Timeblock

Dream

I remember a dream within a dream and an argument with my dad. Not the content of the argument, but that I had one. That's it. Might've recovered more if I wrote it down after my morning meditation.

Meditation (Day 15)

I'm half a month into meditation now. With some difficult days under my belt, I am more confident that the meditation is helping. Specifically, I am more tired on days when my mind really wants to keep chewing on certain ideas, or keep flipping from ideas. I have been working diligently to be joyful when I realize I'm caught in this loop, even outside of meditation.

This intention has created a sort of "mini-meditation" habit wherein I go through the meditative joy formula: relax and look for joy; observe, let it come, let it be, let it go. There are things that I don't want to ever intentionally invest time in, and things that I do, but both in the moment are observed and let go. What matters is what I intend to do in the present. I can plan to tackle important things that come to mind later.

There is some family drama that has led to a heavier practicing of flexibility today. Yesterday is when it boiled over, but yesterday was set in motion and family drama wasn't something I was going to deal with properly. So I spent a small amount of necessary time on it, on purpose, and then I worked the rest of the day to let my subconscious mind process it. Often it bubbled into consciousness, but then I would repeat the mantra.

Today, the drama isn't done, but more work was necessary. Again, I intentionally spent some time on it, and outside that time I have been joyfully guiding my mind to other tasks as I realize I am dwelling on it.

I trust the subconscious mind to do a better job of processing. So far, it has done exactly that. So I get a better result and I have more energy to show for it. There did end up being a little bit of an analytic meditation on this drama this morning, though, which wasn't exactly on purpose (I wanted to keep the time investment today to an hour but it was an hour and a half), but it ended up being worthwhile and started whilst in a toggl timer devoted to this drama (so it was brain activity accurately tracked).

I think I'm dealing with this in a healthier manner, in a way that will end better for all involved parties, and with the ability to devote energy to other things.

Timeblock

Thinking

Morning routine in a solid place, I think. Though it is a significant chunk of time, I believe it sets me up for success. The goal moving forward is to channel my strengthening consciousness to more deep work so I can get things done. This should translate to less watching of YouTube (specifically the YouTube I watch alone, aka MTG Arena stuff).

Meditation (Day 14)

Two weeks of practicing regularly! That's pretty awesome. Meditation was always something I wanted to make a part of my life. For years and years! And now it may very well be a part of my life for a long, long time.

Still haven't experienced strong dullness during my main meditation, but I think I can identify progressive subtle dullness? Or rather, there are some tells, maybe. Been playing with the various pointers for working through stages 3, 4, and 5 depending on how I feel the current session is going. This morning was pretty hard so I tried a bit of stage 5, but gave up on it and kept with stage 3 stuff (introspective attention to identify gross distractions).

I don't think I'm forgetting the meditation object very much, but I believe it happened once or twice today. Also, after many days of songs not coming to me during meditation, they have started to break through yesterday and today. I thought it would happen much sooner. Songs have been a constant thing flowing in my head since I started meditation, though only outside meditation sessions. Still, even within meditation sessions, I find the songs playing in my head are somehow quieter, and they stop playing on loop with much less prompting.

Perhaps there is something about the stillness which quiets the mind. Though it may also be my attempts to focus. For instance, right now I'm focusing on writing this and though I am maintaining awareness (my wife just walked up the stairs), no songs are playing. Maybe a song playing in meditation is a sign of dullness, then? Perhaps, also, it is a form of resisting the meditation session?

This realization is something I've already noted, mind you. I even use it to try to quiet songs when doing menial tasks. I try to focus on the various types of consciousness (e.g. the feeling of water running over my hand, the smell and taste of food, the sounds of whatever I'm doing, how they all bind together), and find that the song will quiet and disappear for a while.

I have also experimented with different sitting positions. I believe I'm doing a quarter-lotus. My leg completely falls asleep (loses all sensation) by the end of the meditation. I am told that this is why meditation should never go beyond 40 minutes (avoid nerve damage), and why you should also pair sitting meditation with walking meditation.

My paranoia is a bit high, though, so I only managed half of today's session in quarter-lotus before switching back to my on-the-knees position. I might wait until I get a cushion, as I believe the way I sit on the foam roller for the lotus especially cuts off circulation.

....

It is something I will continue to play with, I think.

Timeblock

Thinking

Doing stretching and planning during this board meeting review. I've already gone over the slides, so I'm just listening for any more info.

Timeblock

Dream

I dreamt that the wife and I were out about the town. We ended up going to an Indian restaurant, and were surprised to find it being run by my former employer (when I worked at an Indian restaurant). The place was empty, so Prasad and I started talking. But then suddenly it was full and I decided to help deal with the lunch rush.

At some point I became concerned with COVID19, and decided to bid Prasad farewell and leave the crowded place.

I vaguely recall some sort of parking garage scene afterwards. There was, like, a sword-fight or something. I can't remember it too well.

Meditation (Day 12)

I'm feeling fairly confident that meditation is causing my enduring daily energy. Specifically, I believe the training I've done to keep my mind in the present helps me keep my mind from spending so much energy thinking about things I have no intention of acting upon. That stuff is draining, and when I focus on staying in the present (like specifically during a meditation session) I can feel my mind charging.

That "headache" that I only would notice when it was gone, I think was this constant strain of thinking. Because that headache has been gone for like 10 days now, though I notice something similar after a day of phycially talking with a bunch of people last Sunday. Which makes me think that I can tire myself out just like talking with others tires me out. Perhaps it isn't an introvert/extrovert thing. Perhaps it is the tangling of thoughts in my mind.

Timeblock

Thinking

I actually did do my weekly review yesterday! Kinda. Made a list and did the list. I'm not sure how much of it will make it to these here public logs. Monthly review did not happen, however.

My energy levels continue to be solid. Yesterday I was noticeably tired, but I did a day of errands and feel refreshed today, still. My goal is to start getting more hours of work in per day this week. According to my Toggl, it's still pretty low. Not going to actually share it because them these measurements become closer to targets, and I am avoiding Goodhart's Law ("a measure which becomes a target ceases to be a good measure"). It is a purely leading measurement, and I want to report only on the important lagging results. And lagging results will take a while to come in anyways.

Meditation (Day 11)

A counting breaths system to work with: The Mind Illuminated recommends counting the in- and out-breaths together as one, and also to place the count at a place that doesn't come naturally. A lot of people consider the in-breath the beginning of the breath, so the author recommends counting on the out-breath (aka "one", out-breath, in-breath, "two", out-breath, in breath). I combined this with counting in binary, and start the count at the out-breath, but put each number in a stage. So "zero" during out-breath, "one" during the pause between out and in, "one" during in-breath, and silence during the pause between in-breath and out-breath (where I most want to put a number).

Timeblock

Dream

Had a dream about being in school again. My classmater included people whom I work with now.

Timeblock

The Return of Wife's Day

So, since the pandemic started, I haven't really been following through an agreement I made with my wife: "Saturdays belong to wife, Sundays belong to me." I intend to return to proper wife's day today, with some caveats.

1. Wife's day does not start until after I do my daily maintenance
2. There are some things I can plan for Saturday if they can not be planned for Sunday

So, a large chunk of today's timeblock is, as it used to be, "Wife's day."

Black Lives Matter

Oh, yeah, I haven't explicitly said anything about this here. I'm in full support of Black Lives Matter. Any condemnation of violence is a condemnation of the police, as far as I'm concerned. I'm also fully in support of the notion that "All Cops are Bad" (which is a systemic argument, not an individual one).

Defund the police. Think about what jobs the police are supposed to be working on, and create a new or multiple new departments towards that end. Don't call them the police.

Meditation (Day 8)

This morning, expecting the resistance, I had a much better meditation session. Though there was quite a bit of difficulty staying with the meditation object. I had to redo the four steps (present, body, breaths, breaths at the nose) a couple of times. I also broke my stillness as there was some periodic noise that sounded like dripping coming from the matt. I though maybe I was dripping sweat, but I think the subtle shifting of weight to naturally keep me stable caused a sort of creaking. It went away after two resettlings of my sitting posture.

But I think maybe I should've tried more to "let it be". The problem was that I had the perspective of control, so I took it, but sometimes distractions come without my control, and I have to accept it. And I have found that I can. I'll play with this kind of problem in the future, so it's not a big deal. Luckily, I have given up the illusion of control on itches and discomfort, and so do not try to remedy those, to great joy.

So, about two days into meditation, I started meditating with my eyes open (as various sources recommend you can do). This has led to various interesting experiences. It is too much to go into all of them today, but I'll at least name all of them in a bulleted-list:

• Sight missing from attention and awareness (a pseudo-blindness)
• Color draining from vision
• Vision bluriness as a distraction
• Vision cloudiness
• Stronger attention when closing my eyes after several minutes with eyes open

The last three were experienced today (and the last two were experienced for the first time today). I want to discuss the last one, though. I decided that my vision was being a bit too distracting and so carefully and intentionally decided to close my eyes. With a sense no longer providing moments of consciousness, I could feel my awareness and attention get stronger elsewhere, and was much more capable of staying with the breath, as well as observing more of the breath.

This is something that was noted in The Mind Illuminated. In the book, he gives you a process for strengthening you awareness and attention via body scanning. By slowly increasing how much of the body you are observing, you improve the control and scope of attention, and exercise and strengthen the total power of consciousness. While doing this, you suddenly return to the breath at the nose to use the full power of attention of a body-scan on just the breath at the nose.

Now, I'm pretty far from the stage where this is recommended, I think (it's something to do in Stage 5 and I'm between Stage 3 and Stage 4). But it seems I can play with the concept via which senses are active and which are not. Though the main one I have control over is sight.

....

Thinking on it, however, I could use headphones and a timed-transition between white-noise and silence to play with it for hearing, as well.

Hmmm... something to consider.

Timeblock

Dream

Last night, I started reading The Wretched of the Earth. Really, I read a ton of the foreword, which is super long and references way too many things I don't know about, so I gave up on it. And then I read a bunch of the preface, which is also long, but more digestible.

I did this right before falling asleep, and I had a very abstract dream about colonialism. That's all I can really remember about it. Nothing solid to grab onto.

Meditation

This morning was the first time I really felt resistance to meditate. It was, as always, very worth it, but practicing digilance will actually take effort soon, probably.

Anyways, I'm starting to maybe build a habit of noting things after my meditation. I do this in Notion, but I plan to think more about them here.

Something that has become cumbersome during meditation is swallowing. Something happens at some point and swallowing stops being automatic and then also fails to work correctly. Eventually leading to a need to cough. I will need to explore why this is happening.

Meditation has helped me address an issue I discovered shortly before I started, which is that I'm clenching my teeth a lot. I believe it's the rubber bands I'm wearing. The pressure makes me want to clench down. Also, the invisalign armors my teeth so it doesn't hurt. I ended up correcting it a lot in meditation, and thus caught it more often out of meditation, and I think it is happening way less frequently now.

Distractions today:

• Korra (been watching it again)
• meta
• planning
• fantasy
• itch
• numbness
• timer
• impatience/resistance
• cat
• dripping

I didn't explain "meta" yesterday, but basically it's fantasizing, but it's a fantasy wherein I talk to someone about how well my meditation is going (or how well the particular session I'm in has went). I find it a very humorous distraction.

Timeblock

Meditation

This morning's meditation was not noticeably better than yesterday's, but it was still quite solid. It also still had very noticeable positive effects following. Like, it feels like a consistent dose of caffeine or my ADHD medication. And further, it stacks with the caffeine and ADHD medication I take shortly after my meditation session.

I'm still working with stage 3's intention: regularly invoke introspective attention (not awareness, but actual attention) to scan the mind's state for distractions. I still feel like I don't forget the breath, though distractions still take center stage. However, I believe the next stage is where I address that. I'll stay in stage 3 intention for a bit before moving on.

Anki only gives me 3 new cards to a deck per day to start memorizing, and so even though I added intention and mastery of each stage to Anki, I haven't gotten to them yet, and so I haven't yet memorized what stage 3 mastery looks like. I think it's fine to wait until I hit the concept in Anki before deciding whether or not to move on. I believe that meditation, if worth doing, will be a lifelong pursuit. No need to rush things.

Something I've been meaning to discuss for a while is the type of distractions I often encounter. Because of labeling (naming the distractions you encounter), I have short terms for them. Things that often come up are:

• fantasy
• meta
• itch
• cat
• pain
• numb
• timer

Now, I label it "fantasy", but it often comes in looking like "planning". These "fantasies" are very much things I could do, but I very rarely do. This has long been a frustration of mine. At one point I did realize that the process of talking about them made me less likely to do them. But I think, also, that the process of thinking about them makes me less likely to do them. I get the reward of doing it in my mind, and that satiates me and zaps the motivation to do it.

I think.

In any case, having noticed it in meditation, I catch myself doing it all the time. And a habit is forming of just letting the fantasy go, and not dwelling in it. This may be the new source of my energy?

Oh, yeah, I haven't talked about my increase of energy yet, either. I'm spending too much time thinking about this today, though.

In any case, I notice that I am able to choose to do things that I'd often fantasize about before. Like more thinking aloud here in this log. And I'm noting certain ideas that spark fantasies in my Notion, and then slowly building them out when the same fantasie sparks in my brain. Perhaps this will lead to the slow building of side-projects (both coding and non-coding)?

Time will tell.

Timeblock

Dream

Meditation has once again brought the dream back from oblivion. I was at my aunt's house (the place I lived a bit between Tucson and Seattle), and there was some sort of celebration going on. A bunch of stuff happened that have probably been lost to oblivion, but one thing I vividly remember was excitement over some sort of TV event. It ended up being a kitten competition, and suddenly it wasn't on TV but happening in the house. There was a kitten with poodle-like curly, black hair, that came and interacted with me. I decided it was the cutest, and sure enough they won the contest.

Meditation Reflection

The Mind Illuminated breaks down the progress of meditation into 10 stages. There is this formula per chapter about a stage in the book. Each chapter starts with an intention to hold in consciousness while working through the stage, and ends with what mastery of a stage looks like. I have decided to add intention and mastery of each stage to my Anki.

Each morning meditation is noticeably better than the previous, at least so far. I do not anticipate this to continue forever, but am appreciating it while it lasts. During the last few meditations, I had noticed this slight headache that I think is always there. Usually, I only notice it when it's gone. This morning, the headache was gone. I hadn't realized it wasn't there until the meditation.

Which is very interesting, as I've only noticed it go away before on my ADHD medication, or when high on marijuana.