The photo is of my bedroom, where I sit, on three square ikea shelves taped together on my Purple brand matress, with a magic foam neck pillow between my ass and the laminate particleboard.
The shelves provide support, get rid of the sinking into quicksand feeling. And the magic neck pillow doesn’t work for magically fixing your fucked up neck. No matter how many you buy.
The light shifts on the blinds. When I start hallucinating I open my eyes, glasses off; the blinds are less interesting and catch my attention less than the eyelid movies that start playing after ten minutes or fifteen. I’ve read of traditions where the eyes are kept half open, half lidded, focused on a spot on the ground several feet ahead of the sitter, to avoid being interrupted by the scenes emerging from neural noise and overactive patter recognition circuitry.
I have a fan in the room, and I play a nature sound playlist from spotify, and the two create a stable sonic environment, again, just interesting enough to keep me from listening for distant cars, distant voices, picking out HVAC sounds, my wife typing at work downstairs.
I have to shave a lot of yaks, before I sit, make bed, pick up room, brush teeth, sometimes a neti pot, wash face, light incense, to blot out sensations that will annoy me that, undistracted, I will tune into. Is there something stuck in my beard? Can I smell my own fucking breath? Did the cat pee somewhere in the condo it wasn’t supposed to, again, like it used to?
You get the idea.
Of course, a real pro could just plop the fuck down and let them all go, one by one, accept them, let them recede, but, as I gleefully admit, I suck at this, several thousand hours into the practice.
And that’s fine. It’s the thing I let myself suck at without self recrimination. God that’s wonderful.
So. Why is it so hard to make myself do this?
It’s harder for people with ADD to make and maintain habits, I have been told, and this makes sense to me, as my life is amorphous haze of activity, hyper focus, procrastination, meaningless planning, good intentions, unachieved ambitions, self-flagellation and a kind of plodding progress toward long term goals.
Anyway, focus, we were talking about focus, right. I’ve been told the squirrel joke is really shitty by some people with ADD, but this is me, and let me say, ok, wait. I see. squirrel and what were we talking about again?
Focus.
So, rather than throw up my hands and say, ‘Ok, we start again at ONE, because, you know. I SUCK,’ or saying, “Okay, if I miss a day I have to just make it up with two sessions the next day…” I’m saying, “I took a break but will just do it today.”
So, I did, yay me, and I looked at my zen timer app, the biggest and bestest iphone timer app in the world, where I meditate with at least 10,000 other people all over the world at any given time, and jesus, why is that even a thing, knowing that, and I discovered, to my considerable chagrin, a word I seldom use, that I’d missed TWO whole days, in a row, and how did that happen?
So, new sub-goal, try to keep the missed days down to ONE for fuck’s sake.
This was a very inspiring post. It captured well what it’s like to meditate and motivated me to do so for the first time in months, and for longer than usual. Thanks.
I have an Android app called something like Insight Timer that I suspect is by the same developer. It lets you set chimes at preferred intervals and also shows you how many people are meditating at the same time. It also had a journaling feature. I became suspicious of these Internet features that verged on social media and stopped using it, but it was very useful. Maybe I’ll start using it again, in which case, see you around the sangha, buddy!