Youssef

I have been obsessed about equanimity and mindfulness since the last March and kept practicing SDS and Shinzen Young's basic mindfulness approach and everything seemed natural and I was making progress that satisfies me, but after few weeks of practicing I started feeling disconnected from my emotions, it feels like my body is becoming angry and anxious but I'm just observing it as if it's not my body, it sounds like I have two individual identities, one that is angry and another that is lit. I believed that it's a mental state of mindfulness or some shit until I started getting mood swings so fucking frequently, I lost my enthusiasm in everything and became very lazy, and lately the same feeling of disconnection repeated itself with my thoughts, if I'm reading, watching TV, exercising or playing video games I'd have auditory conversations going inside my mind out of my fucking control, it never shuts up unless I decide to think or while I'm talking to someone, otherwise it keeps running spontaneously even while I'm asleep, I wake up on it's noise every other day and it makes me scared. Am I losing control of my mind? Did I become a schizophrenic? What the fuck is happening to me?

My equanimity and pain-endurance have gotten a significant boost. I managed to perform a SDS in the half-lotus posture for a duration of 40-45 minutes with ease, which indicates that I'm progressing quickly. Yesterday, a thirty-minutes session in the alleged pose was extremely challenging and I'm delighted to know that I'm extending my boundaries gradually. I'm capable of enduring ten minutes of SDS in full-lotus at the current time, implying that full-lotus is four times more strenuous compared to the half-lotus sit which motivates me to keep progressing further. So far, I have invested 7~ hours of my time on training in the last three days with an average daily meditation span near 2.4h. I'll try to keep my practice consistent and devote a particular time amidst the day for meditation instead of sitting in a phase when my mind is unresistant, I suppose that'd aid in increasing my adherence towards my commitment. There was prominent pain in my prefrontal cortex area recently, I concluded that it's either due to stress or that brain-region is building more neurons, maintaining perpetual control of my body is obviously exhausting. I'll head off to my bed with the ambition that my stillness will keep increasing in quality.

I performed a one hour SD sit upon a plastic chair in the crossed-legged posture. The chair's space is insufficient to allow me to sit broadly so my legs were partially elevated and my knees were leaning against the chair's two sides. The physical contact between my skin and the chair has given rise to various sensations that urge me to cease sitting and readjust my position and my ankle bones were pressed against the chair's external surface, leading to additional pain being experienced. This session was arduous but not as harsh compared to sitting on the half-lotus pose. Eventually, I was motivated to proceed subjecting myself to pain in an attempt to increase my equanimity. I twisted my left leg and inserted it underneath my right one while surfing through the internet for 46 minutes. I noticed that I was able to remain concentrated on whatever I read or write during the process of sitting as if pain wasn't rather troubling. I performed another similar session later-on in the half lotus posture. Most of my body was entirely static except for my eyes and two palms. I managed to remain seated for 40~ minutes without attempting to avoid the pain I confronted. My total SDS time today is 147~ minutes; My self-control has increased in momentum remarkably. I was able to do what I desire to do after the alleged session, my attachment to my lust has contracted drastically as well as my need to escape what I'm experiencing and replace it with a fantasy in my imagination. While remaining idle, I was fully aware of my breath's occurrence and was able to control it unintentionally. I haven't progressed significantly, but a small gradual change is enough to gratify me. I'll try to stay committed to my practice for the rest of the day either by performing a third sit while browsing my social medias or by isolating myself in my room before sleeping. A 1 hour SDS in the full-lotus posture seems hellish in the current time, I hope to keep building up my will-power until I'm capable of breaking this objective.

Greetings! I've been an intermediate meditator for a duration of a full year and quit afterwards due to lacking the sufficient motivation and will power to solidify my practice. Recently, I noticed vividly how my refrain of meditating has impacted my life and how I'm obligated to keep my meditation habit a regular practice that should not be interrupted or abandoned for other types of activities and decided to resurrect my Strong Determination training to recharge my will-power and concentration. In the current week, I was able to invest dozens of minutes into practicing, and ambitiously, I managed to train well enough to achieve 90 minutes of constant stillness and pain endurance which shifted my perspective towards some intriguing concepts that I intend to investigate further. I noticed that my only frontier is pain and temptation, therefore my practice wasn't in need of being lengthened as I have sufficient patience to sit for a gratifying amount of hours. Instead of increasing my practice's duration, I oriented my goal towards enduring more pain and resisting more tempting thoughts, which I believe to be the foundation of SDS's effectivity. Sitting in full lotus is apparently capable of providing the discomforting environment required for increasing my pain tolerance and mindfulness of thought so I made the decision of building up my momentum towards 1H of SD sit in the full-lotus posture, hopefully I may attain something cultivating. Currently I'm capable of enduring 30-40 minutes of SDS in the half lotus pose which is not quite bewildering. A major obstacle that I started to confront lately is stress. Stress is gradually building up in my lower-body region which hinders my ability to progress quickly in my practice, so I decided to take frequent cold showers and devote thirty minutes of my daily time for performing physical exercises that target my leg muscles, I believe that exercising will be a decent solution for this issue as it accelerates blood back to my thigh muscles and aids in producing more endorphins which overcome stress over time. With an indestructible will-power and the never-ending motivation obtained by reading the achievements of my fellow meditators on actualized.org, I intend to strengthen my prefrontal-cortex sufficiently to become capable of enduring at least an hour of full lotus SDS. In this challenge, I intend to: invest time and effort into expanding my momentum and increasing my equanimity daily by subjecting my body to dozens of painful hours. I intend to: perform physical exercises daily to minimize the effects of stress on my practice and to never tolerate them. I intend to: remain disciplined and never neglect my goal. I intend to: broaden my self comprehension and attain insights regarding the concept of self-control and where it originates. I intend to: stick to my journal and write down any remarkable improvements coherently until my objective is reached. I believe that my decision of writing-down this thread was thoughtful, I expect that investing time on sharing my thoughts, experiences and intentions on this forum will empower my motivation to complete the challenge. Flexing online with a public-journal might seem counterproductive as it slightly heightens my ego and pride, but neither are my main concern. I currently have an ambition of increasing my ability to remain disciplined under the most tragic circumstances which requires the desire of establishing the practice and the need of attaining the rewarding results. Once my objective is attained, I'll put everything that reinforces my ego aside, including this particular thread.

Pulse - Erra, The Lichtenberg Figure - Novelists, Born in winter - Gojira and Islander - Nightwish are my all-time most favorite metal songs. I think that they are quite bewildering and decently made.

Warming your body up before beginning to exercise is important only when you have to prepare the muscles that are going to work by allowing your blood to access them in the purpose of avoiding injury. Furthermore - if the exercises do not involve a large muscle group that you rarely use i.e a Push Up then warming up lacks importance, however it's still recommended. Cooling down through stretching just does the reverse effects of warming up. It restores your blood vessels back to your brain and organs while calming down your heart. For those reasons, I think that it's more important to be done than warming up.

Greetings, Matej. I have instantly assumed that you are performing the crunches exercise to burn down your belly fat, I hope that I'm correct in this regard. If you really desire to burn them down dramatically, then you should not only practice doing crunches, but also attempt to mix them with squats and lunges. Because the change in your belly-fat that you may get to notice after performing the crunches is due to working your belly muscles up which burns calories in return and those calories that are burnt through-out the process are not from your belly region alone, although you are only working up that part of the body. Therefore, the more you use your body muscles, the more you burn fat generally even in rarely used parts of the body. And your thighs resemble the biggest muscle group in your body, which implies that using them would help in burning down your belly fat way quicker than when you just use your belly-muscles. In advance, exercising quickly as in the High Intensity Interval Training style enables you to use more muscles than when you exercise slowly in the Cardio way, implying that you shall grow more muscles and burn more calories. It also raises your heart beating rates near the maximum bpm possible which results on accelerating the Human Growth Hormone productivity that brutally burns body-fat and slows down the aging process.