Day 162 & Scaling Fixed Meditation

Day 162 Record Keeping SRHI = 84
Day 130 Fixed Meditation SRHI = 82
Day 76 Bodyweight Exercise SRHI= 79 (3 bridges, 1 min wall plank)
Day 3 Writing = 21
Day 176 Eating SRHI = 62
Good sleep, bleary wakeup. Depression, irritation and loopiness yesterday. Perhaps went too low in the carbs - also had very intense burpee workout yesterday.

Scaling Fixed Meditation
I’m noticing quite a bit of improvement in my bodyweight training - I’m pushing, and I’m able to improve daily. I like that feeling, and I want that to occur in all the habits that aren’t static. Record keeping and eating are pretty static, as flossing will be when I get around to it.

But writing is scaleable - and I already have a plan for that - I want to get faster, I want to have more of a minimum daily amount, like in my burpee habit, and I want to get it so it’s eventually a polished, publishable article that I write per day.

But meditation hasn’t been like that. What I’m currently doing is the same thing I outlined in my initial meditation protocol (Described a bit HERE and HERE).

To recap, I do an extension of Vipassana. In Vipassana you observe emotion. By observing the emotion and describing it in your head, you refuse to give it fuel, and it eventually fades. In this extension you observe the emotion, imagine it leaving your body, transform it into positivity, and reintroduce it back into the body. I realize this sounds very woo-woo but it works incredibly well, and has completely changed how I deal with bad moods. Suddenly, bad moods and depression are things I have a choice about - If I stay in a bad mood, it’s my own fault.

But how can I scale meditation? Well for one, I can time it. It has naturally gotten quicker to do, but ideally I want it to be instantaneous - or as close to that as possible. I can also add different types of meditation. For example, I should be able to relax myself totally at will. And eventually I want to be able to do very advanced practices like Tummo - fire meditation. 

So for now, I think it would be profitable to make a progression, just like bodyweight exercises, that I can follow to stay out of meditation plateaus.

Day 11 and Habituation is not Mastery

SRHI=46

Great sleep, woke up groggy and soar

Habituation is not Mastery
This is one point I’d like to underscore what with my obsession with habits. A habit does not mean you’ve mastered a skill. Some habits are a win in and of themselves - if you eat right, you are going to reap the rewards. The same goes for exercise in losing weight and things like flossing.

But the same does not go for many skills - i.e. learning a musical instrument, becoming functionally strong, learning an art, etc. At some point you’re going to get stuck in a plateau where you habitually practice a task but do not progress. It’s natural to practice parts of the skill you feel most comfortable with but not actual aspects that you have to work on to become better.

Busting through these phases involves mental anguish and may involve changing up your practices. But that’s all in the future and there is no doubt I’ll have to talk about methods to bust through plateaus. But for me, the first step in that long walk towards skill acquisition is forming the bracketed period of time in which you practice.