Day 5 - 100 Day Meditation Challenge

Day 5

Length: 15 minutes (timed)
Start: 10:22pm
Experience:

I jumped straight up to 15 minutes because I thought it was a good time to ramp up.

 

A movie played in the background which was a minor distraction for a time, one that I ultimately was able to forget.

I sat in contemplation of things - of feelings I've been having, of anxieties, to better understand myself. I've been having some health concerns and I focused on my worries. 

 

I realized they were connected to my mortality, and that this was something that isn't directly 'agreeable' with the path. I shouldn't be worrying about life and death. Not that it's bad to seek medical attention if you think you are sick, but I am worrying for not. I am not sold on reincarnation or any sort of karma, so this is a passing thought.

I thought in passing about other things - relationships and my feelings towards them. Such are my worries. Time passed more quickly.

Closing thoughts: Improvement. I am neither happy nor sad during my meditation, which is exactly what I should be striving for. Good things then.

Day 4 - 100 Day Meditation Challenge

Day 4

Length: 12 minutes (timed)
Start: 7:30pm
Experience:

I spent the day working, then drove to my girlfriends and we went out to eat. After lazing around for an hour or so I decided I should get my meditation in while the night was young. This meant I had to work against the distractions of my SO. She happily lets me follow my practice but makes sure to chide me, and some of her words stick with me throughout.

I attempted to meditate while the television was on in the other room, sort of as a way of tracking my ability to ignore it. Looking back I was able to overcome it after a few minutes by concentrating on my breath. There was no frustration in my mind this time, which is a change. I'm no longer disheartened or frustrated by concentration difficulties. It just is.

I reach into the deep relaxation quicker now, with a slightly improved frequency. Unfortunately the deeper relaxation seems to feed into wandering thoughts of my life and situation. I think that if I was less stressed I would have less of a problem concentrating.

A positive though - despite two extra minutes of meditation time, I have almost no thoughts at all about the length or concerns about the duration I've been sitting. This is an improvement I can really get behind!

Closing thoughts: 'Active distractions' like a TV in the other room are very detrimental to my practice but may be unavoidable as I can't guarantee alone time some days. Despite this I am finding small incremental improvements; I spent less time thinking about the duration of my meditation and no longer feel bad about my own lack of concentration.

Day 3 - 100 Day Meditation Challenge

Day 3

Length: 10 minutes (timed)
Start: 12:15am (1/4/2013)
Experience:

Today was... a frustration. My car is dieing, taking a long time to start and twice in the parking lot at my job it stalls out before I can make it to my normal spot. I am stressed and this activity was pushed to the wayside so that I may binge on more pleasurable activities - gaming being one of my easiest setbacks. Oddly I manage to fold my wash before I've started the meditation. During the day today I felt a certain strange happiness as though I was more aware of the moments and reveled in them. I consider this progress.

During the meditation my thoughts run in bursts. It's late at night/early in the morning so the day has faded and I find it wandering into more esoteric thoughts about the nature of my relationships to others. Songs are stuck in my head again, inbetween the thoughts.

But this time if I force a buzz in my head and transition into focusing on my breath I can slowly ameliorate and blankly exist for short stints. During these times I can feel a deep relaxation set in. I prefer that to a state of thinking.

The conversation I plan to have brought me peace while being thought about. I have conquered, perhaps, the anxiety of that thought.

Closing thoughts: If I meditate at an extreme hour it helps to leave behind the day. I would rather not start this late because it will be disruptive to my upcoming day. Despite some major stresses I can find some relaxation in the practice. This is good. I am also improving both during practice and when going through my day.

Day 2 - 100 Day Meditation Challenge

Day 2

Length: 10 minutes (timed)
Start: 5:45pm
Experience:

My thoughts are torrential. It's late in the day so I've felt the full brunt of a working day, some bad sleep mixed in, and it wrecks my focus. I find myself constantly trying to refocus on my breath to try to get away but it doesn't work. I also made the stupid decision to play a game online before I started, which made me more irritated because I lost.

I recognize the drifting into the past, remember that I am supposed to be of the present, then realign myself with the breath again. Music is playing and occasional parts seed my conscious with lyrics.

I worry about a conversation I'll be having later in the week about possibly moving out with some friends. I don't dread the conversation but I think about it and realize it is a 'future state' that I need not concern myself with at the moment.

Closing thoughts: After work is not wise, but if I oversleep or am outside of my home it will be my only option. I'll need to cultivate a state of mindfulness that is not in competition with a long day at work.

Day 1 - 100 Day Meditation Challenge

Happy new year!

As part of my self-improvement for 2013 I decided to try meditating, and what better way to do so then to challenge myself to a 100 day stretch with some strangers over the internet. I’m joined up with some other meditators via Google Groups 100 Day Meditation Challenge.

I’ve had a few false start meditation plans before that generally resulted in twice a week attempts for a week or two in a row but it always falls off. I think that with this regiment and taking it slow I can really finally escape the rut.

Without further ado:

Day 1

Length: 10 minutes (timed)
Start: 8:50am
Experience:

I wake up and before I’m really completely together I grab a pillow and place it in front of a window in my girlfriend’s apartment. I’d prefer to meditate here because it’s quieter but I don’t live here so I want to make the most of a nice start. My mind is turbulent. Small sounds distract me. I try to remember the things I learned from reading about Vipassana meditation in Mindfulness in Plain English.

I hear my girlfriend moving inside and wonder if she’ll come out, how I’ll handle it if she wants to talk, and recognize fleetingly that I should be trying to understand why I’m preparing for a thing that hasn’t happened. I think about writing this, and wonder if anyone will be interested, then try to forget it again. I don’t remember having this much of an issue when attempting meditation in the past, but now I’m wondering if I was just ignoring the stream of thoughts that I’m tapped into now.

It’s never ending, thoughts of selfishness, pride, curiosity, worry, it’s all connected in this web. I return repeatedly to the feeling of my breath coming in and going out of my nose. It feels like a crescent on my left nostril, and helps me picture a moon. That keeps me occupied and is one of the few moments throughout the experience that I’m not busy concerning myself with things I don’t need to be thinking about.

Closing thoughts: The morning is a good time to aim for because it gives me ‘make up time’ if I miss it. I’m not really as peaceful as I thought. At least I can see it all and become more aware of it.

Google is the Future

Recently there's been a lot of reasons to want to make sweet, passionate love to whatever idol of Google you can acquire. Whether it be advanced cellphones, cheap and reliable internet infrastructure, their support of an open internet, availability of free and awesome apps including the collaborative online office-clone suite Google docs, Google maps, Gmail, blogger (the platform that this blog is written from), driver-less cars, the Google search engine, Google is the best and brightest that the technology world has to offer.

Technology people fucking love Google. If any company is going to take us into the future it's going to be Google. You can basically guarantee that almost* anything they put their effort into will be shaken to its core and innovated.

* Social media notwithstanding

So why not just throw in our lot with the Googs? Clearly they are the tech dynamo end all and be all, and basically can do no wrong.

What do we see when a company finally hits critical mass? There's always contraction and what appears to be calcification; companies lose relevance. We've seen it with countless other institutions, right now basically every cell phone company in the world at one time or another offered unlimited data plans for a large sum. As prices went down², our options to even have it dried up! I have an unlimited data plan because I was grandfathered in with my last contract but now if I upgrade I'll have to choose a plan that costs the same amount as my current one, but no longer offers unlimited data.

Forget that, unlimited texting costs me almost half my phone bill each month when the actual cost of sending and receiving a text is 140 bytes³. How much does a voice call cost? That information isn't freely available from phone companies but Skype, a leader in VOIP, claims you need 30kb per second⁴ just to maintain a call at low quality. As a point of reference, one kilobyte is equal to 1024 bytes. So you would have to send 219 text messages to equal 1 second of a voice call, and yet the price difference for these two plans is negligible. Ho-hum.

We are in a country where it pays to be lazy and mysterious. Telecoms want you to pay huge premiums on newer technologies even if those technologies are a hundred times more cost effective then anything else they offer. The United States infrastructure in third-world in quality and despite making hundreds of millions of dollars these companies are doing nothing to help you. Oh wait, Time Warner bumped a lower tier's internet speed up by 5mbps to 15mbps for free. They also started making people pay a surcharge of $5 to lease their modems, a service that has been free for the last 10 years.

Google is currently offering Google Fiber in small areas as a way of threatening these other companies with competition. Google's internet is a Gigabit upload download for $70 a month or free for life for a one-time construction fee of $300. If you'd like to compare Time Warner, we'd do the unit conversion of 1 gigabit = 128 mbs. Yes, you read that right. No, I didn't fuck up the math.

There is a sad thing that seems to happen when it comes to companies now, people think that no matter what you do you're a shill for them or you have some kind of vested interest in their well-being that supports a little fervor.

This post is no different. I'm definitely a shill for Google. But it you're going to be a shill for any company, let it be one that threatens you with innovation instead of stifling our progress.

1http://stopthecap.com/2012/11/05/time-warner-cable-will-increase-standard-broadband-speed-to-151mbps-nationwide/

2http://www.newamerica.net/publications/policy/capping_the_nation_s_broadband_future

3http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Text_messaging

4https://support.skype.com/en/faq/FA1417/how-much-bandwidth-does-skype-need

Hello again!

Okay, wow, so it's been a while huh?

I always considered myself to be really careful with things, finances, my words, my actions, all that other stuff. I like to temper my optimism with realism and sometimes that can come up and bite me in the ass. I try to take on like ten things at once and keep up with it for the briefest flash in the saucepan and next thing I know I got nothing again.

A few years ago after a breakup my cousin invited me to the gym and I got really into it. I had just spent a lot of time losing weight and I was excited to be working out, which was awesome. I spent many days of my week out with that group of people and lifting, we went to some shows in the city and off in some further away places and it was grand. At some point I picked up the guitar again and started taking lessons, and a bit further down the line started rock climbing and joined a book club. Everything was in balance, and I was improving myself in a wide arc. I could have mastered all those things over the course of a few years if I had the single-mindedness to continue with everything at once.

I met a very special lady, we hit it off and have been together ever since. We go on all sorts of adventures (some of which I wrote about in this blog - Ireland is a biggie!)

I picked up my writing more frequently. I'd never tried to give it structure before, instead working only when I fancied to on an impulse. So I picked two days a week and started writing on those days, which further locked down my weeks.

I overextended. six out of seven days a week I was spoken for and people were asking me to make time on the remaining day. The stress of all that was too much.

I finally hit the tipping point though, something had to give. I stayed with rock climbing but was running out of time to work out, so I toned it down to just running. I kept up with the guitar but I wasn't watching my finances. When I realized it I started cutting back - the lessons went but I tried to keep it up. I injured myself running and never really got it back together. I occasionally break out and go for one and realize I'm pushing it too far too fast and get frustrated. I promise myself I'll give more and never get around to it.

Life is hard. It's not supposed to be easy, not by a longshot. We all do the best we can, but at the end of the day we all have a limit. I push mine in leaps and bounds and sometimes need to take a break. It seems like I hit that point with this blog as well, and let it languish.

I'm going to try to resurrect it soon - I've got plenty of other projects I'd like to explore and work on. I'm especially interested in Buddhism at the moment, in addition to financial stuff I was going to explore in another blog but I realized I didn't have the experience to really work on that and give advice. I might need to consolidate and just give my personal experience in the areas of finance, spirituality and entertainment from a central spot. That doesn't jive with my original plan - that this be a blog for my writing - but I don't produce at the rate that a blog like this needs to be relevant.

So I'll be back, and will be posting things differently.