My meditation Stats

Above is a screenshot from my iPhone meditation App - Insight Timer - which I've been using for just under 2 years.

Although I've done over 300 sessions, when I tell people my average meditation time is 12 minutes, lots react in a sort of dismissive way that its not very long at all. The weird thing I've noticed is that the people that react like this are the ones that dont meditate, whereas the people that have actually meditated for a while are always very congratulatory...

Anyways, I've said it before and I'll say it again: In our increasingly distracted and disembodied world, meditation is more critical than ever. The usual excuse: "don't have enough time". SERIOUSLY?? You dont have 12 minutes a day? You can do it right away and right where you are. Quite honestly you dont even need a sitting cushion or to take your shoes off.  (With respect to the traditionalists, I often think the Buddha would look at all these modern people meditating and say "But why barefoot and on the floor? The only reason we did that 2000 years ago is that we had no shoes or chairs"  :)

Meditation explained : Set Theory

Note: Not to scale. In reality Set B much bigger part of Set A.

Once you are awakened, then what?

The title of this blog post comes from WillBeFine's excellent comment on my recent post about awakening through meditation

I've gotta admit - WBF's question stumped me. So I spent lots of time thinking about it, and some even meditating about it and finally I've come up with a semblance of an answer:

Q: Once you are awakened, then what?

A: You become a clever fish.

Don't worry, this is not one of those infuriating Zen Koans. Here is how I reached my answer:

Many years ago I had the privilege of knowing a very accomplished artist. We were talking about where creative ideas came from and he said to me he sees it like this: "Imagine that your mind has a fishing rod and it can cast out into the universe and hook ideas and reel them back in. The people that can cast furthest, and in the right places, catch the most 'far-out' and creative ideas."

This analogy impressed me, and has always stuck with me. However, after meditating for a few years, I have become aware how thoughts can creep up into the mind and take you off in their own direction, without you even been aware that it is happening.

So my proposal is that, no, my artist friend actually got it totally wrong. There is not some crafty fisherman sitting in our minds casting his rod. No - we are actually the fish. And its the ideas and concepts out there that have the rods; they're the ones dressing up the bait on the hooks; they're the ones casting into our minds to see if we'll take the bait, get hooked and pulled in uncontrolled directions.

Can you ever be totally awake 24/7? No. But by meditating you can learn to be a bit more alert when it comes to tasty morsels floating around in the idea-sphere. And instead of just gobbling at first sight, to try and examine morsels a bit closer before engaging with them.

PS: I'm going away for about a week so may not be able to respond to new comments for a while.

The Awakening

I've attended several Buddhist teachings lately, including a weekend retreat 2 weeks ago. And I've been thinking a lot about meditation.

"Buddha" is most usually translated as "The Awakened One". Most people have some understanding that Buddhist Enlightenment involves some type of awakening.

The popular perception is that this Awakening is a major paradigm-altering step involving some kind of Awakening into an Otherworldly realm. 

Maybe it is. But on another level one can experience Buddhist awakeness at a very practical level. A level that can even address the skeptics retort "I dont need to awaken - I was never asleep in the first place."

If you've ever meditated you will likely know that the crux of the practice is about being aware of what you are thinking about, whilst you are thinking about it. "Observing the observer" is how some people put it. And you will also probably have experienced first-hand how difficult it is to accomplish this, even for a few minutes, without your mind wandering off. Once you realise that your mind has wandered off, the task is to let the run-away thought go and bring your mind back to its self-aware state.

In my personal meditation experience I have never really had trouble letting the errant thought go, once it has been recognised. My problem has always been the "drifting off" part, the fact that one minute I am sitting concentrating on what I'm thinking about and then the next minute, unbeknownst to me, my mind is in a totally different place. All meditators will be familiar with this experience.

So lately i have been trying to pinpoint and articulate this elusive moment of wandering off. What actually happens? What is it like?

Answering this is not easy as at the point when it happens you are, by definition, not aware of it happening. The observer has been lost sight of. But recently I've been thinking that perhaps the closest experience to this "slipping away" happens to us every night when we fall asleep. Think about it: despite falling asleep every single night of our lives, we can never pinpoint the exact time that we transition from normal thoughts into dream thoughts. Because, if we could do this - we wouldn't be asleep. We would be awake.

So next time you hear about the great Buddhist "Awakening", do not be intimidated that it is some far-removed concept only attainable by cross-legged monks sitting in caves in the Himalayas for years and years. You can experience it every day, in ordinary meditation, right where you are.

Mastering it of course, is another issue altogether...

Tom Robbins on Meditation

Snippet from the novel "Fierce Invalids Home From Hot Climates" by my favorite author of all time (at the moment anyway - always subject to change) Tom Robbins. Robbins is not just an author, he is a philosopher - and a very wise one.

"Let's split"

The meditative mind is a mature mind. We are not born with it.

We are born with Juvenile Mind. Or "monkey-mind" as seasoned meditation practitioners call it. The juvenile mind, like a 4 year old, needs constant entertainment. You cannot leave it for less than a few minutes without feeding it a constant stream of new sights, sounds and thoughts. It is demanding, mischevious and manipulative. It throws tantrums. Increasingly it is inflicted with ADD.

That is why, after a few minutes of meditation, when you have finally managed to gather all of your body, all of your sensations and all of your thoughts to the one SAME place - the silent retreat from the relentless tumult - the Juvenile Mind rebels. It needs new stuff, stimulating stuff, entertaining stuff. Switch it all off and there is Boredom - an unendurable boredom. Undendurable even for a minute.

That's when you have to keep your eye on the juvenile. The minute you turn your back, the juvenile will sneek out of the retreat, like a thief in the night, back into another land of thoughts and fantasies. You will be none the wiser.

Faced with the intolerable boredom, the juvenile mind says : "Let's split"

There is a lot in that. Let's split.  

Muddled Values

Meditation is something best done in total silence. Not that you shouldn't meditate in noisy environments (often when the meditation is needed most) - its just that silence is the pinnacle - the pure, blissful source.

Silence is difficult to come by these days. The best time for silence is early morning (pre-dawn early), but even then, I have discovered, silence is elusive. For me its the sound of my computer fan. I've known this for a long time. I even played around with fan settings where you could temporarily switch the fan off. But I'm very scared to go that route - knowing me I'll forget to switch back on and the African heat will fry my motherboard in no time.

So for a while I considered switching my machine off every time I meditated but after doing some research, a lot of techie geeks said that daily on and off is not good for your cmptr.

So I've just kind of put up with the computer fan for the past few years. The other day, by chance, my machine was off anyways when I meditated, and being pre-dawn I got the first TOTAL silence meditation for yonkers. Bliss.

...after which I realised how muddled my values are. Which is more precious - my mind or my machine? Here I am not turning off my machine, thereby compromising on the quality of my mind. So from now on I'm gonna compromise on the quality of my machine, rather than my mind, and enjoy the daily bliss of silent meditation.

meditation for weightloss

Up until my 20s I was blessed with a lean, athletic body. But ever since the first depression/mania and accompanying meds, my weight has been all over the place. More up than down.

So I'm really pleased that right at this point I have lost 7kg over the past 3 months. There are a lot of factors in this success, but if I had to single one - meditation would be right up there. Weird huh, I mean meditation isn't exactly a calorie-burning excercise. Here's how it worked for me:

In December I came upon the one, inescapable but most denied truth of all weightloss:

IN ORDER TO LOSE WEIGHT YOU ARE GOING TO HAVE TO ENDURE PERIODS OF HUNGER.

In the long (and sustainable) term, there is no way round that. You are going to feel hungry, and you are going to have to be able to endure these periods.

"Endure" is not normally a word that you would associate with meditation, but in terms of my own endurance-withstanding-arsenal, I'd say meditation has prepared me best. Yes, I could give the whole spiel about "mindfull" rather than "mindless" eating, and that certainly is important, but its the ability to ENDURE that is key. Not easy to put into words, but let me try explain it like this. Anyone who has meditated for a long time will have had the experience of a radical itch occurring somewhere on your body during a meditation session. Scratching that itch is just not an option. Ignorning it is difficult too. So what I've learnt to do with them is just LET THEM BE. Acknowledge the itch. Feel it even. Yes, its got a weird burning unique sensation of its own. But you can observe it without reacting to it. You can ENDURE it. You dont HAVE TO scratch it. And the more you let-it-just-be the easier it becomes.

So thats how I endure hunger.
The really sad fact, of course, is that the vast majority of us from the developed world don't even know what REAL hunger is. I mean real, 24/7 starvation hunger like people in Ethiopia feel.

Absolute Readiness

In terms of the meditation path I am still a beginner. I've been meditating on a daily basis for approx 2 years now. Some people do it for 50 years.

So I got to wondering what meditation must feel like for a Grand Master. I am speculating here but I think one of the hallmarks of the advanced meditation state would be READINESS. Total and utter readiness - for anything.

It is oft assumed that advanced meditators enter a state of supreme bliss. Maybe... But I don't think it's the kind of supreme bliss that is totally detached from the world, like an impenetrable cocoon that cannot be pierced.

Maybe I can try elucidate what I'm trying to say by way of an example. Picture a Grand Master meditator deep in the midst of a meditation session, and a bomb goes off next door. What would his/her reaction be?

In the picture in my mind the Master would open his eyes wide, say aloud "Oh, an explosion", and slowly & calmly rise and evacuate the area, helping all others en route. But here's the pivot: He wouldn't do this because in his meditation he was securely walled-off in this state of impenetrable calm. No, he would be able to do this because he was 100% alert and 100% ready for ANYTHING that the universe threw at him/her. He would be ready for this for every second (milli-second) of the meditation session.

OK, so this is a pretty idealistic picture. But what I'm trying to say is that ultimate meditation is not a CLOSED affair. On the contrary, it is 100% OPEN and integrated with the world. Not many people ever acheive this. It requires a supreme amount of confidence. To be fully prepared for ANY eventuality, at ANY time, on a second-to-second basis is the most powerful kind of confidence that there is.

It's certainly not something I am anywhere near acheiving. But sometimes, in my meditation sessions I try and focus on this readiness. And the few times I've glimpsed its workings it is supremely liberating. For when you are in this state - what is there to fear?

...not even death.

(like I said this is all pure speculation on my part so if any advanced meditators out there care to differ, I'd love to hear from you)

Whatever works for You: PART 2

As I said in PART 1, Buddhist philosophy resonates with me. Particularly the practice of meditation. Here is how it works for me & my particular circumstances:

• I've found that it is the best thing to do when I'm hypo/manic to collect my thoughts, calm down and slow down (having said this, it is also the hardest thing to do in this state).
• It is one of the ONLY things I can do when I'm seriously depressed. And, although it doesn't make the depression disappear, it makes me more accepting of it which diminishes the suffering.
• You might know or might not that I am a member of MENSA, and therefore was born with a complex, fast and enquiring mind. It may seem like a blessing, but it is not without its own set of problems. It leads to spending most of your life in your thoughts/mind. Intellectuals are definitely more out of touch with their bodies than non-intellectuals. (probably explains why so many intellectuals end up attracted to Buddhism) Meditation, I find, is the perfect anti-dote for this. As I've said before, although most people think meditation is all about the mind, it is actually about connecting the body with the mind. Getting the body & mind into the same place, at the same time.
• I work in the IT field, more specifically on the Net. This means that I spend more & more time sitting in front of the screen, mind racing around all over the place and, other than my mouse hand, the rest of my body practically "going extinct". So after uploading my awareness onto the Net for hours and hours, I find meditation the best way to download it back into my body.
• One of the biggest diseases of this millennium is "Rush Sickness". I recently read the book "In Praise of Slowness", and I can honestly say that every person on the planet should read it. Having worked in a corporate target-driven environment for 15 years, I am particularly apt to rushing everything I do. One of the central themes of Meditation and Buddhist philosophy is "Slow Down". Need I say more.
• I've always been a sort of Philosopher and 2 years ago actually completed the first year of a Masters degree in Philosophy. And that is one of the problems that I had with Christianity. It just did not stand up to logical, deep philosophical enquiry. But the deeper I go into Buddhism, the more I see how resonant it is with the conclusions leading philosophers have arrived at. It is particularly in line with the latest philosophical debates, especially Post-Modernism and Deconstruction. Many of the West's greatest philosophers have recognised the perfect logic of Buddhism, Schopenhauer being one of the best known.
• In addition to being in accord with philosophy, Buddhist metaphysical truth is increasingly being confirmed as the accurate view by leading science. Speak to any Quantum Physicist. Nothing is permanent, absolute or solid, everything is in a state of constant and relative flux. This Empirical evidence is a great thing because it means that you don't have to take everything on Blind Faith.
  
• Perhaps most importantly, as someone who has suffered the blackest of depressions, and deepest of Existential Angst, I gave up the illusion of a perfect world long ago. I've seen life in it's barest bones and have realised that life is imperfect and full of suffering, and always will be. And this, it turns out, is the very Cornerstone of the Buddha's message. The First Noble truth: "All Life is suffering"*
  
  But maybe I'm just jaded and cycnical. So if your personal world is close to perfect, or if your idealism is totally totally intact - my sincere wishes are with you. May you find what I have not.
  

As I said in Part 1, Buddhism is not for everybody. I am merely laying out the reasons why it works for me. Other things will work for other people. And neither is Right or Wrong. Like the slogan at the top of this blog says:

"There are no answers. Only choices"

* Suffering can be a confusing concept here, because it has two parts - stimulus and response. What the Buddha showed is that the suffering can be alleviated. But it is NOT alleviated by changing the stimuli (the painful conditions of the world ) which are permanent, but rather in the WAY in which you relate to those conditions.

Subtlety

Top of toilet cistern
Originally uploaded by Frames-of-Mind.

subtle Adj 1. not immediately obvious 2. delicate or faint 3. Having or requiring the ability to make fine distinctions

- Collins Paperback English Dictionary

Today's life is everything but subtle. All things are in-your-face, and our senses are subjected to a 24/7 barrage assault.

As a result, we've become DEsensitized. And as a result of being desensitized we need our consumption, whether media or fast food, to be more potent, more shocking, sweeter, greasier - otherwise it just won't get through.

Daily meditation is the antidote. Instead of DEsensitizing, it is REsensitizing. After you've been sitting for a few weeks you become aware of things you had forgotten existed. The rub of your shirt against your chest. The loud booming beat of your heart (even when it's going real slowly). The tingle in your throat as the breath goes down.

Meditate for a couple of months and this appreciation of subtlety spreads to other parts of your life. Like taste. Instead of plastering everything with more and more amounts of sugar, you try the plain yoghurt on its own. And, yes, it has it's own special flavour too. Not sweet, but just as interesting. And vegetables: a myriad of subtle tastes await your resensitized buds.

And then you begin finding that you're easlier entertained. You don't need 24/7 surround sound blood and gore to keep you wake. There's millions of other things going on. Things that have always been pretty much drowned out.

The best part about all this is that you don't have to be special to do it. Sit for half an hour a day for 3 months and ANYBODY will start feeling the effects. Cost: Zero. Equipment needed: maybe a cushion. Venue/ Weather needed: anywhere (prison cells included).

OK, so now you're saying but what about the TIME required? It's less than you think. Considering that you can invariably take 3 paces right from where you are and start meditating just about immediately, there is zero preperation/ travel time. Most other things consume half an hour just getting to and back from them. And in any case, when you start right in the beginning you start with 10 minutes, not 30. If you haven't got 10 minutes a day spare then you're really living a screwed up life (in which case you probably need mediation more than ever). After you've done 10 minutes for a week or 2 (shit, start on 5 minutes if you have to) you build up to 12, then 15, then 20. By the time you've got to 30, your daily meditation will be such a valued part of your day that you'll make time, no matter what.

Disclosure: BPG is on the advisory board of Meditation International Inc.
NOT!

Emptiness & Nothingness

Coca Cola
Originally uploaded by Frames-of-Mind.

People confuse emptiness and nothingness. The two are often (and erroneously, in BPG’s opinion) used interchangeably in Eastern philosophy. And this gives things like meditation bad press – because who, after all, wants to achieve nothingness?

A good way to reveal the difference is by comparing it to your email inbox. Our inboxes are all way too full. (people are even talking about “Email Bankruptcy” these days – a public declaration that you owe too many emails and can never recover from your debt.)

The Nothingness approach would say “Delete the Inbox. Yeah, the whole goddam thing.”

OK, so problem solved. No more email. Which might be useful if you’re gonna go live in a cave the rest of your life, but not so if you’re still a participant.

The Empty approach says “Empty the Inbox”. There’s different ways to do this usually encompassed by the 4 D’s (Do it, Delegate it, Defer it or Dump it). One way or the other, at the end of the process you’ve got this shiny, beautiful empty email box. Ever had an empty email Inbox? Try it sometime it gives you a very warm tingly feeling. And, more than that, you will be way more efficient on that particular day.

The point is that with Emptiness, you’ve still got the container, the sacred vessel. Nothingness throws out the container with the bathwater.

And so it is with meditation. You don’t Delete your mind. You spring clean it, work through all the shit that’s in it. Ultimately out of respect for it. And once you’ve got an empty mind, you can see with clarity the new “emails” that arrive in it. You can see which messages are important, and which should be dumped on the spot. You get a lot more done. A lot quicker. And a lot more efficiently.

Now all you need to do is switch to Gmail, and you’ll be an efficiency factory on steroids.

Downloading my soul

Lots of business =
Lots of busiYness
(etymology 101)

In bad need of a good meditation session
Been uploading my awareness onto the net all week
now I need to sit down and download it back into me

NO person breathing
NO person observing breath
JUST breath itself

Becoming the breath
BEING

Hyperlinked thoughts

Amanda asked: "how do you meditate without falling asleep?"

Let me say one thing right upfront - Meditation is the polar opposite to sleep. It is pure wakefulness. Everyday "awakeness" is somewhere in between asleep and pure awake meditation.

So first off - you gotta take your meditation sessions super seriously. It is hard, disciplined work. People can be forgiven for thinking that it is a time of relaxation and "letting-go". It is those things but it's also paradoxical - you gotta both be super relaxed and super alert at the same time.

In many ways, "sleep" is to "awake" , as "awake" is to pure meditation. Have you ever caught yourself "drifting off" at night? I have sometimes, and am vaguely aware of my thoughts halfway between that sleep and wake state. The "drift-off" is always characterised by my mind being pulled further and further away into some dream thoughts. It starts with an awake thought, and that links into another thought, and that into another, and soon the thought that you have linked into is not awake at all, and you are somewhere else.

Meditation is the same. Our daytime thoughts each come with little invisible hyperlinks in them. Like one minute you'll be thinking about the sunshine on the window, and the next minute you will be thinking about jail. And you ask yourself: "How did I get here?". Probably it went something like this:

...the sunshine reminded you of swimming last summer, which reminded hyperlinked you to the new costume you wore, which hyperlinked to the old friend you met at the shop where you bought it, which hyperlinked you to the time you and your friend got caught drunken driving and spent a night in jail. All in a split second.

Being the equivalent of our "global brain" the internet demonstrates this tangental thinking perfectly. How often have you set out on the web to find something specific and landed up somewhere totally different, and didn't know how you got there?

So our daily thoughts look like this, one leading into the next, leading into the next.

Often, the first time we observe just how linked our thoughts are, is exactly when we sit down the first time to meditate. Because that's what meditation is:

BEING AWARE OF WHAT YOU ARE DOING WHILE YOU ARE DOING IT.

more specifically:

BEING AWARE OF WHAT YOU ARE THINKING WHILE YOU ARE THINKING IT.

Sounds easy but its not. There is always another sneaky thought lurking there waiting to hijack your mind and take you away. And when it does, you are no longer aware that you are not thinking about what you are thinking.

So it takes practice. Plenty. And eventually, once you've progressed a bit, you can be vigilant as to the hyperlinks. You will never stop thoughts arising, but when they do, you will stick with the thought, let it arrise, and let it subside without getting pulled in any other direction. Once you've got the better of the hyperlinks, your mind may look more like this:



The rings are still the thoughts. But you will see that there are now gaps between the rings. And it is in these gaps that pure meditation wakefulness is happening.

Disembodied

My post on Second Life (the virtual reality world) a few days ago, definitely touched some kind of collective nerve. People felt overwhelmingly antagonistic about this virtual lifestyle.

It is very understandable – spare time these days is even more endangered than global cooling. So its not surprising people get their backs up at the hint of something MORE that’s gonna demand their time.

But besides the time thing I think there’s another underlying issue. We’re all spending more and more time peering into our little cmptr screens. We are sensing that slowly, slowly the real world – the one with green fields and trees, remember – is disappearing, and our minds and souls are being sucked into this digital nothingness of wires and radio waves.

Soon our bodies are gonna be useless. They’ve already got technologies where you can move a cursor through brain waves alone. What then?

Need an anti-dote?
Try meditating. Meditation works in the opposite direction to virtuality. It tries to shut down the flitting mind, and experience the fullness of your other 5 senses. Where the Neb is about disembodiment, meditation is about getting inside of your own skin. Not the skin of some slick avatar on Second Life.

This might come as a surprise to some. The popular conception of meditation is that it involves a very focused mind, and has very little to do with the body. Well that’s just crap – especially with the particular meditation (there are a zillion varieties) that I personally practice. The one I do every day involves letting go of all things cerebral and instead feeling your body. Your breath, your skin, your bum on the cushion, the twinge in your neck. Just feel. Just be there. Present in your own body.

Some people focus on the sense of sound, some even on smell, but for me the sense of touch works best. It took me about a year of meditation to work this out. Touch is the last frontier. Sight and sound have already practically been assimilated by our electronic brethren. Next will be taste and smell. Touch? I don’t think they’ll ever get that right. It’s our last bastion of humanityhood.

So maybe, the more we get sucked into virtuality, the more reason there is to start meditation. Just do it.

(No, I’m not getting paid through PayperPost by some global meditation corporation. I just believe in it)

Meditation Spectrum

Most people think of meditation as focusing 100% on one thing (usually your breathing). At other times you drift off and are focusing 0% on the One Thing. And when you start meditating your meditation session might go something like this:

34 seconds 100% focus...
4 minutes 0% focus...
22 seconds 100% focus...
2 minutes 0% focus... etc. etc.

And they envisage that if they keep the meditation up and really work at it, eventually they'll be able to change the sessions to look something like this:

2 minutes 100% focus...
30 seconds 0% focus...
3 minutes 100% focus... etc. etc.

And they imagine that a meditation master's meditation session looks like this:

1 hour 100% focus...

BullPoo!!!

This ALL or NOTHING mentality has nothing to do with real life - it's all a construction of the human brain.

Real meditation starts off with you being, say, 2% aware of your focus point, while simultaneously 98% unaware. Simultaneous, get it.

And the more you practise, the more the underlying "aware" proportion grows. So, like, you might get up to 40% aware and 60% unaware. Co-habitating. So that even while those pesky thoughts of the deadlines sitting on your desk tug away at your mind, underneath there is this persistent pool of conscious awareness.

It makes sense if you take the time to think about it. I mean, fck man, if anybody could totally, 100% focus on something, and 0% totally non-focus on everything else - their heart would stop beating before you could say "failed fine-motor control".

And the reason we meditate is so that the positive benefits spread and permeate to our everyday life. What kind of benefit is it gonna be to focus 100% on, say, the sound in your ears, when, say, you're driving down the highway at 120k per hour? BUT: carry on about your everyday stuff with this underlying reservoir of focused, grounded, C A L M, even while you're arguing with your dickhead boss - is good, good stuff.

And today is fckn Monday, which, according to my little grey poll in the right bar => is overwhelmingly the worst day of the week for a BiPolar soul.

Disobedient Mind

Been really struggling with my meditation the last few weeks. Before that I had built my daily session up to a quality 25 minutes a day. But since that run of "In-the-Pinks" in May, I just can't quieten my mind. It is always busy, shooting off at different tangents. At the moment I'm probably spending about 80% of the meditation sessions "somewhere else". The mind just wanders and wanders. I keep roping it in, trying to let it settle on feeling my breathing, or letting go the tension in my temples, but it bolts in under a minute.

It's been so bad that I've cut the meditation sessions back down to 15 minutes thinking this would help. I mean it was seeming pretty pointless just sitting there every day for 25 minutes daydreaming. Every time when I sit crosslegged and close my eyes I say to myself: "this time it will bew different. This time I'll be 100% disciplined. This time I'll focus." But still, the mind has a mind of it's own.

I'm not sure where to go from here. A part of me thinks that maybe I should take a total break from meditation for a week. Start completely afresh. Another voice says, "no, this is a test, you've gotta push through this barrier". I guess what I really need is some collaborative guidance, like going off to a meditation retreat for 4 or 5 days. But I don't have the time or cash right now, especially with the sale of my business still under negotiation. Although I must admit that every day that slips by says to me the sale is less likely to happen.

That approach to buy my business 2 weeks ago (or is it 3?) was the worst dang thing that happened to me. It took my eye off the target. Sent my focus off on wild scenario-planning sessions.

Tomorrow I must really get back on top of things. Bracket all the other shit out. Just concentrate on the task at hand.

Seems like my present life state is reflecting my present meditation state. Maybe if I can get one right the other will follow?

The Only Thing Helping

It's been a bad week. The only thing helping at the moment is my daily meditation. It's the one small piece of discipline in my life. Every morning, straight after Miss L leaves, I head down to the outside room and sit cross-legged for 20 minutes of being mindfull.

Not only the fact of "keeping the appointment" is an act of discipline, but the activity itself is a concentrated effort of disciplining the mind. Keeping it from straying.

And it's starting to spill over into the rest of my life now. De-linking from your fears of the future and regrets of the past and just living in the the moment, the unchanging NOW. Enjoying the simple things. Feeling the water on your skin when you wash the dishes. Being aware of the subtle vibration of the steering wheel when you drive the car.

Buddhists say that rigorous daily meditation is neccessary to "de-program" the mind from it's bad habits. That once the mind is pure you will be able to see "things as they really are". That reality will reflect truthfully into the pure, polished surface of the mind.

I don't consider myself buddhist (although I admire their philosophy). But perhaps the depression that I've been groping through this last week is a direct result of - for the first time in a long while - seeing things "as they actually are". Seeing that my business is not going to bring in sufficient income. Seeing that my debt is out of all proportion. Seeing that my physical health needs a big shake-up. Seeing that things at the moment are generally not working out.

And if a week or two of depression is neccessary to process and digest the real truth, then I guess that it's a small price to pay. It just hurts like hell while you're going through it. Like the dentist I suppose - take an hour's pain now and avoid a month's pain further down the line. If I could only keep sight of this during the really bad moments...

Feeling not Thinking

Not every meditation session is equal. Some go good, some go bad. Hopefully they get slowly better as time goes on.

This morning was my best session of the whole year. Focusing on the breath alone was not doing it for me, so a few weeks back I tuned into the ringing sound in my ears. But I struggled with that. It's just too monotone to hold my attention. Maybe one day I'll be able to zone in on sound alone.

Today I just cocentrated on feeling my body, the breathing vessel attached to my mind. The weight of it. The pulse of it. The subtle tingle of air on the surface of it. The aliveness of it.

And I started feeling a bliss. Like the universe was gently tickling me. I could hear my heart beat. My whole body felt like it was in a mild hard-on state, but an eternally sustainable hard-on, not a momentary one that collapses in ejaculation. An exhilerating but peaceful itch.

And I felt how good it was to be alive. Not doing anything else. Just being alive. Pulsing with the universe. Aware of my full being.

When the meditation ended, a spacious calm stayed with me for at least an hour. Mrs M was doing the dishes, I offered to take over, feeling the warm water enveloping my hands. The smooth surfaces of the plates. The cold iron of the spoons. All connecting with me.

Aware.

So today's been a special day. But I'm gonna give it a "Half-way House". I'm never satisfied with Halfway Houses, they're just not as exciting as "In-the-Pinks". But if you treat them right, and trade a little contentment for excitement, it might just be that Halfway Houses are the best place to be.

A Meditation on Meditation

Firstly I must tell you that I STILL can't get into any site on Blogger or
Blogspot. Could be a cable under the Atlantic that's got blocked, but what's
really strange is I'm still getting into every other site on the planet.
Maybe Blogger has blacklisted me due to my derogatory comments last year
about Google?

So I gotta send this post by email again. It's my last lifeline to BiPOlar
Daily. And guys, if you haven't seen any of my comments on your blogs for a
while it's not because I don't love you - it's because I can't get there to
post a comment.

***

One of my New Year's aspirations was to restart meditation. And so far I've
kept it up. In 2003 I used to meditated every day for the full year. Mrs M
and I went on a 10 day silent retreat with a world renowned meditation
master, and we shot up the meditation learning curve. Actually "learning"
curve would be frowned upon by real McCoy meditators as it's actually a
"doing" curve, as in, you can't learn meditation - you gotta do it.

At that time I was doing it with some grandiose notion that I may reach
enlightenment. I hadn't been officially diagnosed with BipOlar yet. But now
I'm doing it largely as a therapy for BiPolar. One possible definition of
BiPolar is that we get carried away by our moods. Considering that
meditation teaches you to NOT get carried away by any thoughts or moods, I
figure that kind of skill can only improve my lot (IMPROVE, not cure).

I'm up to 20 minutes a sitting, and believe me, not to get carried away by
thoughts is the hardest thing in the world. The goal is to be aware of what
you are thinking about as you are thinking about it. So you focus on one
thing, like your breathing, and try keep your mind there without it being
dragged off by errant thoughtlings. Lately I've switched my centre of focus
to my sound sense. When I sit in a really quiet, still place, I can detect a
high-pitched ring in my ears. This is what I try focus on.

I've managed to narrow the time that it takes me to realise that my mind has
drifted away from the support, and I have no problem with letting the
thoughtling go once I've detected it, and returning to the support, but for
the life of me I cannot pinpoint the exact point where the thoughtling
hi-jacks my mind. It sneaks up like a thief at night, carries you away, and
only after a lapse of time (which, as I said, I am shortening) are you aware
that you've drifted off topic.

The meditation was going well up until I went up to Johannesburg. Up there I
didn't get the slightest sniff of a chance to meditate. (not something you
tend to do in the middle of a kidnapping). Since then the meditation
sessions have regressed significantly. Which tells me that although my
surface mind (the place we spend 90% of our waking hours) is seeming to be
handling the situation - there is huge turmoil in the Deep Mind. Gonna have
to work thru it.

Miss L started her new school yesterday. We've gotten her into a Waldorf
school which we're happy about. The reasons for choosing a Waldorf school
are complex and need to form the subject matter of another post. The main
thing though, is that Miss L is settling back into a routine and doing
exceptionally well. Kids have the ability to bounce back so much better than
us past-their-prime dudes.

***

Feeling pretty shitty today. Had terrible nightmares last night and didn't
get a good sleep. I might be sounding fairly upbeat in this post, but that's
because posting is one of the small highlights of the day. Not much else is
gonna be happening today, I can assure you.

CURRENT MOOD: PRETTY SHITTY (and, no, the smiley won't show as I'm sending
this via email)