Purposefully slept in this morning. Was pretty exhausted yesterday and didn't practice good sleep hygiene by getting into bed sooner.
Dream
Intention (2325 the night before)
Watch myself fall asleep. WBTS. No wake-up time designated tonight. Thank you me, for remembering my dreams.
Wake-Back-to-Sleep (logged at 0435 this morning)
There's a dream I woke up from, but I can't remember it. A spooky optical illusion freaked me out a bit on wake up. And I couldn't breath thru my nose as much as I would've liked. Pretty sure it was just a dream fragment that I can't remember now. Not a huge loss, though sometimes fragments unlock the whole dream (or much more).
WILD time?
Wake (logged at 0850 this morning)
There were dreams but I don't remember. That's okay, it happens. Looks like I still got to work on sleep hygiene a bit. Gots to work on consistency, and also making sure I sleep well the day following a poor night of sleep. Which is ironically hard because sleep deprivation hurts impulse control, which hurts my end-of-day wind-down habits.
Pre-nap (1400)
Still haven't meditated yet today. Pretty rare now to not meditate before nap. Will meditate shortly after nap, I think. Lots of variables at play, though.
I'm falling into doing habits again, not because I've decided them, but because they're habits. In the moment, I pick them intentionally, I start the Toggl and everything, usually beforehand.
But... my reasoning for choosing to do them is more "I do this at this time" and less any higher level purpose. Mind you, I'm not saying I'm trying to avoid "wasting time". I simply want whatever I'm doing to be accomplishing its purpose the best way. In the past, this ended up being "Less YouTube, more Anime". Replace like with like, more-or-less.
Though changing ratios may also end up being a goal. That's different, though, and not in scope here. That'd be a separate project.
Post-nap (1428)
Lots of thoughts of Smash. Not just Melee, but also Ultimate.
Also, interestingly, naturally ended up thinking about living at my aunt's. Which is kinda what I'm trying to incubate.
Lower back is aggravated again. Noticing old posture habits regressing lately. Probably related. May have also been the poor sleep the other night. Might even be the not doing ab exercises yesterday (which ironically I decided against because of my body). Going to work on posture for a bit, regardless.
Higher-level choosing of the things I do is something I'll start working on, I think. I suppose, in the moment, I could work on asking the deeper "why" of anything I choose to do.
Meditation (Day 142)
Prep
Motivations:
- Practice intentionality
- Unity of mind
- Overcoming illusion of self
- See how far the stages take me
- Subduing distraction
Intentions for the day:
- Eyes closed
- Prep posture and set intention to stay still
- Before focusing on meditation object, cultivate joy
- Immediately notice and correct for subtle dullness (stage 5 intention
- Body-scan to increase mindfulness (stage 5 exercise)
- Establish a clear scope of attention and completely ignore all subtle distractions (stage 6 intention)
- Move, grow, and shrink the scope of attention to improve control over attention (stage 6 exercise)
- Especially work to completely ignore posture distractions
Distractions to look out for:
Post-Meditation
Today feels pretty close to another best day. Not sure how much a feeling of more subtle distractions is me still getting better at noticing them. Especially the hypnagogic ones. Further, noticing them seems to gain me more energy, which may mean they are a symptom of subtle dullness after all.
An interesting thing that occurred at one point was the internalizing of something I thought of a while back, which was that subtle distractions were like things in my peripheral vision causing my eyes or head to move to that thing. Ignoring it would be not moving my eyes, and completely ignoring it is to be aware that there's something to notice but not processing it.
At some point it clicked and now I could keep my third eye on the breath and not have it momentarily look at the distraction. This was inconsistent, but will prove useful. Perhaps I'll make one of my goals to be "don't move the third eye"?