My meditation journal

[Thittato]

30 min meditation yesterday, and 30 min today. Before this I don't think I have meditated since sunday. There has been a lot going on. Most importantly I have been speaking with the bank, and now I can finally get a loan so that I can buy my own appartment. Yesterday, when I was getting a green light for this, I was having so much panic. Didn't feel ready for such a commitment. Wanting to just continue to be free and continue to just float around (even though I have been living in the same appartment for 4 years now, but I like the cheap rent and that I can just decide to leave anytime I want). But now, after this panic has been processed, I'm really looking forward to creating my own home that is totally my own, and which is bigger than where I am currently living. I'm fantasizing about a bigger kitchen so that I can make more food and invite guests for dinner. It also make me motivated to work more so that I can make more money and pay down this loan, and build up some capital that can be invested into an even better home further down the road. Since I also have a carpenter education, I'm looking forward to get more nerdy about my own home. When I'm just renting I feel indifferent towards the technicalities of this building, but when something is going to be my own, that will certainly give me a much stronger feeling of ownership and I think that will put me back in touch with all the stuff I learned as a carpenter. Yeah, this is totally the right thing. No more dreaming about going off into the jungle to pursue some kind of shamanistic path for a while (I've had plenty of spiritual adventures before so time to let go of the freedom to just strike out on a new one whenever I feel like). Time to just land even further here in my home-town and in my job.

[Thittato]

30 min meditation today. Didn't meditate yesterday. Been a little bit down today. Helped to meditate. I've been very caught up in my tendencies to get very inspired by my creative projects lately. First it was rollerblading, then it was guitar. I used to get a very strong counter-reaction towards this tendency before. Like I would suck all the inspiration totally dry and then get disgusted by whatever I was so inspired by. Now it feels more like some familiar tendencies going on. So I'm expecting that there will be a certain backlash whenever I get very inspired by something. But I guess it still has that component of loosing touch with myself and then identifying with some mental projecting of myself doing whatever I'm so inspired by in that moment. But I think I'm more realistic about that as well.

[everythingisnothing]

@Thittato Great work so far, keep going! What kept you from meditating yesterday?

[Thittato]

30 min meditation today. Feeling really good and powerful about it. Interesting how it can switch so much back and forth between being the most boring stuff ever that I just have to go through the motions to get through, and this other side where it feels like it is the most awesome thing I can possibly do.

[Thittato]

21 hours ago, everythingisnothing said:

@Thittato Great work so far, keep going! What kept you from meditating yesterday?

Thank you! My practice goes in cycles. I don't have a goal of sitting every day, unless I have a dedicated period for exactly that. This summer I sat 45 min per day for 3 months. And now I'm decompressing after that. I'm just keeping track of my cycles here. Trying to always find the perfect balance for exactly what I need in any given moment to maintain myself as a sane and friendly human being. Sometimes I need to sharpen up my practice and be more disciplined, other times I just need to totally let it go, but it always seems to come back soon enough, somehow.

What is your practice like?

[Thittato]

30 min meditation today. Gosh, I love this stuff. I can feel so totally miserable and that my whole life is a failure and etc, but one good meditation and everything feels perfect again. These are all just perspectives floating through my mind, and my meditation is certainly increasing the flow so that these frequencies vibrate on a much higher level and it becomes much more comfortable to inhabit this body/mind complex.

There is also something about totally allowing oneself to feel as utterly miserable as one possibly can in order to let that feeling express itself. There is so much shame around being successful or not, and so many times we try to fake sucess in our own minds - creating this projected version of ourselves, the fake narcissistic self which is trying to compensate for feelings of low self-worth. I clearly have some layers still of these feelings that needs to be aired out of my being through opening up as much as I possibly can to the depths of my own being. So I can only expect this seemingly "spiritual bi-polarism" to continue for some more time, alternating between expansions and contractions.

[Thittato]

30 min meditation today, and then 20 min yoga nidra. Didn't really get in the groove with the meditation today. I was distracted. So I was disappointed and wanted something more out of my practice and yoga nidra turned out to be a really good choice. I was really getting into the groove with yoga nidra. I was tired before this, but now I feel really well-rested.

[Thittato]

30 min meditation today as well. Distracted today too. I’m just finished with my first round ever of being involved with bidding for an appartment I was interested in. Went to see it yesterday, and then the bidding-round started today. I was almost willing to give the price they wanted for it, and I was sitting with the finger on the trigger, but I couldn’t quite pull it off, and I went back and forth many times, but eventually the bidding-round started to accelerate beyond the price that was declared as what they wanted, even though the bidding round started really low and slow, so I was never bidding anything myself, but I was heavily involved as the company selling this appartment kept calling me to see where I was standing, and I kept calling both mom and dad to discuss the development in this bidding-round and whether or not I was ready to give my own bid. Hahha. Pretty intense process. Eventually I just landed on that the price had gotten too high and that I want to observe the marked and how these processes work a bit longer because this is all so new to me so I better not end up making a hurried decision that I’ll end up regretting. I guess since I wasn’t really willing to give the original price they wanted when the bidding-round was lower than that that means I wasn’t really sold on the project and I’m waiting for something that is more right to enter the marked. But damn, this was close and intense hahaha. What a rush.

Edited October 29, 2020 by Thittato

[Thittato]

20 min yoga nidra today. It was so sweet. I was lying in my bed for 10 min after it just soaking up the effects. That gave me an even deeper rest. This project of getting a loan and searching for an appartment to buy has been pretty exhausting. So far I have been heavily involved with 3 appartments that I went to see and spoke with a lot with the sellers, started to dream and fantasize a lot about moving my life in to all three of them. But so far it hasn't clicked with any of them. Almost gave a bid for one today where I went to see it a second time. I'm pretty sure the guy selling it thinks a bid from me can tick in any time. He is pushing me quite a bit, but in a friendly and comfortable way, and he can see I'm on the edge of almost commiting. I went home, talked with my bank again, and they gave me the green light for that appartment as well. But then I couldn't do it. I now I have sort of resigned. Maybe I will have to let all three of these appartments go. Well, one of them is already sold, and another one I'm not interested in anymore, so there is only one left, the one from today. But maybe this is just the first round of this type of session. Now I need to process and digest everything I have learned about this process. It was only 8 days ago that I had a meeting with the bank and found out I satisfied their requirements for giving out a loan. Before that I thought owning my own home was very very far away. So maybe I don't need to rush anything. It is probably wiser to take my time. I have already learned so much from this process that has been going on for 8 days now. Seems like this is the same as with dating. If it doesn't click something else (and perhaps better or more right) will always come along. Maybe that is not an eternal truth. I see it could easily dry up as well. But I believe that as long as I maintain my spiritual practice then I will continue to attract abundance into my life. Maybe that is because the fruits of meditation practice are its own abundance, which means, they are independent of external results, so in a way one achieves a certain level of freedom from the conventional sense of success, and to emanate that type of freedom is very attractive I believe. But in the end, abundance, or not abundance, I just want to be happy with living a simple and fun life. This thing about attracting abundance into ones life can easily become a little bit too New Agey.

Edited October 30, 2020 by Thittato

[Thittato]

20 min yoga nidra today as well. Been very attracted towards yoga nidra lately. So nice to just lie in my bed and receive instructions about where to put my attention.

[Applegarden]

On 2020.10.12. at 11:36 AM, Thittato said:

These are four pieces of guitar-playing that I'm very inspired by these days:

 

It dawned on me here tonight that I only need to engage a little bit with guitar-playing in order to get a much greater appreciation for the skills of these masters. In one sense maybe I'm not only playing to be able to produce music myself, but maybe just engaging a little bit with it is really enhancing my ability to appreciate music in general, and maybe that is the most important part. I think I understood it the same way with Chess. I'm only an amateur player who has only been playing for 2 years, and it is far too late to get anywhere else than just having fun as an amateur player, but when I'm watching some of the master games that have been played being explained by commentators on youtube, wooow, that is such a refined esthetic pleasure, and my small little struggles to improve a little bit in Chess makes those intense pleasures available to me. I guess that is one of the things I consider really really important - remembering to appreciate all the beautiful wonders happening around me all the time. It is so easy to forget about it, but life is so beautiful when I remember. No need to struggle to get anywhere. Just surrender into all the miracles that is already here.

By the way, you are not too late of producing something decent on guitar, but you will certainly have to work for it.

[Thittato]

17 hours ago, Applegarden said:

By the way, you are not too late of producing something decent on guitar, but you will certainly have to work for it.

I think my goal is just to have fun with it :-)

[Thittato]

No practice today either. I had to stay home last night not working night-shift because I was having a cold. One of my bosses called me today saying I had to take a Covid-test because I had been working this weekend. Well, fortunately it was negative. So no big deal about it. I guess my level of stress lately has been strong enough in order for me to catch a cold. In fact, I think I have been having mild symptoms of having a cold for almost 2 months now. Intuitively I knew it wasn't Covid--19, but I was guilt-tripping myself over it. I'm always a bit stressed when the fall and a colder climate comes. Maybe it is part of letting go of what was. I think that when a new virus enters my body I will recognize that something different is going on. The stuff that has been going on lately has been familiar, something my body knows. But interestingly enough, when I woke up this morning, this HUUUUUGE summer-love, which wasn't so huge after all, but which made a huge impact on me, it was still active when I woke up this morning. But all that "I have to contact her again" was gone. It seems like I have totally let go of any clinging to any expectations that anything between us will continue to live on. Which is sad. But which is the truth. One has to be ruthless. I think. I feel sad when I write this. But I also feel proud. I've met two ladies after this. One which I won't meet again, and another one which was really charming and beautiful which I might meet again for a 2nd date. Anyways. There is something about letting go which feels much stronger now. The clinging is so much weaker. I'm much less desperate. Whatever this summer-date triggered in me, which was pretty HUUUUUUUUGE, and that I had to deal with by doing two ayahuasca sessions, it seems much less desperate now. This last woman I was on a date with, she was really REALLY beautiful, but there was much less of a force inside of myself telling me that I had to "own her." In fact, she was a distraction compared to all the other cool things going on in my life. Maybe that means she is not the one. I guess the balance would have been more right if she was, but I'm really glad the desperation was not as huge as it usually is when I like someone. I like this idea of hitting the reset-button. Every cold is like hitting the reset-button. And in the grander scheme of things, certianly every fall is totally like hitting the reset-button. I guess that is where I am these days. I just want to totally surrender. I'm tired of trying to win. I'm tired of trying to be better than everyone else. No one is winning in this game. Everyone is loosing. I just want to have an open heart for this whole thing. Including myself. And especially the ones I find the most difficult <3

[Thittato]

30 min meditation today. Really good sit. My mind got very concentrated. Good energetic flow in my body. Feels like just dissolving into nothingness.

[Thittato]

30 min sit today as well. Surprisingly strong momentum. Surrendering into emptiness.

[Thittato]

Yesterday I also did weight-lifting, 20 min of jogging (4 km), and 20 min vinyasa flow yoga. Today I went rollerblading in the local indoors skatepark for 2 hours, and when I came home I rounded it off with 20 min vinyasa flow yoga. I think I'm settling on 30 min of sitting meditation per day, or approximately per day, will be my foundation, and then I can be creative/flexible with the rest of my exercise/wellness routine. But it is pretty damn awesome to add a lot of exercise to these 30 min per day of meditation. It seems like the recent psychedelic chapter I just had is over for this time. Well, the last of two ayahuasca journeys I did was 30th of September, so it is over a month ago, but it takes some time to land from and to integrate something like that, and whenever I go into psychedelic mode I also seems to add some sessions of smoking weed before, after and in-between those psychedelic sessions. But now it is also some time since last time I smoked week and I don't feel any attraction to that either, and weed is pretty intense and trippy for me, so that certainly belongs to the psychedelic sphere for me. Really glad I'm getting some distance from that now, but that ayahuasca was certainly necessary because of that date I was on this summer which triggered some deep mother-wounds I was still having. It seems like, at least for now, that there isn't any process like that going on at the moment. Maybe I've been able to deal with some pretty deep and heavy scars that perhaps has been healed. Seems like I'm much more relaxed around women now. I've been on two more dates. Didn't work out with any of those either, but even though I was getting a mild crush on both of them, I didn't get obsessed the same way I used to always get when I get a crush, so maybe something is really starting to cool down inside of me related to that. There is a very nice feeling these days that things will turn out just fine, and that I'm on a good track - and my meditation-practice is my foundation for that.

[Thittato]

20 min yoga nidra yesterday, and 30 min sitting meditation today. Really happy about my meditation these days. There is a good and humble momentum going on.

[Thittato]

30 min meditation today. Disappointed because the momentum was not as strong as the last days, but it is sobering and nice to surrender into disappointment.

[Thittato]

30 min meditation today. Letting go of all expectations about achieving anything through my meditation, and surrendering into my experience just as it is. Simple and sweet.

[Thittato]

A few days without meditation now. It can come and go as it wants to these days. Went to the skatehall today with my rollerblading skate-buddies. We are turning into a skate-crew hahah. Everybody is getting more and more into it. Such a good form of exercise, too. It doesn't feel dangerous anymore either. I've been back into rollerblading since this spring now. Approximately half a year. In the beginning I was afraid of hurting myself. But nothing dangerous has ever happened. I have a good and natural technique for falling safely, and I naturally only take calculated risks. It is more dangerous in the beginning when one is stiff, doesn't have a good falling technique, and is insecure about where ones limits are.

Progress is slow, but steady, and things are finally starting to feel a bit more solid again. I still don't have all the tricks down that I had when I was 16, but now, 20 years later, I'm slowly getting there again.

Interesting how this all started up again when I was snowboarding 2 winters ago. When the spring came after that winter I bought a longboard from a friend and started skating on it. Then when the winter came again I went snowboarding again, and then this spring came and I returned to rollerblading. So it has been a pretty huge emotional, social and mental investment. Been binging pretty hard on both snowboard, longboard and rollerblading on youtube. And oh my gosh how much I have been talking about it with my buddies. And I have been journaling pretty much about it here, too. And it has been a huge focus on my psychedelic trips as well.

Interesting all this processing going on when one is learning something. I think the psychedelics I have been doing are playing into this process in a good way - it expands my possibilites and helps me see beyond my limits. The yoga and meditation too. It helps keeping my body strong and flexible enough for this. And this journaling is certainly necessary. And also my awareness of how the social group energy is enhancing this experience.

What is the main-thing I'm getting out of this which is related to meditation? I think basically it just generates a really awesome sense of flow, freedom and mind-expansion. In other words, exactly what I seek from my meditation. And it is good exercise. And also it looks and feels pretty damn cool. And the group-energy is really awesome, too.

Another important aspect to this is that I can get really manic and high about this, and then I milk it has hard as I possibly can, which can be unfortunate, this journaling is part of it, the mental masturbation part of it, and then when I've milked it for all that it was worth I can get really disgusted by it for some time. It is like I so heavily go into an identity about it, that at some point the whole thing gets really disgusting. But then, after a little pause, I always seem to return back to it. And these cycles. I've found some peace with them. First of all I just allow the mental masturbation to go as far as it wants. And then I'm willing to give it up when it comes to that, and just see if it naturally returns by itself. I guess it just has to be that way. This is just a hobby. If it never returned after a cycle like that, that would be fine, too. I guess that is the freedom in it. To just enjoy it while it lasts but without taking it on as an identity. It seems like everything in my life is like this. I just go with the flow, wherever it takes me. Seems like I can trust this process.