Diving deep down
Bathtubbing
At the end of my university years for every good grade I started to reward my self with nice relaxing bathtub. Other then relaxation I usually used that time to contemplate. I analyzed what I did, what I could do better and how to tackle next goals. The whole session lasted usually 2hours, first half hour or 45min was relaxation phase, the rest was contemplation.
I found that technique very effective at the time but no longer. During last 10years my life speeded up a lot. Now I cannot even pass the first phase.
Get a grip
I tried replacing the bathtub with hiking, long walks in nature but that didn’t help even to scratch a surface of the level of clarity and calmness that I achieved earlier.
Listening to Tim Ferriss podcasts almost every guest on episode had meditation as one of morning routines. I short research on meditation I found out that TM is the most popular. After I dug some more to TM I found it somewhat repulsive with the fact that only way to practice was through certified teacher, it’s pricey, the mantra stuff, it felt sectish (knowing this is not a word), meh…
I went further in searching for other methods. Through listening Sam Harris podcast and watching “Waking Up with Sam Harris” video, the Mindfulness seemed promising.
Now I’m Taking 10 with Headspace. Currently I’m on 2/10 so it might be too early to form an opinion but I could share how the first two sessions went.
First session I took yesterday afternoon and I repeated once at night. The main goal was to embrace the distraction wether it originated from outside sound or thought, if mind wanders off we should focus back to breathing or to any sensation body can feel at the time, like toes pressed down to the ground.
I was able to focus back when needed, usually on breathing, but I don’t think my mind is 100% focused even then on breathing, I think there are few background threads still working on something else.
In the first session I was extremely irritated when I needed to scratch my head for itching while focused calming down.
Second session I took first thing in the morning and it went much better then the first session. I handled similar irritation very well — my pillow on the back as pressed down started to generate noise but I managed to accept that sound and go with it as any other external sound which cannot be avoided.
In addition to Headspace experiment I added one important thing to my NYR list — daily journaling.
First tool that I could use for this that I could think of was Trello, but I didn’t went with it as it could turn my journaling to task listing which I don’t want. Additionally my wife does not like Trello (what she has to do with your journaling) — eventually I would like to share this with her. It will help us organize our day, she will be aware not only of my tasks but my aspirations, gratitudes — it could improve our relationship.
With her in mind the tool that come to my mind was Reminders app, as we’re using it for grocery shopping, but again, this is task list.
Then I recalled from listening the Tim Ferriss podcasts “The Five-Minute Journal” and I though this is it, even better to have this in analogue form, this way in the morning I would not need to grab my phone/laptop and be tempted to check out socials or anything else that could distract me from journaling.
But on their web there was a note of back-order. Browsing their web I found out that they are planing to launch an app which again flipped me to go digital with this and rather practice discipline in avoiding distractions such as IM’s and socials as I’m going to need that during a whole day every day.
Now I’m subscribed to notification when applicaiton becomes available, until then I’m editing simple txt file in TextMate with same sections as in Five-Minute Journal.