Daily Entry: October 19th, 2020

Meditation (Day 137)

Another prime number day, woo!

Prep (1850)

A new latest start, I think. Let's see how I feel about that.

Motivations:

  • Practice intentionality
  • Unity of mind
  • Overcoming the illusion of self
  • Subduing distractions
  • Seeing what the next stages bring

Intentions for the day:

  • Set posture during prep and then set intention to sit still
  • Eyes closed today
  • Set intention to immediately notice and correct for subtle dullness (stage 5 intent)
  • Body scan to increase power of mind and mindfulness (stage 5 exercise)
  • Set intention to have breath be vivid for the entirety of the session (stage 5 mastery)
  • Set the intention to focus exclusively on the meditation object (stage 6 intention)
    • Breath at nose or breath at given body part (stage 6 exercise)
  • Do not feed distractions with attention (not even labeling anymore)
    • Especially posture
  • Work on returning to your intentions wordlessly
  • Before starting to focus on meditation, cultivate joy

Distractions to look out for:

  • Wife
  • Labeling
  • Outside
  • Cat
  • Posture
  • Body-scan
  • Timer
  • Reflection
  • Politics
  • Haunting of Bly Manor
  • Meta
  • Hypnagogy
  • Vision
  • Work

Let's sit down on the cushion!

....

After a quick restroom transition.

Post-Meditation (1950)

Feel like I really struggled to keep the breath vivid. Lots of surges of energy today. Hypnagogy was present, as well. Really not sure whether or not as less distractions are let thru if I have hypnagogic-like thoughts without dullness. Whenever I check I often don't think it's there, though a check often leads to a surge of energy. I can also catch the hypnagogic thoughts.

I don't know. Feels more like dream-like metaphors coming to my brain. Which, to be fair to the part of me that thinks it's dullness, is what naps do. Though lately naps haven't been like that as much....

I'll keep playing with it.

I think that wordlessly setting intention the return to breath is either wrong or too soon, though. But that too I'll play with.

I don't think this dullness is strong if it is dullness, so I suppose that's fairly stage 5 territory.

Dream

Intention (2335 the night before)

So, incubating aunt house dream now. Otherwise, same strats different day.

Wake (logged at 0805 this morning)

No WBTS. No dreams remembered. Think I need to focus on sleep hygiene.

Experimental (Notion Organization)

Not today. Probably not tomorrow. Busy with errands using rental car, which I return tomorrow. OpsLead is over, though, so normalcy should return.