Meditation (Day 143)

Prep (1030)

Going in feeling really good. Something about the extra stretching I'm doing this weekend? I've decided to do whole stretch routine save for the second foam-roller exercise that's purposefully done very shortly before laying down in bed. This takes roughly 40 minutes instead of the typical 20, though I get those 20 minutes back at the end of the day. The reason I decided to do this is because on weekends I often spend some extra time watching entertainment with wife, and have less time during the night.

Motivations:

• Practice intentionality
• Unity of mind
• Subduing distractions
• See how far meditation takes me
• Overcoming illusion of self

Intentions for the day:

• Eyes closed
• Prep posture and then set intention to sit completely still
• Before focusing on the meditation object, cultivate joy
• Immediately notice and correct for subtle dullness (stage 5 intention)
• Special call-out to identify hypnagogic thoughts as a symptom of subtle dullness
• 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)
• Special call-out to completely ignore posture distractions
• "Don't move the third eye"

Distractions to look out for:

• Body-scan
• Wife
• Cat
• Outside
• Posture
• Lower back
• Shoulder
• Lotus
• Pain
• Vision
• Timer
• SSBM
• Reflection
• Planning
• Meta
• Labeling
• American Horror Story
• Politics
• Hypnagogy

Post-Meditation (1155)

Not sure if cold air makes feeling the breath at the nose easier of if vividness of breath is getting really strong. Probably a bit of both. It did take extra effort to put the breath at nose into awareness when moving my scope of attention to other parts of the body.

The labeling habit is starting to fade. The new "third eye" (though I often call it the "mind's eye" so I may refer to it as that instead) vigilance seems to help with that. It also helped with keeping the thinking/emotional mind considerably quiet, and rang the alarm when there were some hypnagogic thoughts whispering. Felt an energy surge very shortly after the whisper. Seems I may be able to trust peripheral awareness to keep that energy up once the habit is set.

Very well could be a new best day. So many days now though, it's harder and harder to be sure. They've all been so good, as well.

Dream

Intention (2250 the night before)

The time has come! Not perfect sleep hygiene, but in a better place. My intent prep as I lay down has gotten nice and simple. Currently, it is:

• I will reality check in my dreams
• I will WBTS in the middle of the night
• I will watch myself fall asleep
• WILD
• Visit my aunt's house
• Cultivate joy

Then I relax, watching myself fall asleep.

So, let's get to it.

Wake (logged at 0740 this morning)

The "write a little bit in journal" habit has waned a bit. The cold, maybe? Perhaps now because I don't want to turn on the light (don't want to wake the wife, who's sleeping on the bed again now that's it's not super hot upstairs).

Not sure if I remembered dreams at the various points I woke up throughout the night. Feel like my mind has been in "processing" mode the past couple nights of dreams.

I think I should set the "write at least one sentence" intent, first-and-foremost when falling asleep. The compromise at the time helped build the habit, and the habit itself helps with dream recollection.

Pre-nap (1500)

Late nap. Almost forgot it entirely. Need to consider new WBTS strats now that it's colder and also I may need to get out of bed to write in journal.

I'll let nap ruminate on that a bit.

Post-nap (1518)

I'll grab and pick up my notebook at least, is what I've come up with as my "bare minimum" intent. That should tell me if I have anything to write, and I should know what to do next if I need to write elsewhere.

Body feels real good after that nap. Had a loving-kindness engulf me without any attempt on my end during the nap as well.

Misc Writing

Weekly Review

Today is weekly review day! First weekly review with new writing system, which actually makes me more inclined to write things.

I have done eye drops and eye mask for the week, which means my vision is a bit blurry right now. That's good, though, means that the eye residue that built up has dissolved a bit and my eyes will be more moisturized.

A task that got me to come here and start writing is the "Experiment for this week?" item. I may just want to continue Notion system updates. Which is to say start moving all the things into defined projects (where appropriate), and having a real "Next Actions" database instead of constantly abusing my tickler.

So, instead of a list of things to tackle that I may or may not throw to the future, I'll have a garden of projects with budding tasks. There'll also be a "No Task" project or a junk drawer for just one-off things, I suppose. The less friction there is with a project, the easier it'll be, I think.

So, then, during this weekly review, I'll take the project list part pretty seriously.

I suppose the Notion mutation experiment is itself a project.... Probably should create that as well.

Alright, so.... The people I know who read this public diary, I have set up regular intervals to chat with them. I think I'm going to stop doing it now. It'll all be in Notion now. Perhaps some blog posts will come this way, though I think I'm going to cultivate a lot of rough writing before I want to publish anything. We'll see.

Later!