Tagged: meditation

Days Four through Ten of Meditating

2 February 2012, day four:

I’ve been so busy with other homework and things to do today that I almost forgot to meditate. My mother’s boyfriend came down today to spend the night, so that knocked me off schedule. That’s why I meditated so late.

I didn’t want to meditate necessarily, because it’s hard for me to take a few minutes to just sit and “do nothing” when I have all the homework I need to do. I took my jewelry off, set the towel on the floor, set my iPod alarm for fifteen minutes, and started. A few minutes in, I realized that I still need to do the brainstorm peer conference report, which I haven’t done, so that distracted me. A few minutes after that, I remembered I was going to put on music this time, so I grabbed my iPod and put Nine Inch Nails on. After that, it was a breeze. At one point, I could only feel my hands on my knees; that was the only thing grounding me in the “physical” world.

I had an anxiety attack in the middle of it, actually, about going to work for my first day on Saturday. I focused on what I was doing, which was meditating, calming, and that helped. For some reason, I remember this sweeping motion, similar to Tevye’s gesture in Fiddler on the Roof when he was singing If I Were a Rich Man, sweeping up everything, including my anxiety, and rolling it in a ball, and kind of cradling it, or something. It was very soothing. (Also, the lyrics when he did that gesture were “there would be one long staircase just going up, and one even longer coming down”.)

I thought about “the bigger picture”, which to me is the Universe. It humbles me, and brings me to a further awareness, to think that I live on a rock orbiting a star in this vast Universe. It puts everything in perspective.

Tomorrow, I’ll do something different, something I want to do, so I’m excited about meditating. Today I wasn’t all excited.

First Three Days of Meditation

30 January 2012, day one:

Day one was interesting. I planned to meditate around two o’clock, but I had to run errands with James (my roommate), so I’m doing it at seven.

To prepare for my meditation, I put a towel down on the floor to sit on, and I put my hamper in front of my barely-open door, because I knew my cat Kallie would come in mid-meditation and I didn’t want my bedroom door open all the way. I turned the lights off and paused the TV, which was on high volume because I was watching the new episode of House. I set a timer on my iPod Touch to go off in five minutes, and chose the harp ringtone because it seemed like the calmest one.

For the first minute or so, I struggled to sit upright because I’m usually hunched over like the missing link, and I struggled with my breath, which I’ve always had problems with. After two minutes or so, though, I was starting to get in the hang of it, and that was, of course, when Kallie came in, meowing.

I handled it fairly well, though. I only laughed a little, because she was purring and climbing on my lap and rubbing on my hands, but I got back into the meditation pretty quickly. For the first few minutes, I was told to just listen to my surroundings, which I did; all I heard was the TV from the living room, Phoebe (another of my cats) purring on my bed, Kallie meowing, and the sound of my TV’s static noise. It was very calming, just to sit and be aware of everything, to have a few quiet moments. I feel re-energized and a lot calmer than I was before. I’m not stressed out about my homework like I was before the meditation, either. I’m pretty excited to do it again tomorrow, except I’ll have to tweak a few things. I’m going to try to do it earlier in the day so I can benefit from it more, and I’m going to take my glasses off and maybe my ring and watch, too, so it doesn’t feel like I’m weighed down as much.

So today was a mission success.