Dec. 29 - Baby Steps in Meditation
Why Meditation?
The MIA curriculum breaks down into a few parts: Active Immersion, Passive Immersion, and SRS (spaced repetition studying). The most important of which is Active Immersion.
Active Immersion means absorbing content in your target language with complete focus. At first, you just focus on the sounds, then on the words, then on the meaning. The “Quality of Input” will determine how quickly you can move through those three stages.
“Quality of Input” is determined by the quality of the content you are absorbing, but more importantly, by the level of attention you are paying to that content. The better you can focus on the content the more you will gain from the experience. There are many factors that tie into focus including your level of interest and the environment in which you study. Meditation trains your mind to be able to retain interest, to not get distracted, and to focus on making sense of the foreign sounds.
I’m betting that meditation will increase my ability to gain information from the immersion content.
The Mind Illuminated
The founder of MIA, Matt, refers to a book The Mind Illuminated by John Yates and his students. The book combines Yates’ background in Neuroscience with years of meditation mastery to provide a pragmatic instruction guide for beginners and experienced meditators alike. It provides 10-stages to mastery with detailed explanation of the goals, skills to be practiced, obstacles you will encounter, and what success looks like at each stage.
I’m an impatient person. I want to accomplish things quickly and efficiently without floundering. I want a map. In language learning, I believe I’ve found that map with MIA. In meditation, I think this book will be my map.
Getting Started
The book is very detailed: 578 pages. I read through the intro, forward, and first 2 chapters, however, I felt that there was too much content to absorb into my fledgling meditation practice.
The first stage advocates for 45-60 minute sessions, starting with a 6-point preparation, and a 4 step transition. That’s way too much for me starting at square one. Fortunately, there is a subreddit for the book which includes a wiki! They suggest beginners start at 10-20 minutes and only focus on the breath.
So for this first week I am working on the following:
20 minute meditation sessions
Focus on the breath. Specifically, the sensation of air moving through the nostrils and the abdomen expanding and contracting.
Counting of the breaths. Restarting when focus is lost.
Writing about each session afterwards
Next week, I will work on incorporating the 6-point preparation.
My first week of Practice
When I was younger, I thought I was good at meditating. I would often have difficulty falling asleep so I developed a routine to calm my racing mind. I would consciously breathe so slowly that I felt like I was suffocating. The intense focus needed to control the instinct to breathe would quiet down my mind and allow me to sleep. I’m sure the lack of oxygen helped too.
As I’ve aged, I’ve developed my ability to think and problem solve, but I feel I’ve lost my ability to manage my thoughts. This first week of meditation highlighted why: I’m always working.
For the first few minutes of each session, the counting and the focus is relatively easy. After those few minutes though, my brain begins throwing all sorts of distractions at me. I find myself narrating for this blog. I start planning for the future or analyzing the past. I find myself having inspirational moments that I want to act on.
In work and in my hobbies I’ve trained myself to latch on to moments of inspiration because they often lead to insights, ideas, and motivation. It feels so wrong to let these moments slip away, but for these sessions, I want 20 damn minutes a day where I’m not working.
This first week has showed me where I am. Thankfully, I have a map that gives some semblance of an idea of how far I have to go.