What's my next Power 30 goal going to be? I was going in order: sleep (save for last), hydration, hygiene, nutrition (skip for now), movement, and that brings me to meditation. Okay.
I've been practicing meditation for maybe fifteen years, I was going to say "practicing meditation on and off" but decided not to say "on and off" because that's redundant. But then decided to say "decided not to say 'on and off' because that's redundant" because that seemed necessary. It's necessary to show how the sausage is made, I think. I don't want to give an impression of myself as a delicious sausage springing from the forehead of Zeus (but I may have just given you an image of a delicious sausage springing from the forehead of Zeus that you may not have wanted, I apologize for that.) Honestly I think that's what we're working against, we're bombarded with images of delicious sausages and it's considered distasteful to show how they're made. I'm not even saying so much that we're lacking in instructions for how to make sausage, I'm just saying that it would feel less lonely if there were more images of people up to their armpits in sausage fixins. Possibly I would feel like less of a freak, not that writing this paragraph is helping me out with that. Whatever, I'm a freak, so what.
Meditation. Is by nature an on and off thing. Meditation is for mediating our on and off natures. So when I say that I've been practicing meditation for maybe fifteen years, I'm telling you that I ain't no Buddha. But I am fifteen years past where I started, which ain't nothing. I like to remind folks now and again that this blog isn't for me telling you what to do, it's just me telling you how I do. Though I acknowledge the potential for interpretation that the me telling you what to do is silent, so every now and again I like to say I ain't telling you what to do out loud. I also acknowledge that perhaps you might take my how I do into your how you do, so every now and again I like to say go you and you do you and in this case, keep in mind the fifteen years.
I think the last time I wrote about how I meditate, I was hiding in the stairwell at work. I don't do that anymore, instead I've been doing it after I get home from work MWF. So my week three Power 30 goal is add it back into the other days of the week, starting with Tuesday and Thursday.
This is how I've been doing MWF:
- I have the intention set in my mind--i.e., in my timetracker, which is overmind--that I will meditate when I get home from work.
- So I get home, tidy the bedroom--i.e. pick up clothes and put them in the hamper, straighten the sheets.
- I get on the bed and launch iTunes, where I've uploaded my meditation track that I downloaded from Insight Meditation Center. These are what I really wanted in a meditation timer: silent, with a chime at the end. Before I was doing 15 minutes but now I'm up to 20 minutes, and here's where I want to remind to you about the fifteen years and about beginning at the beginning. I wouldn't start with 20 minutes, if you're just starting. I would probably start with 5 minutes. Or 1 minute. And if silent meditation makes you crazy, there are lots of guided meditations out there. Guided meditations make me crazy, so I do silent.
- I get into Legs Up The Wall pose, which for me is actually legs up the headboard, which is why I'm on the bed, I don't actually have any suitable floor/wall space in my house except for the bed and headboard. Why Legs Up The Wall? It's a restorative pose, I figured I could use that and really make use of my time out.
- I start breath counting, same as I was doing before: close or unfocus my eyes, breathe naturally, and count my breaths, not out loud. I count on the exhale and "and" on the inhale, up to four. When I get to four, I start back at one. And that's it, until the timer goes off.
- Except that's still never it, and I still use the parade as my backup: when I notice that I'm halfway through a rant I pull back and quietly note, "rant," or even better, "hurt," and then I go back to counting my breaths, when I notice that I'm busily planning I pull back and quietly note, "busy," and then I go back to counting my breaths, when I notice that I'm up to 57 I pull back and quietly note, "haha, whoop" and then I start back at one and count up to four.
- When the timer goes off, I get up to tidy the kitchen and get my dinner.
Really all I have to do to get this into TuThu is to set my intention to meditate before I go to the gym for clients, and do everything else the same all the way through getting my dinner and then go to the gym. And if I want to get this into SatSun, figure out how to set my intention for that.
Last but not at all least, I said before:
the crazy thing is how it turns into so much more than just fifteen minutes counting your breaths. I guess it's because basically you're practicing calmly bringing yourself back to the task at hand, over and over just in the fifteen minutes, then day in and day out, then week by week and so forth. That is a lot of practice, a ton of repetitions. You know what it is, it's WAX ON WAX OFF. You wax on, wax off for fifteen minutes every day, and then somebody tries to sweep your leg and WAX ON comes out of nowhere! Except not nowhere, it came out of those fifteen minutes.Except Ska told me that if I actually tried wax on against sweep the leg, I would find myself flat on my back. You know what I mean though, right? Because I'm telling you that if you ever find yourself being loaded into a CT scan with the left side of your body disabled, which I truly hope you never do, you'll be glad that you have a bunch of nice, calming breath counting under your belt.
