Day 336 & Pushing Protocols

Day 336 Record Keeping
Day 305 Fixed Meditation 
Day 251 Bodyweight Exercise  (1 full wall walkdown and walkup bridge)
Day 178 Writing (159 words)
Day 351 Eating = 70
Day 108 Work = 52
Good sleep, good wakeup. 

Pushing Protocols
Now that I have a few days between trips and am gradually getting over my sickness, I’ve noticed there are definitely some protocols I want to update.

For fixed meditation I want to start recording different types of meditation and then cycling through them - vipassana, tantric, anchoring, and single pointed meditation (I really should go into a detailed description of these). After recently reading Dan Harris’ book, 10 Percent Happier, which reaffirmed my belief in the power of meditation, I really want to push this habit to prevent myself from falling into laxity. Another fantastic book, Mastering the Core Teachings of the Buddha: An Unusually Hardcore Dharma Book by Daniel Ingram, really emphasizes how easy it is to fail to achieve mastery while still having a regular habit. Strong habits do not equal mastery - it’s a great first step, but you gotta keep pushing.

For my eating habit, I want to start transitioning into clean refeeds. What I’ve been doing so far is not caring at all when I’m sick. I do this because I worry about being carb depleted and I know that carbs are a key component to willpower.

But during this sickness I get this sensation that I don’t really need to do that. I should definitely be eating carbs like rice or potatoes, and that might be a better strategy. The real thing is that when I cheat, I feel horrible, and it  has become more and more noticeable nowadays. So that mental component, of avoiding that bloat, really helps to stabilize my eating habit during breaking points like travel and sickness.

Lastly, I want to try an experiment regarding my work habit. I’ve talked about Pavlovian training for this, but I really want to crank it up - I try to do 2 hours of work, and my minimum is 20 minutes to keep up the habit. I’m curious what will happen if I link the action to a certain sound and do it 4 times a day.

My theory is that I will increase the speed of this habits formation - which would be nice because it has been floundering for a while now.

Day 189 & Additional Scaling to Meditation and Bodyweights

Day 189 Record Keeping 
Day 157 Fixed Meditation 
Day 103 Bodyweight Exercise  (3 ground up bridges, 1x4 dragon lifts)
Day 30 Writing = 38
Day 203 Eating = 78
Great sleep, great wakeup. 

Additional Scaling to Meditation and Bodyweights

After reading Mastering the Core Teachings of the Buddha and perusing the Dharma Overground the conclusion I’ve come to is that there are various facets of meditation. As far as I can tell you can work on single pointed concentration, “energy” work/tantra, and insight meditation.

Energy work or tantric style meditation (no not sexual stuff like how tantra is mischaracterized in the West) is what I’d categorize what I’m working on now. I basically use imagination, sensation, and visualization to drain away negative emotion and transform it into positive emotion. This has been the root of my training.

After reading the MCTB I’ve tacked on insight meditation - distantly observing sensations arising, staying the same, and lessening - a practice that has helped me immensely not only with emotional control, but controlling pain. 

What I’ve lacked is really serious single pointed meditation training. In Roald Dahl’s short story The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar the main character does this by taking a stop watch and literally times how long he can concentrate on one object. I’ve started doing the same and will start recording stats.

I’ve also decided to alternate days on this in 2 day splits - just like with bodyweight training’s 3 day splits. Every day I’ll work on the emotional energy thing, then add in either single pointed or insight training on alternating days.

Bodyweight training is going really well. I’m able to do 3x8 burpees with knee slappers and I’m starting in on full diamond pushups. I’ve made amazing progress with my core and am very proud to start training for the dragon flag.

The dragon flag is one of the most intense core exercises, and I thought I wouldn’t be ready for a long long time. But it too presents problems with scaling. Thank god for youtube. The guy in THIS video has a lot of tips on starting off and gradually progressing with the exercise. I’m at the lowest lowest rung on that progression, the beginner exercises of simply doing a leg raise, going past that and getting the butt off the ground and extending out without letting my butt touch the ground (what I’m calling “dragon lifts” - though I’m sure there’s got to be a better term for it).

It’s hard but I’m really excited to get started on it.