Day 28 of ? of meditation & blogging!

15 minutes 31 seconds

Friends,

One of the challenges I have found in this meditation and blogging journey is in trying to not repeat the same descriptions and metaphors each time. A juggling of word orders here and noting where I’ve used that metaphor before and trying another, all in trying to not bore any readers while also conveying something of the experience. This is made more difficult by the fact that each day, each session, many of the same elements are in play each time. Yet each session and each day can bring it’s own experiences, lessons, and challenges.

Today, I closed my eyes and gently held the music in my attention and feeling within myself the stable surface of that new yet familiar place of inner calm and quiet as I tried to settle into my usual cycle of breathing. In through the nose, down my throat and deep into my lungs, my belly swelling as I filled my lungs, followed by the expansion of my chest and the raising of my shoulders till the last of my inhalation tickled at the back of my throat, then the equally slow exhaling through my mouth. While I slowly found my proper breaths the first thoughts came.

They were mostly dismissible with a slight acknowledgment a few requiring the invocation of my mental charm of “it is what it is” to help fill the spaces within my attention and focus until the words faded and my attention turned more fully towards the airs journey through me. Thoughts came and went but they were what they were and it was about my breath and to a lesser degree the music and the inner quiet and calm within me blossomed for a time.

Time… It’s hard to explain but time seemed to contract and stretch at different moments in todays mindfulness session. There were pockets of timelessness where it was as if I had sunk deeper inside myself into that place of peace. At other moments I would note that a particularly shiny thought or observation or emotion had crept in upon me before letting it drift away and I would feel like the stillness within was slipping away all too quickly…which of course was another thought…returning to breath and air and body, then time and worries would drift away once more. At a certain point I began to feel a sense of fatigue… I noted this especially as it was a relatively unfamiliar sensation on the journey of this practice. I had gotten used to the gentle chiming of the timer coming upon my like a surprise. Yet I had reset the timer for a longer time and it would come when it would come. These were also thoughts observations and judgments so with another breath I let them go and tried to remain with my breath and my inner silence.

The timer did finally chime, was silenced, and I stayed a few moments more with my breath and the stillness.

I cannot know if that sense of fatigue was genuine or some illusion of my mind trying to do its job and think and feel and process. I will be interested to see in the coming days if this continues or fades as some part of me gets used to the new time on my timer.

I can definitely say though that I have begun to learn to control my awareness and focus related to my thoughts and feelings in everyday situations, more so than I could 28 days ago at the beginning of this journey. I find myself able to deal with various people and situation in my life MUCH more effectively because I am not viewing situations through random feelings and emotions from the past triggered by current events. I am more able to set aside accustomed lenses or habits of thought through which I have looked at the world and deal with the world more effectively on its terms.

The other thing I can (now) observe is that the place within me of calm and quiet is rather delightful, even though in the moment I am striving to accept it as it is! The newness and delight of it is at times a distraction from the training and work of cultivating the focus and awareness that in turn helps cultivate it? In some ways it reminds me of the sense of stability and calm I feel when I engage in any of the various Grounding and Centering exercise I have tried within my journeys in Witchcraft and the Occult. Within most of those, though, you are connecting to something outside of yourself… you are becoming more fully a part of a greater whole. Mindfulness practice is helping me to find this place of stillness, silence, and stability within (dare I say inner peace?!) has been a delightful and new revelation to me of something… perhaps a capacity… within myself that I did not really appreciate or know that I possessed.

In a couple of days I will have reached my 30 days limit on daily blogging about my now established and ongoing mindfulness practice. I will post a wrap up piece for this journey. After that… well I may take a few days off. I have a number of other longer form pieces that I have been wanting to write but where my writing skills were so rusty that I could NOT get a start on them… now…well this journey has also served to get rid of a lot of the rust and dust clogging my mind and writing skills/process!

We have a few more days together on this particular journey though, and it is always best not to get too distracted from the current journey.

Bliss & Blessed Be,
Pax / Geoffrey