Alex K

So, since my last reply, I've meditated at least 30 minutes each day. So today is day 22 of uninterrupted practice. I had 16 days vacation and meditated for 2 hours a day on the average. I'm back at work. I re watch Leo's video about strategic thinking multiple times, I've started some strategic planning stuff, I want it to be very thorough. I've watched some lecture videos on critical thinking and want to incorporate that into my daily life, use it in strategic planning. I want to determine my strategic intent, I think is is not unlike that of Leo's, but I need to make it clear for myself, so that it would 'feel' solid and inherent to me, i intuit that it should have some flavours. I have a large mindmap about my meditation, I want to implement what I've learned about critical thinking to enhance it -> some strategic analysis. I have fears and doubts about my life now, especially my work. I know I don't like it very much. I fear what would happen if I loose it. It sucks up a giant portion of my life energy, my mental energy, time, attention, I stir neurosis based on it in me. I have to think about it critically and include it in my life strategy in some comprehensive way. Notes on critical thinking: Blooms taxonomy of learning: memorisation -> comprehension -> application -> analysis -> synthesis -> evaluation. Strive for higher level of learning. Six hats thinking: Information, Intuition, Critical/Cons, Pros, Ideas, Thinking management. -> Think on the issue with different facility, build on the results of previous iteration. Critical thinking consist of: - Attitude to change every you believe under new facts and ideas (Like Open-mindedness) and - C.T. Tools: - Always ask a question: How does someone arrive at that conclusion? (How has someone come to know what he knows?) - Think of counter examples. - How could my hypothesis be invalid? (Under what circumstances, what should be the case for my h. to be invalid?) - Attach degrees of probability / certainty to hypothesis. - Beware of Dunham-Kruger effect: be humble, always say you don't know when you don't know. - You should always ask questions and generate ideas without thinking they are stupid or irrelevant. Another idea is to work somewhat on notes taking skills. How to take notes quickly and with drawings?

@Natasha Thanks, I've read somewhat and I understand I'm as far as couple years from initial seeing Nonetheless, very supportive. So today is day 4 of uninterrupted practice. Towards the end of 30min doNothing felt myself as a 'gerbil in a wheel' - my thoughts revolving around stuff I'd should do today felt like all dirt. Starting tomorrow I'm having a 16 day vacation - would be at a country house with my wife. No internet coverage there, so will write here again in 2.5 weeks. I hope it would be akin to a retreat. Had a coffee again today in the morning, now feel a burst of undeserved energy. Wrote an A4 thoughts stream on nature of work and client satisfaction forced culture to my two friends over the skype. Just now, 2 hours later, I understand it's all bad use for that energy. I'm at work, nonetheless, I'll use the energy to meditate right here and now, would do breathing observation as doNothing was in the morning. Wrote on Wed., but now I think that if I'd always have as much energy as I have right now, I'd have no problem fighting maya and growing spiritually. This raises a pleiad of questions: - Should and could a man have this much energy always? Definitely could, at least in 50 years with advances in medical tech. How could any logic forbid a man from having all the energy he wants? Ecological basis - a man with lots of energy could destroy/destabilise a lot. Man's neural system may not be ready for this much activity. Man's mind could be not ready for this much activity. - I'm not convinced that having children, wife, good friends, having a simple good impact on the world by your simple 9-5 job is sub optimal to having a life of a sage and striving towards enlightenment in terms of being a benevolent force in the world (this is from Leo's video on what we want and I understand that I want to have a positive impact on the world) The thing is I do not have anything where I could impact the world in a 'serious' 'grown up' manner - I'm not very smart and I won't help at a poor people's shelter at least as I am now, I do have a document on my life's purpose, but I do not currently believe that I can achieve anything of that. My current approach is as follows: I'll work at my present job, and I will pump up the meditation. It, being an 'ultimate' habit, will with time help me to remove negative habits like overeating on junk foods, overconsuming meaningless informational content, etc. and it will remove some of my autonomous complexes in my mind and it will help me to adopt some positive habits, as I'm trying to institute yoga right now. These things will raise my level of energy and I would be able to move to the next more 'material' steps of my life purpose plan. (Probably even this is incorrect as what I'm doing now is at least as material as next steps, it is just social conditioning talking in me) - Thus I even find striving towards enlightenment an egoistic thing as it will diminish my immediate ability to have positive impact as I'll be meditating all the time. I feel that my suffering is 'good' in that it is 'emotional' work and all I can offer this world. I feel that if I suffer, I'm making a positive impact based on a 'sacrifice' of suffering. But it is the easiest thing in the world - to suffer. You do not need to understand, you do not need to evaluate, to discern right from wrong, to put in any actual mind or emotional labour, suffering just happens to you. Does Leo have a video on this? Are there any topics on this forum about this? Are there any books or blogs on this? Idle suffering as a false virtue. I'm a hopeless lounger. I don't want to be. Can I free myself from this? Isn't meditation going to free me from this with time? I suppose it would. Wouldn't it be to late? I'm sacred of this. Should I be? Better late then never. I'm so insecure, everything is so uncertain. Everything IS uncertain. Certainty is just not one of our false world's properties. Shinzan writes to apply equanimity to the feeling of uncertainty (not knowing) to gain a true wisdom. Probably, I should right now. Obviously, I still have a long way to go in terms of my development, brings feeling of being at a certain point on a finely built broad road, running in the green hills under the calm soothing warm sunlight.

Novelty in practice expired, motivation subsides. Perfectionism and fears erode at it bit by bit. I feel that I'm at a turning point, I should go on. Mind becomes uncertain in the purpose of it all. Why is this suffering-less life is preferable to the usual one? Why should I self-actualise? Straight back is not needed, sitting is not needed. One could lie down and meditate. Even if I fall asleep, I can start again once I awaken. So hard, so backslidy, do I need any support? My purpose it seems is to have nothing to do with maya, it is degrading to any non-grounded mind. This feels true to me, I should explore and build on it. Hopes are high. Today started counting practice time in subway - day 2 is done.

@popi Well for me meditation is hard work. Only if I do some guided lying down relaxing visualizations is it nice. During DoNothing I alleviate some suffering, but it takes a toll on my mind as some hard math solving would. From mindfullness practice I get obvious concentration increase but together with this breathing problems when it feels like not enough air in my lungs for long periods of time. I've failed my quest on Saturday - Monday. Today starting from day 1. On the positive side I had a chance to evaluate an evolution of my calm equanimity levels and evidently some base level has emerged.

@popi Yes, that is exactly what I need! Ended up with a 50 min sit. 27 days to go.

I frequently admire and envy genius which can go as far as finding out what is enlightenment all on their own and not even being 30 y.o. Day 2 was completed, Today is so hard it's 22:00 and still I haven't meditated. Finally I feel content and alone enough, am going to practice now. Ate s**t like a pig, somebody stop me.

@popi Happy for you . Here you can also 'Edit' your responses to fix your grammar - it's what I do. Thought a bit about my lazy day and I've decided to start a 30 days 30 minutes meditation challenge, starting today. I think I've never meditated each day in a month before. So, day 1 of 30 -> completed .

@popi @Natasha Ofcourse, all valid points. Unfortunatelly, knowing something to be right does not automatically bring it in. Yesterday was a lazy day - I haven't meditated and ate junk food like potato chips. Fell kinda ok with it though, everything will come. Today have already punched in some practice time, off for some more. Namaste.

Saturday 1.5 hrs total, Sunday 2 hrs total practice. Feeling good. Today before work ate at a cafe: a subway, latte, cowberry pie, np - with time everything comes, let's be patient as... something very patient. I don't know what is it, but today on my subway to work I started breething very deep and it still felt like not deep enough. I know what a hyperventilation is and strangely, I do not feel it coming. I feel like my brain gets oxyginated. I feel a need to breathe soo deep like never before, hope i'll survive this. Practice brings forth interesting stuff.

Today I've tried "walking zazen" - basically counted my breathing 1-10 while walking as normal, not slow - for about 15-20 minutes in total. I felt an onset of meditative state, so I'd continue working on that. I've tried 30 minutes sessions yesterday and the last like 5 minutes seemed too torturous for my taste. Today I've done 3 * 20 min sessions of do-nothing and planning to do one more. Tomorrow I will try 25 minutes sessions. I feel like if the time when meditation would be the first thing in my life is visible near the horizon. My usual despair-filled thought patterns start fading under the concept of us being awareness. God, I hope I would stick to it, it's so important. I should think tomorrow about how to stick to it, draw a bad-ass mindmap around it. Created a text on my life purpose out of a hatred for my job. It's in Russian, want to translate and post here.

@popi I think it is from your upbringing and nerve system parameters -> some people are just grow up to be ambitious. For the rest of us like me, let's meditate starting with 5 minutes a day and with years I gather awareness of the rational and the necessary would take the place of motivation. @Growf Sorry for it if I am off-topic in you journal.

I have an idea, you seem to already have an established habit: - Going to the gym 3 or 4 times a week. (Actually been nailing this one for the past 3 months! ) What if you add a 5-10-minute meditation point into your gym session at the beginning or at the end? I remember having martial arts mats and yoga mats at my gym - they would be perfect for meditation. Even if there are crowds of people there, meditation could be done. I do it sometimes in the subway train ><. All the best to you!

And now to the real "meat" of it like Leo puts it . - I believe that awareness (2-3 points out of 10kk on 'the scale of awareness') is with me from time to time now, even sometimes in a fierce arguments with people. - For the last 1-2 weeks I've become a much more direct and say-what-you-think person, in an aggresive-assertive way. I think that awareness lets me disable the automatic suppression of my anger and my ideas and I give them away at the moment they arise. I believe it is a part of gradual mental purification. - Further, yesterday I've started to feel sadness again and I half-see, half-intuit that it is caused by my hatred towards my need to work at my job to get by, a connection which I believe awareness helps to witness. My Hopes are High and I'm positive I WILL break the identification with this and all the other sadness in due time. - When I've meditated enough, I now often have dreams with concrete ideas on my mental problems. It looks like this: I wake up and I remember dreaming of some situation from my childhood or some nearer date in connection with some 'limiting' thought pattern or some behaviour I currently have. This becomes a 'realisation' of auto complex like in psychotherapy, or I can start thinking and 'observing' on this material towards such realisation during the day. As of yet, this involve rather minor things, potentially this could grow in volume. Journaling is good, I'd love to continue putting my ideas here.

@Natasha Many thanks for you advice! - I'm from Moscow and more like your average white/grey-collar office Joe - I'm in commute 2+ hrs every week day and I always try to incorporate awareness practices into it, albeit they are not as effective as my cross-legged sit practice. - I'm very interested in how could I incorporate meditation practices into working itself, at the moment I do not think one could be doing this and think logically hard ad the same time. - Your advice for headache is very comprehensive, I've been battling with exclusion of processed foods from my diet for the last 10 years of my life, making commitments for dozens of times only to break them the next day or in three days. Couple of times I was able to go for a few month and loose like 15 kg, but it always come back after some serious life problem. Currently I put my highest hopes into Leo's approach from the video. Unfortunately, I currently do not have 2-3 free hours alone in the empty room to try the principal technique from this video, so I hope that with basic meditation this would gradually come too. ___________________________________________________________________________________________________________ I've read the journal and got some ideas and motivation from it: Further, I felt like I'm able to start a full-length meditation sit right after I get up and there is no need of 10-min warm ups, I've combined two insights and tried a 30 min sit right after waking up today morning. It was very good: legs hurt just a bit, I felt a "workload" on my head, but no headaches. Other ideas: - I am myopic, now trying to do the sits with my glasses on -> It's much nicer to be able to see the place I'm in and not a blur, I've started to see some effects like a small glowing around the objects in my room, falling and rising brightness, etc. - I did third day of yoga today, I believe yoga could help me to be in shape for a longer meditation. My egotistical desire is to be able to sit in lotus posture ><. - I recently started using apps for time measurements. I use a Time tracker and a Meditation app with 10 min intermediate gongs, which helps me not to think "When would this 30 min finally end" thoughts.

Today I commit to meditate no matter what every day for the rest of my life. My current stats are 2 * 20 min sits a day. My aim is 4 * 30 min sits a day in 1-2 years.