Some personal notes on this thread
My main desktop system went down a couple of days after the warranty expired, the mother board went and turned it into a $1400 door stop! Into the shop for a new main board and I hope the hard drive is gonna stay intact. I'm gonna save shit to my cloud account from now on and much recent stuff is in the cloud, on email or on this thread and another threads here. So I'm gonna use this space for some writing notes.
Personal observations about going into the "bag" again
I quit smoking pot last week and had a puff one evening after finding a bud while cleaning up, that evening of 2 joints made me feel like shit the next day! So other than maybe making a batch of weak cookies at some point in the future, I think I'm gonna give pot a rest for a spell, knee pain can be dealt with through practice. If I do puff, it will be in a small pipe or hitter and the small amount smoked and when it's smoked will be under some discipline. When I do smoke again I will get very high on a very small amount of extremely potent kush I grow and around christmas time I'm gonna be curious about the Gorilla Glue #4's I've got on the go, top drawer genetics too! I find that pot is very bad for self regulation, for me at least. Increasingly my life is being automatically contained with in self discipline, a consequence of practicing over an hour a day in 3 x 20 minute sessions, plus other practices.
Week #2 of the online MBSR course.
I got off to an inconsistent start to week #1 with sitting and body scan practices, but a good beginning nonetheless. Week 2 is going much better with consistent practice and I'm doing more than the minimum amount required and moment to moment awareness is rapidly returning. When I meditate I spend most of my mind time in practice and not chasing thoughts, I know where the "groove is and how to get there. I'm now doing other things outside of formal practice to reinforce moment to moment awareness and connecting with my body. I'm catching bad mental habits that crept back into my mind because of instinctive origins, these are mostly inappropriate in modern society! If I were living full blown tribal it might be OK, but not in a modern society!
It's day 5 of week #2 of the MBSR course and yesterday I bought a book for a journal (just a composition scribbler), that I'll use to track my diet and calories, meditations and exercise (a great motivational tool too). Today I started a healthy eating and weight loss plan, yesterday I made a gallon and a half of
French style Canadian pea soup (sans celery) 200 calories per cup and tastes better the next day, and after being frozen and several liters are in the freezer. I'm already thinking about an evening walk and perhaps going back to the pool after the new year! I've even got my eye out for a good (hardy used
) second hand elliptical trainer! (always buy such equipment used, because most of the time it was never used). An elliptical trainer will let ya just about kill yerself, even with bad knees! This is what happens automatically with one week of consistent and assiduous 1 hour + of practice, and no pot, practice makes pot unnecessary, or a lot easier to do with out!
Today I had a 20 minute insight, or Vipassana sitting at 7:10 AM ( my alarm is now set to 7:00 AM) and 20 minute concentration or Samatha sit and at 2:00 PM I had another 20 minute insight sitting. Usually when a novice learns meditation it takes a while to get to Samatha meditation and MBSR focuses on insight or Vipassana practice and rightly so, developing a Samatha practice takes time for most people. Some claim there is no difference between
Samatha and
Vipassana practices and for the beginner this is for the most part true. My 20 minute Samatha sit left me calm, peaceful and happy, it's what it does.
Constant mindfulness gives rise to deep concentration during Samatha practice that takes our practice to the next level and prepares us for the first of the four stages of jhana (some claim 5 stages). Jhana (Sanskrit) or apana (Pali) means absorbed or fixed upon and are very deep meditative states. After the third Jhana once you go in you lose control and come out when your deep inner self is ready. All jhana states involve a very brilliant white light that permeates the mind, the cleaner your heart, the brighter and cleaner the light you go into.
Here is the expert on jhana states Ajahn Brahm and
here is his book ( I have a hard copy)
for those who want to chase jhanas. As a jhana hunter, I will tell you it takes time and practice to prepare for Samatha meditation then clean living and effort to attain the first jahna, in the fourth jhana, your breathing is almost imperceptible and the respiration rate is very slow and the heart rate can go down as low as 6 beats per minute! People have been pronounced dead in jahana states and have surprised a few doctors, assuming they didn't kill them first while trying to treat them!
programminglife.net
Don't pay for meditation, the practices are always given away free.
