Meditations 7 & 8: Starting Week 2

I have begun week two of the meditation discomfort challenge and it has been fairly uncomfortable. For one, my body is not a fan of sitting in one position for 40 minutes. Yesterday was the first 40 minute sit of my life. I struggled greatly because I was so tired. Maybe 20-30 minutes into the guided meditation, I was told to open my eyes. This revealed my fatigue very clearly because I realized how much difficulty I was having just keeping my eyes open. This physical symptom was mirrored internally by my lack of focus and alertness. I would repeatedly bring myself back to focus only for it to fade within five or ten seconds. The big moral of this story is that I have been neglecting sleep and paying for it in diminished quality of life. Get to bed early tonight, kids.

I am still plucking passages out of The Path of Insight Meditation by Joseph Goldstein and Jack Kornfield. I'll likely finish it this week and move on to quoting something else. Here's a passage that specifically addressing sleepiness...

"Be particularly vigilant with respect to the rising of the five hindrances: desire, aversion, sleepiness, restlessness, and doubt. These are strongly conditioned in the mind, and it is easy to get lost in and become identified with them. Make a special effort to notice these particular mind states. The more quickly they can be observed, as close to the beginning as possible, the less their power will be."

Meditations 4, 5, and 6

The whole wake up mad early to meditate thing isn't happening. Instead, I have decided to build it into my morning. Thanks to a flexible job at which I make my own hours, I can simply keep my schedule blocked off for a meditation session. So that's what I've done for the rest of the month. My schedule is set for sitting until February 28th. There is not much remarkable to state about my 4th, 5th, and 6th meditations of the month, except for one thing. During my 4th guided meditation with the Waking Up app, I was instructed to bring my attention back to me breath. As I started to do so, I had the strangest feeling of distance from my breath, as if it was happening about a foot in front of my body. With each breath, my breath appeared to get closer and closer. Over the course of ten breaths or so, it finally reached my lungs. This was the first time that I had felt my breathing in this part of my body. Normally when I focus on breathing, I observe the sensations in my nostrils, or in my throat where the nasal passages connect. But this time, the sensation felt unbelievably internal. In hundreds of meditations (albeit short and often quite unfocused), this was only the second or third time where something came out of left field and wowwed me. Am I a fool for wanting more? I suppose it is natural for a novice to hunger for these sorts of novel experiences. I wonder if even seasoned vets find themselves thirsty for state-altering, drug-like experiences. Of course, the most obvious take is that this is silly and meditation should not be about chasing a high. Some words of wisdom: "To cultivate generosity directly is another fundamental part of living a spiritual life. Like the training precepts and like our inner meditations, it can actually be practiced. With practice, its spirit forms our actions, and our hearts will grow stronger and lighter. It can lead us to new levels of letting go and great happiness." - From "The Path of Insight Meditation" by Joseph Goldstein and Jack Kornfield "There is a big difference between taking a walk in the woods and really being there and taking a walk and spending the whole time thinking about visiting Disneyland or what you are going to cook for dinner or imagining all the stories you can tell your friends about what a great walk in the woods you had. It is only be being fully in the moment that the fundamental questions of the heart can be answered." - Also from "The Path of Insight Meditation" by Joseph Goldstein and Jack Kornfield I read this last quote after my unusual breathing experience and boy oh boy did I relate to it. I found my mind thinking about how I was going to write about it in this here blog. I also recall thinking of a book I'd read recently, Emmanuel Carrere's Yoga in which one of France's greatest living writers describes his experience at a Vipassana retreat and the meditator's guilt he feels about taking mental notes for his upcoming book on yoga and meditation while sitting! Not my favorite Carrere book (I'd maybe recommend L'Adversaire or Limonov), but it really hits home as a neurotic amateur meditator.

Meditation #2 and #3

I spent day two of my challenge not finding those 20 minutes to sit and meditate. I had some half hour gaps in my teaching schedule, but that 20 minutes seemed too long to fit into a 30 minute break somehow. That was my old friend Resistance at work again! I finally got around to it around 11:30pm. I have therefore resolved to wake up early and sit before work from here on out. 

I used the Waking Up app (first month free) again and selected the daily guided meditation. Because I had meditated after midnight on day 1, the app gave me the same meditation on day 2. So once again, I committed to not moving a muscle for 20 minutes. I was faced with the same general discomfort in my back and a sense that I had zero idea how my posture was after a couple of minutes due to a lack of reference points. This has the interesting effect of making it obvious that we don't "feel" our back or hands or feet. I mean this in the sense that we don't feel the shape of our body parts. We only feel sensations of hot or cold or tingling or whatever may arise. Removing movement from the equation makes this more apparent for me.

As promised to myself, I woke up early to sit before work on day 3 (today). It felt like a real struggle. My mind was chugging at a mile a minute and I found it nearly impossible to check in with my actual experience of sitting for more than a few seconds before my thoughts took over and ran amok. I suspect that it make take some adjustment to adapt to waking up and immediately sitting. 

Although I often find my meditation experience colored by a tone of frustration or anxiousness at not being able to calm my mind or feeling like I'm failing to make "progress", I'd like to offer the insight that if you take a step back, you can notice that even five seconds of paying attention is likely to be five seconds more attention than you would otherwise have mustered over the course of your day. That is to say, if you sit for twenty minutes and manage to realize five times, for a cumulative five seconds, that you've got a runaway-train ego pumping out a neurotic monologue in your head, that's good! Five seconds of clarity is better than zero seconds of clarity. 

For my second and third bits of wisdom, I pulled two passages from The Path of Insight Meditation by JewBu duo Jack Kornfield and Joseph Goldstein. 

"At the beginning of practice we must ask what is most important to us. When we're ready to die, what do we want to have done? What will we care about the most? At the time of death, people who have tried to live consciously ask only one or two questions about their life: Did I learn to live wisely? Did I love well? We can begin by asking them now."

"What is love? What is freedom? The questions cannot be answered by secondhand or intellectual ways of understanding. What the Buddha discovered and what has been rediscovered be generation after generation of those who have practiced his teachings in their lives, is that there is a way to answer these difficult and wonderful questions. They are answered by an intuitive, silent knowing, by developing our own capacity to see clearly and directly." 

Meditation #1

Last night, I began my February discomfort challenge by meditating for 20 minutes. I followed a guided meditation using the Waking Up app by Sam Harris. I have been using the app on and off for about a year and I find that it appeals to my secular sensibilities by avoiding certain woo-woo tendencies found elsewhere. 

His meditations vary in theme and angle. Last night's meditation addressed discomfort directly by explaining that physical discomfort could be addressed by either mindfully adjusting your position or simply resolving to accept that discomfort and sit with it. It was presented in such a way that either course of action was perfectly acceptable, but as a discomfort blogger, I felt almost obligated to follow that terrible feeling in my back down the rabbit hole and sit immobile for 20 minutes.

It was not easy. At times, I found that my mind was engulfed by the discomfort and the rush of compulsive thinking that went along with it. At one point late in the meditation, I briefly experienced a shift in my perception of the physical sensation of discomfort and it momentarily felt like a blissful bodily sensation. Before too long, I snapped right back into feeling anxious and wishing for it to end so I could crack my back.

After several minutes of staying perfectly still, I found that I couldn't even tell how my body was positioned. Was I sitting upright? Was one shoulder slightly hunched forward? Without movement, I lacked a reference point. When the meditation ended, I took a deep breath and my back cracked twice! To me, that revealed how tense I had become. 

Twenty minutes feels long but doable. Eighty minutes (daily objective for week 4 of the challenge) looks like Everest from where I'm sitting. 

For the meditation/spiritual/self-improvement quote of the day, I transcribed something that meditation teacher Jack Kornfield said in a Q and A with Sam Harris. When asked about common misconceptions that beginning meditators have, he said, "There's the common misunderstanding that in meditation they should stop their thinking... The point is actually not to stop the thinking mind, but instead to find a relationship to the present moment's experience that's not just lost in thought." 

Discomfort Challenge for February (Challenge #2): Meditation

Meditation is something that I have flirting with for years. It took me at least ten years from the time that I decided that meditation might be a good thing to making an honest attempt at developing a practice. It wasn't until a friend sent me an invite to a free month using Sam Harris's Waking Up app that I made a real go at it. I completed the introductory course in 50 days (it is now a 28 day course), and keep going until I hit over 100 consecutive days. There was a little streak counter on the app which I apparently found motivating, because when Sam Harris made a principled decision to remove that feature from the app, I almost immediately stopped meditating daily and eventually went months and months without sitting. 

When I had the idea for the Discomfort Blog, I had already been tracking almost 40 different behaviors each day. Meditation was one of those habits, but I was simply leaving the boxes unchecked each day. When the cold shower challenge started, I also began doing a 10 minute guided meditation every day. It isn't much, but it is something, and has started to give me a taste for meditation again, even if that ten minutes can sometimes feel like an eternity. 

I wavered between a meditation challenge and another idea, but when I woke up this morning, the choice was clear. I have decided to structure the challenge as follows... For the first week of February, I will sit for one 20 minute session each day. For the second week, I will sit for a 40 minute session. The duration will increase another 20 minutes in week three and another 20 minutes in week four. So the final week, I will be sitting for 80 minutes, which seems patently insane from where I am sitting, but I'm going to give it a go. 

Instead of a playlist, I thought this time I might post some favorite quotes I discover from various spiritual meditation guru types. 

Here goes nothing! 

Penultimate and Final Showers (of this month's discomfort challenge)

 So in an hour or so, after I've had dinner and some time to relax, I will take my last cold shower of the month, and with it, I will complete the cold shower discomfort challenge that I gave myself for January. 

Looking back on that first, terrifying shower, I am proud of myself for having seen this thing through. There were no transcendental breakthroughs, no silver bullet health benefits, nothing flashy. What I gained was something more subtle and, I hope, more durable. There is a big part of me that doubts my ability to follow anything through to the end, and I was able to quash that, not completely, but significantly. I am proud of myself. 

Will I continue to take cold showers after midnight tonight? Yes, I think I will. I enjoy the refreshing and invigorating feeling it gives me. But I think I will also take warm showers. And I think that I'll probably be toggling the temperature from cold to warm and back again within the same shower. 

As I mentioned in a previous post, I will also be much more willing to plunge into cool or cold bodies of water in the future. That in itself will add some spice to my life, so that's a sweet bonus as well. 

I still haven't decided what my discomfort challenge for February will be. I've got to figure it out before I go to sleep though! I'll likely post on it tomorrow morning. In the meantime, here are the final songs for the Cold Shower Playlist...

- Everything Went Numb by Streetlight Manifesto

- If and When We Rise Again by Streetlight Manifesto

and to cap it off tonight, I will go with 

- Break on Through by The Doors

No one knows about this blog yet, but I think that I feel comfortable revealing it to some people now that the first month has been a success! See y'all in February!

Cold Shower #14: The Sound of Silence

For this last one, my phone was almost out of battery, so I went for it without music. I quickly realized that I'd been using the music as a cue and motivational tool. The pattern was to put on a song, turn on the water, jump under the steam when the guitars come in or when the verse starts. My mind would naturally gravitate towards the idea that the next change in the music was the right time to just go for it!

Without music, I found myself, nearly a month after my first cold shower, dreading the feeling. And that's fine. I think systems are important as hell, and if music is part of a system that gets the job done, then great. But it is also important to be able to bridge the gap when a system momentarily fails, or when an unexpected circumstance arises. I have noticed that maintaining habits is not all that difficult when I'm in a daily groove, but a curveball, a change in location, a late night out, a holiday, is often enough to throw me off of my habits and then I wake up a month later to the realization that my four-month meditation streak has long been over. 

So it took a moment of wasting perfectly good water, and a mental false starts, before I said fuck it and jumped under the shower head. 

This little micro-lesson has reaffirmed an idea that I've had kicking around my head for a while, which is that I'd like to develop a system to keep the ship steady when those curveballs come. What system could I put in place so that a visit home to see my friends and family doesn't become a reason to not hit the meditation cushion or the eat healthily or to exercise or to work on creative projects?