After wak­ing from yet another weird dream, this time involv­ing horse rac­ing, and a quick shower, the med­i­ta­tion went bet­ter today. There were at least a few peri­ods where I was focused on the flame for a lit­tle while, and I “caught myself” quicker when I wan­dered off.

I’m still reg­u­larly plagued by music, thoughts about writ­ing this blog, thoughts about work, and so on, but these occa­sional bet­ter days help me feel that it’s worth con­tin­u­ing the experiment.

The dreams really are an inter­est­ing change. I really can’t remem­ber the last time I had such a run of remem­ber­ing dreams, and such odd and vivid ones, at that. And it’s not like I’m mak­ing mas­sive changes to my life, really — just try­ing to med­i­tate for 15 min­utes every morn­ing. And that’s really about the only thing that’s changed. If it isn’t just some bizarre coin­ci­dence, and there is a link, then it’s odd that such a small length of time doing some­thing I’m not even vaguely good at yet would make such waves.

Any­way. There may be a cou­ple of days’ gap on the blog­ging front now; I’ll still be try­ing to med­i­tate, but I have such a busy week­end com­ing up that I doubt I’ll be able to write much down. I’ll try to catch up when­ever I can.

In other news, I’m con­sid­er­ing chang­ing my daily rou­tine around to help give me spe­cific time to write when I’m actu­ally awake and at my best, i.e. in the morn­ing. I work flexi-time, and I’m con­sid­er­ing chang­ing my pat­terns from 8:30am-4pm to 10:00am-5:30pm. This would give me an extra hour and a half in the morn­ings, which I could use to write.

Actu­ally, that might be too dras­tic, and more time that I can fill with my imag­i­na­tion in its cur­rent state, so per­haps I could just go for chang­ing by a half-hour. Com­mit­ting to write for a half-hour every morn­ing shouldn’t be too much of a killer, and nei­ther should get­ting out of work a half hour later. I walk, so it’s not as if I have to time my day around the traffic.

Right. Enough blog­ging for the day. Now I have to go do a ton of stuff before House comes on

A brief flicker of… some­thing, dur­ing this morning’s ses­sion. I had a minute or two when I thought I was get­ting the hang of it, really focus­ing on the flame. I felt some deter­mi­na­tion, some gump­tion for a while, to con­cen­trate on the tip of this damn can­dle, no mat­ter what.

How­ever, that drifted off pretty quickly, by the end of the fif­teen min­utes, I was my usual scat­tered self, and wait­ing for the ses­sion to be over.

Feh.

This evening’s class was also pretty much miss rather than hit. I really didn’t enjoy the chant­ing mantra stuff the last cou­ple of times, with a guy lead­ing it. Tonight, with a (com­pletely delight­ful, and obvi­ously very together) woman lead­ing it, I really found myself cring­ing rather than chant­ing. The prob­lem is, I really can’t hold a note, espe­cially when the mantras appear to be writ­ten in a key that’s just too high for the high notes of my very lim­ited vocal range, and just too low for the low notes if I go down an octave. And with a female voice lead­ing it so I’ve not got some­one who’s at least in my “best chance” octave to fol­low, I’m really dread­fully uncon­fi­dent and crap. I really don’t think singing/chanting med­i­ta­tions are for me, and they seem to do quite a lot of it in this class.

But, you know, I’m going to stick with the classes for a while, because they are going to do dif­fer­ent tech­niques, and it’s just quite inspir­ing being around the peo­ple, both the teach­ers, who do seem to have that reas­sur­ing inner-calm-along-with-a-sense-of-humour that I asso­ciate with peo­ple who are fairly sorted — peo­ple who know them­selves, I guess — and also the other stu­dents, because it doesn’t feel like I’m on an iso­lated path.

I’ll miss the next class, mind, because I’ll be at a hen party. Don’t ask.

Any­way. There are other med­i­ta­tion teachers/schools in Bris­tol. The West­ern Ch’an Fel­low­ship spring imme­di­ately to mind, as Zen has always felt right for me, so I may look into where they are and what they do at some point. I tripped over them the last time my left bent in a spir­i­tual direc­tion, and I remem­ber being impressed by them, at least.

So. Excuse me if I’m writ­ing rather dis­joint­edly, but I just plain feel quite dis­jointed right now. But the plan for the next week is basi­cally “more of the same”, morn­ing med­i­ta­tions where pos­si­ble, with at least one fifteen-minute ses­sion per day no mat­ter what. And we’ll see what happens.

I’ve also planned some writ­ing, actu­ally decided in advance what I want to work on on which days. This is unusual for me; I want to try it to see if it helps me on those days where I have dif­fi­culty sum­mon­ing up the moti­va­tion — at least if I have some­thing in mind to write on that day, that’s one less bit of think­ing I have to do before I set pen to paper…

In a strange turn­about from the past cou­ple of days, last night I didn’t sleep very well, and kept on wak­ing up and not drift­ing off again for ages. I also had yet another strug­gle get­ting out of bed — I won­der if there’s an uncon­scious desire not to get up and get on with my changed morn­ing rou­tine of immediate-shower-then-meditate? Could be.

But the com­ple­tion of the turn­about has been that I’ve not felt par­tic­u­larly tired today. Odd, but nice.

This morning’s med­i­ta­tion ses­sion started late, and was very fit­ful and dis­tracted. This wasn’t helped by my upstairs neighbour’s wake-up rock music start­ing about five min­utes in. Still, I can avoid that by drag­ging my arse out of bed on time in future, as she gets up quite late com­pared with me, normally.

What was dis­tract­ing me? Well, the usual ran­dom ten-a-minute thoughts, plus a cou­ple of wor­ries about per­sonal stuff; there are some out­stand­ing things in my per­sonal life that could do with sort­ing out. But there was noth­ing I could pos­si­bly have done about them dur­ing the time of the med­i­ta­tion ses­sion, so they were fairly point­less intrusions.

I’m a bit sad that I haven’t seen more progress so far, but really, it’s only day seven. Tomor­row will be an evening med­i­ta­tion class, but I’m also going to do the usual morn­ing med­i­ta­tion to help keep the habit developing.

I’ve not done any writ­ing yet today, either. I’m going to do at least a quar­ter of an hour of free writ­ing right now, because this exper­i­ment is just as much about the writ­ing as the med­i­ta­tion — con­cen­trat­ing on writ­ing is a more long-term kind of focus, really.

Any­way. I sup­pose this is the end of week one. I’m hop­ing week two will show me some def­i­nite improvements…