med­i­ta­tion. Yes­ter­day I was think­ing of med­i­tat­ing when I got home from work, before I went out to din­ner with my par­ents, but as it turned out, we met up on my way home from work. That pretty much put paid to my idea of med­i­tat­ing, though I did man­age a poor ten or eleven min­utes just before mid­night. Yeah, an hour after my pro­posed bed­time for the week…

Today I’ve come home from work dog tired, and I’ve been partly sort­ing things out ready for attend­ing my cousin’s wed­ding tomor­row, and partly pro­cras­ti­nat­ing about sort­ing things out for my cousins wed­ding, and pro­cras­ti­nat­ing about med­i­ta­tion. I finally sat down on the zafu at around 10:30 PM, far too late when I’m tired to get much in the way of use­ful med­i­ta­tion “work” done, it seems.

I had some moments of still­ness, when I man­aged to keep my eyes open and my back straight for long enough to keep me from doz­ing, but not much.

Tomor­row I’m going to do what I should have done these last two days: med­i­tate in the morn­ing. I’ve had enough time, I just don’t tra­di­tion­ally med­i­tate in the morn­ing on week­days, so it’s hard to crow­bar it into my rou­tine. Part of the nor­mal rou­tine — whether it’s doing my Morn­ing Pages, or read­ing my RSS feeds, or check­ing my mail, will have to give, and that makes things harder.

But tomor­row morn­ing, I’ll try. I’m off work, and the wedding’s not until the after­noon, so I will at least have plenty of time, unlike the last cou­ple of days, but I’m going to try doing it first thing, like I’d have to on a work­day, just to see if I can do it.

I’ll let you know…

Reboot Day 62: Directing the Mind

Posted on by
Reply

[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 25: Losing It

Posted on by
Reply

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

Posted on by
Reply

…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…

Reboot Day 4: Late

Posted on by
Reply

…although tech­ni­cally it’s day 5, as I was stu­pid enough to leave med­i­ta­tion until 12:10 AM. Bleh. Still, turn­ing stu­pid­ity into some­thing use­ful, I med­i­tated to get in touch with just how sleepy I was, which seemed to work, and at least I fell asleep pretty quickly when I went to bed imme­di­ately afterwards.

How­ever, this isn’t really the kind of prac­tice I want to build, and tonight I’ll be prac­tis­ing when I get home from work. Last night my prob­lem was that I needed to go for a jog, too, and that a (really good!) World Cup game was on as soon as I got back. But I should at least have sat down to med­i­tate as soon as that was over.

Or maybe even decided that watch­ing the foot­ball live wasn’t as impor­tant as med­i­ta­tion to me, set it record­ing, and med­i­tated first. A fifteen-minute time-shift wouldn’t have made a lot of dif­fer­ence, and I’d mostly have caught up at half time.

Either way, I’ll try to do bet­ter tonight.