Saturday, June 15, 2019

Completed: #32. Meditate for 15 minutes daily for 1 week straight

For days 6 (yesterday morning) and day 7 (just now), I did a silent 15 minutes on timer with the only strategies that worked for me for a few seconds at a time: body scanning -- individually checking in with each part of the body and feeling sensations currently associated with each, focusing on all sounds around me, silently saying "in" and "out" with each breath, and imagining breathing in and out through each part of the body.

Today I tried it after smudging first.

Honestly, though, this was really difficult and largely unproductive for me. My mind does not sit even remotely still, even with concerted effort -- when I was a teen, I used to describe it as a 20-fold thought-track. My efforts at meditation just made me more conscious of this and less able to stop them as I didn't have any actions to distract me.

Moreover, one of the more damaging parts of my psyche is that I must never feel self-indulgent. This manifests into a lot of my longest-standing issues and just regular day-to-day quirks of existence. The last two mornings, for instance, I had instant coffee because I did not feel like I deserved good coffee. In this sense, I could see taking a still fifteen minutes if I "earned" it -- my most productive was after a difficult and sweaty yoga workout as a cool down. It had earned purpose then. I could see trying that out again.




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