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."