Have an orthodontist appointment that'll eat up a lot of my day today, so no extracurricular stuff, I don't think. We'll see, though. I'll keep the tag for now, and will remove it tomorrow if I don't make time for it.

Meditation (Day 48)

Hit a really solid posture for a significant chunk of today's meditation. Hit that "delicious stillness" where there's a strong desire to not move.

The "focus on the breath" thought when the mind starts to wander is cementing into a habit. Pretty amazing, actually. Several times I was also just strongly in stage 4, I'm pretty sure, where distractions were kept out of attention by continuous introspective awareness and thus only drifted in and out of awareness.

For some reason, the Lion King (the 2D one specifically) drifted in and out as a regular distraction today. "Can you feel the love tonight" was a particularly tenacious distraction. Interestingly, though song distractions are the hardest to keep away, they're the easiest to notice very quickly and kinda help keep me in the present. The tenacious frequency also sort of good practice for letting the distraction come, let it be, and let it go.

Mind felt intensely focused today for a significant chunk of the session. I managed to get two body scans in (one in the first half of the session and one in the second half). After the second one, distractions started overwhelming me, and I didn't feel I could do a third.

I wonder if the strengthening of mindfulness via full-body scans means learning to deal with a greater frequency of distractions. It seems quite possible. Yes, I'm strengthening the mind, and part of the exercise is strengthening control of the scope of attention, but it's also about just giving the mind more resources to work with. So, if control doesn't improve as fast as the power of the mind, it means I have to train more to get the new level of distractions under control.

It makes sense to me, though if that is the case it's curious that the book did not mention this....