My Best Year Yet — Meditations, Fields & Fences.
Mediation often doesn’t receive the attention or notability it is most likely deserving of. Referred to as ‘alternative’ or ‘odd’ it has become almost a taboo of the high tech switched on driven individual. Despite this foggy stigma I gave it a go, for a year + straight.
I am not a yogi, nor am I disciplined, or do I have enormous amounts of self control. Like you, I’m just a human. I do however like to pick 2–3 things and drive as much focus and attention into those things as possible. Meditation just so happened to be one of those and this is what changed for me and became my best year yet.
To recap: everyday for the past year + I have meditated everyday for an average of 14 minutes per day, totalling over five thousand one hundred minutes (5100). Or 85 hours, spent sitting with the self.
Regardless of my location, schedule, emotional state or lack of sobriety I practised. Planes, buses, airport lounges, hotels, random spaces it didn’t matter I got it done.
Day 0–100
Beginning meditation was difficult. Days 1–10 were unbelievably restless and laborious. I would sit, adjust my application (HeadSpace) and follow along. Regardless of the guidance, sitting down and following my breath just felt like torture.
Mustering some grit, I slowly but surely began to look forward to sitting down to meditate, the restlessness faded away and calm set in.
My only reflection from days 0–100 is the intensiveness in which one can follow the breath, believe me when I say that it is deep!
Meditation is a practise and not an easy one. 100 days is just not nearly enough time to even begin to understand the practise or understand it’s workings. But enough time to learn how to follow the breath =].
Days 101–200
Meditation isn’t about switching off your thoughts or not thinking. No, it is the ability, or better put the awareness to know that you are thinking, observing it and letting it go.
Sounds pretty straight forward, but much harder in practise. Most people assume awareness is knowing the TFE (thoughts, feeling, emotions) of others around them and suppressing their own to ‘get along’ with everyone. This however unfortunately results in something along the lines of this….
My reflection of days 101–200 is awareness. Most importantly, awareness of the self. A great way to explain my thoughts on awareness is a technique called noting. Noting is simply noting thoughts as thoughts and feelings as feelings. e.g. something that is a thought “I like bananas” vs. something that is a feeling “I’m hungry”. Apply this to your thought pattern in everyday life and you’ll be well on your way to Elysium.
Days 201–365
This is where it got fun! Those above lessons of following the breath and practising awareness really began to become part of my thought pattern and my practise became as easy as walking.
I would often sit down and my 15 minute session would feel as quick as a blink of the eye, as if I had just been removed from my body and returned without my knowing (really cool sensation!).
This phase became what I describe as the application of my practise. And that is it, the biggest and best lesson I learn’t from meditating. That is that it is a practise.
It isn’t something that has an ending or can be conquered, you just get a little better at it every time. Some periods in life are better than others but the year that I spent meditating has been my best year yet. I have since ended the ‘streak’ but continue to practise meditation almost on a daily basis, often unguided and for longer durations.
Conclusion
The breath, awareness and practise. Oh and a scene from the movie Margin Call.
Movie: Margin Call, start: 01:07:24.
Why this scene? Well this beautifully put scene captures the core concept of meditation. Whats at the root of it all, put simply, awareness (plus or minus it is one of my favourite movies by my favourite director!).
Eric Dale: Do you know I built a bridge once?
Will Emerson: Sorry?
Eric Dale: A bridge.
Will Emerson: No, I didn’t know that.
Eric Dale: I was an engineer by trade.
Will Emerson: Hmmm… hmmm
Eric Dale: It went from Dilles Bottom, Ohio to Moundsville, West Virginia. It spanned nine hundred and twelve feet above the Ohio River. Twelve thousand one hundred people used this thing a day. And it cut out thirty-five miles of driving each way between Wheeling and New Martinsville. That’s a combined 847,000 miles of driving, a day. Or 25,410,000 miles a month. And 304,920,000 miles a year. Saved. Now I completed that project in 1986, that’s twenty-two years ago. So over the life of that one bridge, that’s 6,708,240,000 miles that haven’t had to be driven. At, what, let’s say fifty miles an hour. So that’s, what, 134,165,800 hours, or 559,020 days. So that one little bridge has saved the people of those two communities a combined 1,531 years of their lives, not wasted in a fucking car. One thousand five hundred and thirty-one years.
Will then leaves his door step chat with Eric, turning at the last minute to spit out in a manner only Will can:
“Some people like driving the long way home, who the fuck knows”
Whilst Will’s character is no saint and the line was only used to convince Eric to change his mind, it captures the concept of awareness to a tee.
So yeah, who the fuck knows =]
