Halfway there, baby!
I have to say, I’m truly amazed at the drastic change in behavior I’ve been able to achieve in the last 15 days. This definitely goes on record as the most astounding habit change I’ve ever made.
This process is far from over, however. My biggest challenge is to improve the quality, versus the quantity of my meditation, namely by getting more rest. It has proven far more difficult that I expected to get my target amount of sleep (7-8 hours) while rising early and meditating. I’ll do my best in the remaining days of this experiment (and beyond) to impose a better bedtime on myself: I should be heading in the direction of bed by 10:30 at the latest, ideally between 10 and 10:30. That would be divine, but it’s harder than it seems. Even when I have hit the sack that early, I just haven’t been able to will myself to sleep. So I’ll be working on that, especially by doing more nightly fiction reading and guitar playing, or perhaps even some more meditation. I’ll give them all a shot and see how it goes.
A little more minutiae on the meditation itself: I’ve been experimenting with the “zazen” sitting style, and trying to use pillows to mimic a zafu, a popular pillow used in zen meditation. This definitely needs some debugging, and I may just spring for a legitimate zafu- it’s hardly a big expense, and they seem to really be a boon for great meditation without back support or crazy postures. In fact, while on a meditation retreat in Seville, Spain last spring, I roomed with a guy who had used the same zafu for something like 30 years. That’s good stuff, right there. The trick is to elevate the butt so that you can sit comfortably without straining your back or starting to slouch (that’s a tough one for me). Having just finished my first freelance writing project on meditation (!!!), I think it would be a suitable investment in my spiritual practice. I should really get some pictures up here, shouldn’t I? I’ll work on that.
