Week One

Day 5: Was, Friday? It must have been. I completed my meditation on a cushion in my bedroom and also practiced yoga. My routine was almost finished when the doorbell rang and two lovely gentlemen arrived with our new king sized mattresses! Holla!

Day 6: Today Deepak led us through a body scan, so I completed this act while lying across my previously mentioned brand spanking new mattresses. Since I have chronic sleep problems and issues, I thought it would be a good opportunity to introduce rest, relaxation, and positive associations with this new space that I will be spending a lot of my time on. We progressively relaxed our body from our feet to our head, then sent warmth and love to any tense areas. Is it something about listening to someone else's voice and following their suggestions that makes this so effective? Because it's not so effective if I try to just do it myself, with an inner direction.

Day 7: Yes! I successfully completed week one of the challenge: meditating every day. No, I do not enter a zen like trance free of distraction. Yes, my mind is busy. "Monkey mind" I believe this may be called? I'm reading this book, "When Things Fall Apart" by Pema Chodron (THE book, as my sister Bethany calls it) and I'm taking notes on passages that I find especially relevant to me. One that I keep coming back to is, "We do not meditate in order to become good at meditating." This was kind of a revelation for me. Every challenge I take on, everything that I DO... I want to be good at it. "Good". And I'm wrapping my mind around this new idea: Maybe that's not the point? It seems obvious, that's NOT the point. It's not the point of my life to be "Good". I need not be good all of the f*ing time. So, I'm slowly letting go of this ingrained path and learning to simply experience my life; the good, the bad, and the ugly. The beautiful. The heart wrenching. The painful. The joyous. The intense. The mundane. The whole spectrum.

It's a start.