Is there a better time to try to develop a healthy meditation practice than during a global pandemic?
My March focus for my Intensity/Simplicity theme was my meditation practice. As a reminder, I’ve decided to take each of my four daily habits (Read, Write, Move, and Sit) and focus on one at a time each month for all of 2020. January I focused on Move and tried to run a bunch. In February I focused on Write and tried to write a “shit ton.” March, then, has been focused on Sit.
Like with the other two months, I didn’t step into March 1st with a specific goal in mind. I figured for this first go around with each of the habits I would just try to see what it is like if I made a general intention to do each one “more.” In the case of January I think that worked pretty well. I definitely ran more than usual, at least. February was mostly a failure. I would put March somewhere between the two. As I sit here today on April 1st I see I have a 73% completion rate on actually sitting down and meditating every day. That comes out to 8 days missed out of 31. In February I missed 19 days so I definitely took a step in the right direction.
As part of this experiment I also re-read Mindfulness in Plain English to help ground me in what I was trying to do — and why. I did that in the first couple days of March with the vague intention I would read some other meditation-related books throughout the rest of the month but that never actually happened. I did re-subscribe to the Audio Dharma podcast and while I don’t listen to everything that shows up in that feed there’s usually at least one or two talks I’ll listen to each week.
I did a combination of completely silent meditations using the app Enso as a timer and some guided meditations using Calm. The purist in me thinks the guided meditation craze ala Headspace or Calm or 10% Happier or Wake Up and the rest of the Relaxation as a Service companies is kind of a cop out and that you don’t “need” anything other than a place to sit and some quiet to meditate. However, in the absence of a teacher I do think I picked up a couple techniques via the guided meditations that helped.
Finally, I had a vague intention to not only meditate “more than usual” but to find a place in my daily routine where it could become just an automatic part of my day. I played with a couple spots and I think I’ve landed on in the morning after I read/have coffee as my favorite timeslot with just before bedtime as a backup. I definitely learned that the later in the day it got before meditating the less likely I was to actually do it.
Now, with all the arguably unimportant preliminaries out of the way, did I actually learn anything about myself by meditating more than usual this month? Honestly, no. But that’s okay. I have enough on-again off-again meditation experience to know that 30 days of extremely limited meditation (between 10 and 20 minutes a day) is not enough for anything to “happen” (to the extent that anything ever happens in meditation). I didn’t expect to become enlightened or have some kind of breakthrough — and I didn’t. I did notice that on days when I meditated I felt calmer and more in control of my emotions. I’m not sure if that’s a result of simply having done a thing I intended to do (I can get similar feelings from writing or reading or exercising) or was a result of the actual meditation experience itself. At the end of the day, it probably doesn’t matter.
April: Month of Write (Redux)
The nice thing about coming up with some kind of experiment or personal development program is that I get to make the rules. I had a general intention to spend the first four months of 2020 rotating through the four daily habits I mentioned earlier. Having done Move, Write, and Sit that would mean April is a Month of Read. However, I’m going to call an audible.
I’m still really annoyed about how poorly my Month of Write went in February, so I’m going to hold off on doing my first Month of Read and do another Month of Write instead. This time, though, I’m putting a little more structure into play. No more am I just going to vaguely try to “write more.” Instead, I’m specifically trying to sit at my desk and try to write from 6:15-7:45 AM everyday this month. The topic of the writing doesn’t really matter but the goal is to more or less keep my fingers moving for the vast majority of this time. Personal journaling and other stream of consciousness writing is what I’ll turn to if I’m not making any progress on an article for SamSpurlin.com or The Ready or The Deliberate or any other major writing project.
Basically, I’ve paid enough lip service to the idea of being a prolific writer and if I don’t figure out how to build it into my days, even though I have a very demanding day job, then I’m never going to figure it out. The day job may be demanding, but it’s flexible (and stands to benefit from my greater writing output, too). My life is also the simplest it’s ever going to be. It doesn’t necessarily get easier from here. I’m not married and I don’t have kids. If those things are in my future then it’s not like there’s some future writerly state where I’ll have more time or attention to dedicate to this. If I can’t lock in the practice now while I’m relatively free to do as I please then I’m worried I never will.
Along with the specificity of “sit at my desk from 6:15-7:45 AM everyday and try to write,” as a goal I’m putting in a bit more scaffolding to help me accomplish this.
First, I know my phone is the central character here who can foil my plans. If I look at email, Slack, Twitter, or Reddit before sitting down to write I’m much less likely to actually get it done. Therefore, part of my process is to not get my phone off its charger until after I’ve finished my morning writing session. The problem is that I generally use my phone as an alarm clock. However, with that setup I’m guaranteed to touch my phone mere seconds after I wake up; right when my willpower is lowest and I’m most likely to convince myself that looking at Twitter for a few minutes will “help me wake up.” The fix is simple enough, though. I bought an analog alarm clock so now I have no reason to touch my phone immediately upon waking.
Second, I can sometimes dilly-dally when it comes to making coffee in the morning. This is usually caused by getting lost in my phone but the resistance to getting up and actually making the coffee might be bidirectional with the phone problem. To that end, I’m making it as easy as possible to make coffee in the morning while still meeting my annoyingly high standards (fresh beans, pour-over or AeroPress) by filling the electric kettle the night before, putting beans in the hopper of the grinder, assembling the AeroPress or pour-over cone, and getting a mug out of the cupboard. It’s not much, but I’m hoping the fact that all I need to do is push a button and twist a knob to get hot coffee and prepped grounds will make it easier to actually get out of bed and to the kitchen.
Finally, I’m really taking seriously the idea that I can create an association with a specific type of music and a specific kind of work. I already listen to a ton of instrumental electronic music while I do other work and the band Tycho is my absolute favorite. When I sit down to write every morning I’m going to turn on my Tycho playlist and that’s the only thing I’m ever going to listen to while working (and I won’t listen to Tycho outside of these morning writing sessions, either). I’m hoping that I can get to the point where hearing a Tycho song immediately puts my brain into a state that’s particularly conducive to writing.
I’ve been operating under this program for the last week of March and have been averaging somewhere between 2000 and 3000 words of fresh prose each morning — so the early returns are certainly promising! The trick, though, as with all monthlong experiments, is to keep this momentum going when getting up “early” and writing for 90 minutes is no longer the fun new thing and is instead “just a thing.”