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."