#meditationlog

This will hopefully be the first of many. It’s very possible the internet cares little for this log, but keeping a meditation log is highly recommended by just about everyone giving advice on how to start meditating, and also a Dedicant Path requirement (hence the Druidry tags on this first one).

10 minutes guided relaxation response/zazen meditation, early afternoon. Wow. That was … deep. Even though sitting up, my body was thick mush. But in a good way.

Lately, I've been dwelling on 2 ideas: first, the thought of traveling and how this affects overall sense of change and sameness. This week, I've been meditating in a different location than usual, and I find both strange and exciting to be there. Secondly, I've been thinking about what is like to live and think vicariously through others, perhaps as a process of building empathy. I think that animals, for instance, are interesting avatars for us to imagine living as and through. Yesterday I went to a kitty cafe!

I've noticed a couple of things that greatly affect how I feel after a session:

1.) Sleep: This is by far the most significant outcome of my exploration in mediation so far. I've realized that so many things are noticeably, negatively impacted when I don't get enough sleep. Since I prefer to meditate in the morning, it's one of the first litmus tests to gauge how rested I am: when I'm tired, I have a really hard time focusing, and just sitting on my wooden chair where I practice meditating feels painful at all points of contact. I also usually have a sense of anxiety when meditating while not well-rested-- it's a restful experience, but less relaxing than I know these sessions can be on adequate sleep. Some days, I even sleep a full 8 hours, and I still feel like I needed more rest-- my morning session is usually when I determine this, and I try to scale back my day accordingly. 2.) Another dimension that I've found has greatly affected by practice is privacy. I live with a roommate, and we almost always have guests staying with us (I basically live in a hostel: I've renamed my home internet connection "GUEST WIFI"). Because of this, it's hard to find alone time, especially in the morning. This can sometime trip up my routine of practice. On the other hand, in those rare moments of stillness in my house, I have the best 20 minutes of my day sitting quietly at my window in the early morning. I've found that I really need quiet aloneness to focus most successfully. It's analogous to the environmental needs I have for studying or doing creative work also. That said, there is something to be said for privacy in anonymity. Two weeks ago, I sat on the grass in Boston Common and mediated for 20 minutes. Though this was in public, I felt some sense of privacy just from being unknown. 

Just finished 60 consecutive days of meditating. 

I feel like I'm getting more and more easily distracted while meditating. While I don't get upset at myself when my mind wanders, I also don't find myself trying to hard to not get distracted. In the end, I'm not sure how much mileage I'm now getting out of my meditation.

Recently, I've also been quite stressed out. I realized that what stresses me out most isn't work itself but rather relationships I have with people. From so many years at MIT, I've learned to deal with drinking from the firehose. If I have a deadline, and a ton of work to do, I buckle down and calmly get through it one thing at a time.

If the metaphorical firehose were to be floating in the air, everything would be ok. However, when someone is holding the firehose, things get more complicated. It turns out that when the person holding the firehose is also stressed out, it transfers to me and causes me to completely freeze up, unable to make any progress on the impending deadline.

In real life, there's always a person or multiple people holding the firehose. What we do always depends on other. I think that in the past, I was just more of a nerd with only a mind for ideas and ignored the people layer of things. Recently, I've really tried to make an effort to become a more open person, which includes more awareness of those around me. However, because this is new for me, I find that I'm not dealing well with the anxiety of those around me.

Intellectually, I know full well that the people around me who are anxious  are not my enemies. They have their own struggles, and it's not their fault that they are stressed. While it's not so cool that their stress is negatively affecting me, I understand their position. However, understanding is different from empathizing. And empathizing is different from neutralizing negative energy.