Jan. 15 - Meditation Week 3: First Revelations

I reread the first chapter of The Mind Illuminated this week: “The First Interlude”.  In it, the author presents a mental framework for thinking about our goals in meditation.  He breaks down our focus into two distinct parts:  Active Attention and Passive Awareness.

“Active Attention” is your current focus.  “Passive awareness” is the absorption of the sights, sounds, and sensations around you.  Active attention can choose what to focus on from all the things in passive awareness (eg. how your food tastes), and passive awareness can elevate something to active attention (eg. your phone ringing).

From Yates’ perspective, the eventual goals are:

1. Choosing what to focus on and maintaining that focus even though your phone rings

2. Controlling the scope (how many things) you are actively paying attention to

3. Expanding the scope of your passive attention to broaden your perspective

Even after rereading this chapter, I still had no idea how to apply these ideas. So, I just let them marinate.

A Breakthrough

During my session on Wednesday, I was bitten by a sandfly.  For those who don't know, sandfly bites are 10 times worse than mosquito bites.  They hurt, then they hurt more, then they itch for 2 weeks.  After the bite, it still felt like the bug was biting me so I kept opening my eyes to check. I tried using breathing techniques to block out the pain and itch but then something clicked: if the goal is to expand the scope of passive awareness then blocking out the discomfort is the wrong direction.

I realized that I had been using meditation and breathing techniques as a way to block out pain, discomfort, or distraction.  For instance, when I had my eye surgeries last year, I used breathing techniques to take my mind off the fact that a surgeon was actively cutting my eyeballs open. But this is the opposite of the goals laid out in “The First Interlude”.

What Yates describes in “The First Interlude” is the expansion of your abilities to absorb and analyze, not a reduction. Reducing the scope of passive awareness, like I’ve been doing, creates blind spots and biases.

With that in mind, I stopped trying to block out the discomfort and instead accepted the fact that there wasn't anything to be done.  Scratching the itch may provide 30 seconds relief but wouldn't make a difference.  Once I accepted the sensation as part of my experience the discomfort diminished enough that it was no longer a distraction. With this reversal in my understanding of meditation, I realized what I want out of my practice.

A Realization

I can't focus when there is a TV nearby.  If I can see or hear the TV my focus is entirely consumed by the flashing lights or dialogue.  This lack of control is so thorough that I've been forced to adjust my life around it.  When I go to restaurants, I trade places with other guests so that I can’t see the TV.  Otherwise, I can't pay attention to the conversation and I'm terrible company.

The level of power that TV has over me has always bothered me but I never thought I could do anything about it.  I have arranged my life to accommodate this personal inadequacy.  Now, with the revelation above, I see a path toward regaining that power for myself.  If I can gain the ability to focus despite this ultimate distraction, I will have substantially changed my life. This is the first specific goal I have for my practice.

Jan. 6 - Week 2 in Meditation Land

Last week I was focused on just getting started and not worrying too much about what is correct or not.  I approached this week with a few more goals:

1. Diligence: Because I'm traveling, I have no consistency which makes it difficult to form a habit. This week, I made sure to practice every day even when I was hungover, feeling lazy, or on a boat.

2. Increase meditation time: I started with 20 minute sessions last week and will continue adding 5 minutes each week until I get to 45 minutes

3. Begin incorporating first stage exercises: 6-step preparation and the 4-stage transition to the breath

First Stage Exercises

6-step preparation

1. Remind yourself of your motivation

2. Set reasonable goals

3. Do not expect achievements. There is no "should be". There is no "bad meditation"

4. Commit to diligence. Engage wholeheartedly. Don't judge the quality of meditation.

5. Review potential distractions ahead of time. What is your mind racing over.

6. Adjust your posture

Per step 1, my long term motivations are:

• Gain a stronger connection to my emotions so that I can understand how I actually feel

• Align my ambitions, emotions, and actions

• Increase my ability to focus

4-stage transition to the breath

1. Focus on the present

   1. Enjoy pleasant sensations

   2. When distractions occur: "let it come, let it be, let it go"

2. Focus on bodily sensations

3. Focus on bodily sensations related to breath

4. Focus on sensations of the breath at the nose

I struggled to maintain focus at the 4th stage.  Counting stopped working for me, so I eventually came up with a breathing technique to force me to focus on the bodily sensations of the breath.  It's been pretty successful helping me return my attention to the 4th stage.

Successes for this week

• For the first time, I wasn't frustrated with myself for getting distracted

• I had the spontaneous urge to say "I love you" to myself

• I successfully mediated every day.  It's now been 12 days in a row.

Goal for next week

• Increase sessions to 30 minutes

• Continue practicing the above exercises

• Reread the first two chapters of the book and incorporate more of the philosophy into my practice

So how zen are you?
I’m so zen my zen is on fire

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.

References

MIA Meditation video

The Mind Illuminated on Amazon

Mind Illuminated Subreddit