Sat­ur­day: Yes­ter­day was mostly a day of tired­ness and lack of focus. Rather too late I pulled together enough sense to try to turn it around, and took a nap that lasted some­where between half an hour and an hour (using an inter­est­ing lit­tle pro­gram called pzizz.) After that I was a bit groggy for a while, but did man­age to perk up and get a few things done. Next time I’m hav­ing a tired-out day, and I have the oppor­tu­nity, I’ll try to get nap­ping earlier.

I didn’t get around to med­i­tat­ing until the end of the day, so I fig­ured I’d try and med­i­tate in the same time and place I used to do at uni­veristy, i.e. lying down and in bed. You’d think this would just involve me going to sleep, but oddly it seemed to work back then. And last night, it was pretty fas­ci­nat­ing. There were two key things:

One was a dis­cov­ery of just how much ten­sion was built up in my body, and was stay­ing there even while I was lying down “relaxed”. My upper back, a usual source of dis­com­fort for me, felt like a clenched fist that I could barely con­trol. And I think this is actu­ally the nor­mal state. It’s only the med­i­ta­tion and pay­ing atten­tion that let me notice it.

The sec­ond was an expe­ri­ence that I used to get rea­son­ably reg­u­larly when I used to med­i­tate at uni­ver­sity, but haven’t expe­ri­ence since. A sen­sa­tion of fly­ing. Who knows, maybe I am falling asleep, and it’s a dream, or some form of hyp­n­a­gogic hal­lu­ci­na­tion. And it’s hard to describe. But basi­cally, it’s like a lucid dream where I don’t get to see much, but I feel like I’m fly­ing. It’s clos­est to, in Arthur Dent’s words, the act of throw­ing myself at the ground and miss­ing. A feel­ing of buoy­ancy, of float­ing in the air which I can actu­ally direct and con­trol, to fly for­wards across an unseen coun­try­side. It’s very cool. And last night it came back to me. Not for long, and I was a bit wob­bly, but I def­i­nitely expe­ri­enced it, and I believe I was con­scious rather than asleep, just in a state of otherness.

So, that was a very good end to a fairly crap day, and it’s pos­si­bly a sign of progress.

Sun­day: Today was a bet­ter day, and I did my med­i­ta­tion nice and early, stan­dard sitting-looking-at-candle stuff, and it worked pretty well. I still got dis­tracted here and there, but I found that, as with yes­ter­day, try­ing to be more aware of my own body as a whole seemed to help. Sim­ple aware­ness rather than thoughts, I reckon, has got to be an improvement.

And also, walk­ing to a café today, I felt the sud­den desire to stop the pod­cast I was lis­ten­ing to, take my iPod ear­buds out, and just walk. So I did. And I dropped into a fairly good walk­ing med­i­ta­tion pretty quickly. There were still thoughts, but I left them behind me quite well, and I felt very at ease with the world.

So, despite most of yes­ter­day being a bit of a write-off, the week­end has, on the whole, been pretty good.

Tomor­row I should be able to have a decent un-rushed ses­sion in the morn­ing, as I’ve taken the day off work. That’s because I have a course in the after­noon at the Folk House, a beginner’s guide to free­lance jour­nal­ism! This might well be exactly the right course at the right time for me…

Any­way. Bit of a marathon entry. I’ll try to keep it shorter tomorrow!