Thittato

45 min meditation today. Really beautiful. There has been yet another pause in my formal meditation practice, but I do other types of practice, especially devotional singing, but oh my gosh what a strong effect meditation can have. I'm somehow very lazy about my meditation these days, and it is related to the low levels of existential suffering I'm having these days, so I'm not compelled by my suffering to push on for further meditative development, but ideally I should be able to meditate even through this laziness, especially when I see the profound effect it gives me. Why do I want to walk around with a foggy awareness, when I can walk around with a crystal clear one? There are some interesting paradoxes at play here. Do I really need a crystal clear awareness when I can fully accept and embrace a foggy one? But still I seem to suffer less and be more energized when I clear my mind and body through meditation. Aaaah, all these cycles. And then one eventually always return to the perfection of knowing everything is exactly as it is supposed to be and it couldn't have been any other way. But can I abide for longer periods in this clearity, or should I just allow myself to lazily drift in and out of whatever way the nature of experience presents itself? And fundamentally, do I even have a choice one way or the other? Let us see how things develop. I guess I can only try to stay open for the ride.

Cycling The same thing happens over and over again, and that is that I get into some kind of creative project for a short time, and then totally loose the energy I had on it. I have this phenomena in my life of cycling through various interests. Cycling is defined at dictionary.com as this: a round of years or a recurring period of time, especially one in which certain events or phenomena repeat themselves in the same order and at the same intervals. a sequence of changing states that, upon completion, produces a final state identical to the original one. one of a succession of periodically recurring events. a complete alteration in which a phenomenon attains a maximum and minimum value, returning to a final value equal to the original one. So I started one journal here about my explorations of music, and another one about naturalistic drawing, but now I'm just going to commit to see this all in the light of meditaton, as that is arguably my most important interest. It feels like I have these various sub-personalities that I alternate between, or that somehow if we compare this to computers, I alternate between various software / operating systems. One day I consider myself a musician, and everything is seen through the lens of how a musician would view his role and path in the world, another day I'm an aspiring visual artist and my whole value system revolves around that. And various other things. From a meditative point of view I think I would just view all this as loosing myself in identifications or mental thoughts, as they are just mind, and not really presence. So I think I just have to re-affirm my commitment to meditation and the cultivation of presence and acceptance of where I am right now in my life, in stead of continuing to buy into fantasies like this. Nothing wrong with pursuing any of these activities mentioned, and I probably will continue with them just as before, but in order to not loose myself in the mental fantasies about them the part about re-affirming my commitment to meditation is now made. Whenever I think something is my purpose and get really worked up about it, I always re-gain a moment of clarity when I sit down to meditate and re-discover that my deepest purpose in life is to keep my spiritual practice going. Meditated for 45 min this morning, and the freshness it gives me is really what I need these days. Everything feels so right when I feel this freshness :-) Meditation is really a project of re-generating my own energy from the inside. I'm looking very much forward to write down my thoughts on the meditative process here.

❤️🙏

45 min meditation today. Centered and powerful energy.

Did an ayahuasca ceremony this weekend. It was really great, but I came down with a cold and spent sunday and monday in bed. Today I was well again in this felt like my big integration day. I played a lot of guitar and sang the hymns, did weigh-lifting, cold shower, two good forest walks, and 30 min yoga and 3 rounds of Wim Hof breathing in the evening.

45 min meditation yesterday, and 45 min meditation today. Very nice and energizing.

45 min meditation today. Very nice. Powerful and deep. Concentration still hasn't established itself fully, but it is on the doorsteps. Lots of process stil that I have to breathe into and ground by focusing on the bodily sensations they create, and thereby counter-acting the tendency to spinn around in the mind.

45 min meditation this morning. Going into deeper concentration again, or the at the least to the entrence of it. Much of the noise in my mind is starting to quiet down, and there is more energy and focus on the object of meditation. On the remaining "noise," I welcome and open up to whatever suffering is there that I'm resistant against - feeling how the sensations manifest in my body, while staying with the breath simoultanously.

8th session of ice-bathing this winter 45 min meditation this morning, and then 3 rounds of Wim Hof breathing and an ice-bath down by the beach when I came home from work. An amazing warm shower after this, ended by a solid cold shower. I'm getting to point where I can just shower in cold water again without thinking about it being cold and me feeling like I have to endure it. The ice-bath was amazing. So empowering. Wow.

7th session of ice-bathing this winter 1 hour meditation this morning, and then in the evening after my job 3 rounds of Wim Hof breathing before going down to the beach to do an ice-bath. Then returning home and taking a warm shower and ending it with a solid cold shower. Wow so nice. What I'm working on related to this these days is when I go down to the beach, to walk really mindfully, undress mindfully, and enter the water mindfully, and return home mindfully. There is this element of both excitement and resistance that plays into the emotional rollercoaster of ice-bathing, and I want to work on smoothing out both of these elements so that it just becomes a really mindfull and calm experience. Maybe there is a possibility I can move into a much more mature phase of my ice-bathing chapter. This is the 5th or 6th year I'm doing this, so I should have some experience now.

6th session of ice-bathing this winter Wow. So nice and refreshing. I live close to the beach. It is like I have my own little spa here in my home when I can just walk down to the beach, and then come home and do a warm shower and end it with a cold shower again.

5th session of ice-bathing this winter Then a warm shower back home that I ended with a solid cold shower again. Wow. So nice. I've actually trained pretty well for this this winter - both with cold showers, but especially with frequent visits to the nearby spa where they have saunas and a cold bath.

3 solid cold-baths today in the nearby spa together with sauna and warm baths.

4th session of ice-bathing this winter Wow. How extremly nice. It is so magical to go out into the sea late in the evening and experience how still the mind becomes and how deeply connected with nature I feel in that moment. Even though I haven't been ice-bathing so much this winter, I've been keeping up with the cold exposure training with taking cold showers and going to the spa nearby where they have saunas and cold-bath.

45 min meditation today as well. I'd be very currious about what could happen to my meditation now. It really feels like I can just sit with whatever is arising without buying into the mental loop that is trying to get my mind engaged in "survival strategies." Another way to put it - all the tricks the mind is trying to use to convince me something is wrong with the present moment. There is a deep pleasure and satisfiction in just feeling fully into all the different types of suffering - especially when the resistance is seen through. In psychotherapeutic terms this could be seen as a willingness to put down the defenses in order to experience the pain.

45 min meditation today as well. My half-lotus position is opening up again and becoming much softer.

45 min meditation today as well. Very nice flow 🙏💫

45 min meditation today as well. I'm going through some pain these days related to my and my girlfriend having just broken up. This time I feel confident that for once in my life I can sit with this pain, instead of running around in a crazy search for something outside of myself to alliviate the pain. Today it was a big relief, with all the emotions and thoughts churning in me related to all of this, that I can just sit down on my cushion and breathe into the pain, instead of letting the mind run around like crazy. Now after the meditation, I'm still in some pain, but it has clearly been alliviated. Yesterday. Oh my gosh. That was really the power of meditation. I was completely liberated from the pain and in such a flow state for the whole day. But I can expect this to come and go in waves.

45 min meditation today as well. Went through a pretty strong and difficult emotional wave, but seemingly it was processed and accepted, the resistance towards it dissolved and I melted into the pain and the pain became beautiful and now I feel very relieved and empowered.

45 min meditation today as well. Nice to experience the mind settling down into ease, acceptance and stillness again. Time to land a lot of the stuff that has been going on the last couple of months.

45 min meditation today. Some disruption to my meditation routine lately, but I'm keeping up with other practices - kettlebells, yoga, ice-bathing, breathing exercises, guitar and mantra-singing.

Some disruption to my meditation routine again. Drifted over into a yoga period. Then I started sitting again on monday. So: Monday: 45 min meditation Tuesday: 45 min meditation Wednesday (today): 45 min meditation. Somehow it is interesting that I allow myself to be more lazy with this meditation project these days. Maybe it is a good thing in this ever on-going fine-tuning of finding the perfect balance between effort and surrender.

Some disruption to my meditation routine, but then I've sat for 45 min friday, saturday and sunday again.

45 min meditation yesterday and 45 min meditation today. Very sweet <3

45 min meditation today. Very nice meditation. Powerful and vitalizing. Deep stillness.