I walked the walk!

Just a quickie - last night I walked the Sleepwalk for St. Andrew’s Hospice Grimsby. Over 560 women turned out in their pyjamas to walk twelve miles around our town. It was an absolutely fantastic night, so much energy buzzing round. Anyway here’s a photo of our team just after we crossed the finish line (just before 4am!). Yes, I got to see another sunrise!

Now I need some good quality SLEEP myself!

Purging of emotion

From the brilliant I can has cheesburger.com

Meditation observations

As I’ve been meditating for almost a month, I can draw some conclusions and observations from the practice and how it is becoming integrated into my daily life.

Photo by Nick Russill

I look forward to the mornings

When the alarm goes off I am happy to get up as I know the first activity of the day will be an enjoyable one. During the meditation, I feel calm and relaxed, and this helps set the day off well. The meditations did feel like hard work during the first few days, and sometimes it was boring. It was uncomfortable too as I often found my back hurting as I tried to maintain the upright posture. I feel less discomfort now, perhaps that is due to the muscles in my back strengthening.

Independence

I deliberately chose a meditation method that did not rely on external stimuli. I like guided visualisations from time to time as a way to relax, but I wanted to have a morning practice that relied on nothing more that me being present. The Clairvision CDs have some recorded practices on to help you with awareness, postures and breathing, but the emphasis is on “see for yourself, know for yourself” rather than visualisation. The experiential side of the meditation programme is what really attracted me to this method.

Towards clarity

Sometimes I feel as though I am moving backwards through my meditations. For example, I have found myself thinking about events that I haven’t thought about in years, way back in my childhood. When I become aware that I am thinking, I release the thoughts, but it feels as though mud is being stirred up from the bottom of a river bed. This seems to me like part of the cleansing process when you change your diet, where you find that your skin breaks out or you get headaches as the toxins are released from your body. I may be way off the mark, but this seems like a sort of psychic cleansing. I know I need to push through this so that I can raise my consciousness.

Outside the practices

During the day, I am finding that there is an afterglow that lasts long after the twenty minutes in the morning. I feel more aware somehow, that feeling that life is just passing me by has been replaced by the feeling that I am more involved in the flow of life. I feel more engaged in even the most mundane tasks, like everything is connected.

The journey continues… stay tuned!

Scenes you seldom see…

I know, I was shocked too… Happy Wordless Wednesday everyone!

Dedication to Meditation - days 16-24

I have kept up with the morning meditations all week, getting up that bit earlier has become incorporated into my morning routine which helps. I do seem to have a lot a mental clutter at the moment though. Sometimes a great idea or realisation comes to me during the sessions, and it’s hard to let it go and return to nothingness. It’s normal to have thoughts, but the point of meditation is to quiet the mind and not get caught up in the drama. Just letting go is simple but not always easy. One thing that I find helps when I catch myself starting to get involved with my thoughts is turning my attention back to my breathing or my posture. This week has been quite hard going on that side of things, there just seems to be so much going on.

Meditation sessions are something I look forward to now. At first I found myself getting kind of bored towards the end, but now the time goes really quickly and I sometimes think that I could do with longer. I seem to have a barrier of psychic gunge that it takes me a few minutes to get through before I start to experience anything that I could really class as meditation. By the time my 20 minutes is up, it’s disappointing as I feel as if it’s over before I’ve got off the starting blocks. I’m not sure if maybe I should extend the time or just keep going as I am. This could be something to review once the 30 days are up.

I guess this is all part of the process. After all, it’s called meditation practice, not meditation perfect