I didn't meditate this morning. I overslept and I just could not carve out the time. And by lunchtime, I...I wasn't anxious or upset, but I couldn't wait to close my door, couldn't wait for the silence. I didn't need it, necessarily, but I wanted it, like I want, you know, waffles sometimes. It was palpable. And I was profoundly grateful that I now know how to access it, whenever I want. It's a real gift.
The frustrating thing is that this is both the absolute truth, and absolutely not achievable. It’s one thing to think that there’s no way to fix something that’s broken; it’s something else entirely to know how to fix it and not be able to.
Interesting side note. I was in the parking lot at the supermarket yesterday and someone cut me off. My first reaction, normally, would be to rage at them. And I started to. “Seriously!?! Eff you, you eff...”
And that’s as far as I got. Instead, I took a deep breath, and offered this. Through gritted teeth, but I offered it.
“May you be happy. May you be safe. May you be well. May you find peace.”
Understanding this is how I was able to walk away from the crater and into the light when j died. It’s how I was able to take another chance on Zaphod. And it’s why I continue to chip away at this thing with Misha. Nothing is in its final form yet.
I don’t seek love anymore. Even before I started meditating, I knew that focusing on me was the right course of action. After j died, I said that I would rather be alone than be with anyone who wasn’t *him* and that is still true to a very large extent. I am good being alone.
Now, the downside to that is that I do need to love and be loved in return. So how can those things coexist? How can I love, and be loved, and be alone?
How can I find someone who will let me love him, and love me in return but not want to *be* with me in any structured way? It would seem to be a tough ask, but that is what I have with Z. We exist without strings, without structure, without expectation, without jealousy, without promises. We just are.
It’s interestingly analogous to the whole meditation journey, which is about learning to *be* without any preconceived notions of what that means.
So, the visualization technique that I talked about earlier has morphed into something slightly more elaborate. Shocking, I know.
I used the analogy today with Dot that I think of this exercise as kind of a “meditation keurig.” Except the k-cups are full of things like hope and peace, and they don’t clog up the oceans.
It works like this. I set a meditation timer for 10 or 15 minutes and I pick two or three things to focus on that seem important that day. Things like peace, or focus, or love, or light, or hope. I load those two or three things into the keurig, and press start.
Now, the meditation keurig is an odd little machine. It’s essentially a lucite box, with slots for the k-cups, and a meditation pillow inside. I press start, and crawl into my virtual machine and get comfy. When the bell sounds signifying the start of the practice, the first capsule drops, flooding the box with that attribute. I sometimes imagine that the attribute has color, so that ‘peace’ for example, floods the box with blue light, or focus with orange light. For those five minutes that I’m focused on the breath, I am breathing IN the essence of that attribute. I’m taking in pure hope. Pure focus. Pure light. Pure joy. When the five-minute bell sounds, the next pod is activated, and I move on to that one.
Like I said, I usually do three in fifteen minutes. And I end feeling so FULL of whatever I was breathing in.
It’s a little elaborate, I’ll grant you that. But it’s also crazy rewarding. Give it a shot. What pods will you load in today?
Learn more about Muse® at Pepcom and The Consumer Electronics Show (CES) booth 43337 at Sands, Halls A-D New Muse® Premium content offering will contain...
More information here: https://choosemuse.com/blog/100-all-new-guided-meditations/
So. Muse. Possibly THE most infuriating piece of tech that I have bought since the original Hue lights, which only turned on about 38% of the time. When it works, it’s fascinating. But it doesn’t work consistently, or reliably.
Here’s my experience. There are five sensor positions that have to be in constant contact with skin in order to work--three on your forehead and one behind each ear. It’s a bit of a trick the first time you put the headband on to figure out what to do with your hair so that the ear sensors aren’t interfered with, and how tight the band needs to be to get good contact on your forehead. I’d say that it took me an hour the first night. But after that, getting it to connect is pretty trivial.
Keeping it connected is a completely different story. My meditation sessions stop in process several times a session. “Session has been paused due to a drop in signal quality” should be my new mantra.
And, if it happened, and I could see that ‘oh, it’s the left ear again...’, I’d feel OK about it. I’d know what the problem is, and I could go about addressing it. But, in fact, when my signal ‘quality’ bottoms out, all I seem to need to do is to press ‘try again’ and everything reconnects without me moving the band or the sensors so much as a millimeter. Which tells me that the problem isn’t the CONNECTION so much as it is the software.
And I was about to just send the effing thing back last week when Muse announced a whole new interactive package to go along with their infuriating tech. Guided meditations were the one thing that was really missing from their offering, and I’m stoked about it. But not if I can’t figure out how to make the effing headband work.
And if I go down the TM road, well...the whole point may end up being moo, as they say.
What? I haven’t talked about TM yet? Oops. More to come on that, too, I guess.
So, I want to share this pretty powerful visualization exercise I’ve been doing. During the focus on breathing, I started imagining the air that I was breathing in had color. If you know me, you know how much I love rainbow everything, so I’d think of the first inhale as being red, and then I would visualize the exhale, with all this red air going back into the universe. The next would be orange. The next yellow.
You see where this is going.
It was really just as way for me to focus on the breath that *wasn’t* counting. I mean, I tried counting. Ooonnnne. Twooooooo. Threeeee.
Not my gig. But colors? That I can do for days.
However, the colors were just a concentration technique. They weren’t a revelation.
But then, I started imagining that I was sitting in a room where the air was actually light. And on each in breath, I breathed in the light, and as my lungs filled with air, I was actually lit from within. On the exhale, I dimmed again, only to light back up on the next inhale.
It was powerful stuff. I felt completely at peace. Completely one with the fucking LIGHT. I mean, I was the light, right?
I had no idea how noisy everything was until I was still and quiet.
Ellen Degeneres
So, yeah.
In the same article, she talks about how sometimes you don’t even hear a noise until it’s gone. How many times has someone turned off a lawn mower and there was just this overwhelming relief? That’s what meditation is like. It turns off noise that you didn’t realize was bugging you. When the quiet comes, it’s like “Oh! There you are!”
Pretty sure that if my back (and to be fair, my bladder) were stronger, I’d stay in the quiet place forever.
Trying to reduce anxiety and stress in 2018? If the idea of meditation makes you want to toss your coffee cup across the room, ABC News anchor Dan Harris offers some advice in his new book.
My favorite line from this article is “Because when you see how absolutely bonkers you are, you have a much better chance of not being owned by the insanity.”
This idea that we CAN cut through the noise, that we don’t actually have to listen at all to the zoo in our heads, that we can make reflective choices...that’s the thing. That’s the reason we do it.
Here's a little animation about how focusing on the happiness of others can actually bring greater happiness for ourselves
This is kind of like that “wish everyone at the mall well and see how much better you feel” thing. I’m in the clear, because focusing on the happiness of others is kind of my thing.
"Suddenly, that advice from my teacher — “Be present, be patient, be gentle, be kind . . . and everything else will take care of itself
Interesting article by Andy Puddicombe.
Full disclosure, I didn't keep Headspace after the 30-day trial. There is some free content that I will likely take some advantage of, but ultimately trying to keep up with two separate meditation tracks was to much, especially after I got the Muse which also has its own exercises.
I think that this sums up at least 75% of what I’m trying to do here. We live in a world that is full of noise, full of distractions. And avoiding those is just not possible, not completely.
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