My meditation journal

[Thittato]

On 20.4.2021 at 2:58 AM, modmyth said:

I have SO much respect for anyone who can maintain some sense of empathy and sensitivity when it comes to dealing with people and not get completely burnt out and jaded or disconnected, or just go nuts for that matter. I honestly feel like people do not get enough respect for doing these types of jobs well nor enough money for what you have to deal with on a daily basis (IMO it is a bit like teaching in that way, but your job seems way harder in terms of raw stimuli you have to deal with in your environment).

My brother's wife did a similar type of work in addictions/ with youth; I thought the type of things she had to deal with was nuts. I don't think I would have been able to cope so well in her job. I find myself thinking back to what she told me about people who would have repeated self-harm and overdose episodes, attempted suicides, etc...

I honestly think on an emotional level, you possibly have one of the hardest jobs in the world (unless you have an actual heart of steel).

I've seen the other side too though; I know sometimes people give a lot of crap to people for not being perfect enough in these roles, because to be a psychiatric patient, it puts you in an extremely vulnerable state.  I am glad though that you have been able to put so much energy and care into yourself; in my experience, that tends to inevitably pay off in the rest of your life as well.

Thank you for giving me such profound reflections back on my process. It was very profound for me to write those reflections, and it got way more profound when you gave that deep, intelligent and empathic feedback. I wish you absolute success, love, and growth. May we all help and support each others growth on this forum ?????????

[Thittato]

3 rounds of Wim Hof breathing today, and first day where the cold shower was increased up to 2 min and 55 sec. Holy schmokes. It totally rocked. At this point it is like crossing a treshold where all rush to get out of the cold water fades and it just feels perfectly normal and relaxing. This point starts to come at about 2 mins, and then I have about a minute to get baked in this total acceptance for the cold water. It is not like it is a kick anymore. It is something deeper, rounder and more stable. Like a deep and very full drone beat of the cold being drilled into the depths of my being. But at the same time something that is very simple and natural.

[Thittato]

3 rounds of Wim Hof breathing today, and 2 min and 55 sec in the cold shower. So good.

[Thittato]

Might have landed on doing a 2 week skyjumping course together with one of my best friends before the summer.

So I've been writing here every so often, along with details about my meditation-practice, that I have an interest for extreme-sports, and I love to go snowboarding or rollerblading in the skatepark, and I have a huge interest in this inter-connection between flow-states, extreme-sports, meditation-practice, psychedelics, and creativity. Like the extreme-sport enthusiasts , they seem to be people who really "get it." They are really stoked about life. Wim Hof, who I have been deeply inspired by lately, also was into various extreme-sports and is famous for various world records (swimming under ice, longest exposure to ice, etc). I know he was into bungy-jumping, too.

So I've been writing here about my experiences snowboarding and rollerblading, and it has helped me a lot sorting out my relationship towards these sports, and I have only gotten a deeper experience with them. Today (now yesterday) I was rollerblading in the skatepark again, and oh my god, it just gets more and more awesome. It is such an awesome feeling when the feeling of control and mastery grows. So I've been looking for a way to further deepen my relationship with extreme sports. Is it enough to just continuen to skate whenever I feel like it? Or do I need something more? Should I look into taking snowboarding further? Or try out a totally new sport. Next winter I'm thinking about taking my ice-bathing further. Perhaps try out Wim Hof´s stunt of swimming under ice. I probably wouldn't make it a very long distance. It seems very dangerous. But perhaps I could start out with digging two wholes in the ice not to far apart, like start out with 5 meters at first just to get a taste of that experience, and maybe prolong it to 10 meters. I also want to focus more on freediving this summer. Freediving seems like an really awesome thing.

But anyways, so me and my friend have been talking for one month now about doing this skydiving course, and now it seems we might have finally landed on something. It has been a huge process, and I have been doubting it a lot as well because it seems fucking insanse to jump out of an airplane and I'm still not sure I can get myself to do it, but actually it seems like I'm getting ready for it and that this is sort of like the next thing I need to complete in my life. It will also look pretty awesome on my CV. My job also goes into all these reflections. You have to be somewhat of an adrenaline junkie to how this job that I'm having, and actually my boss is a skyjumper and paraglider, so we have been having some interesting conversations about extreme sports, and it is pretty cool to bond in this way with my boss because I like him very much and he seems to like me as well. So yeah, my relationship with my boss and my job also feeds into this interest a lot.

It was a huge hazzle to convince my friend to go to this two-week course, because he wanted to do a one week course on the other side of country where there are beautiful mountains and fjords, and where this two-week course is the landscape is more flat and boring - like in-land stuff without mountains. But the price is equal for these two courses, but in the one-week course you only get 7 jumps, where as in the two-week course you'll get 20 jumps. And in the one week course you go through a progression called an AFF course (Accelerated Freefall) where you go through 7 levels where each jump is a new level and at level 7 you do your first solo jump where there will only be an instructor ready for you in the air should you really need it. In level 8 you are completely without instructors and you are jumping independently. So in this two week course you'll get 13 jumps which are completely independt after you are finished with level 7 in your 7th jump. So it seems a bit rushed to me to go through all these steps in one week and then you are done. When I'm first doing a course like this I would like to really master it, so when I'm an independent jumper I would like to feel that I master that experience before the course is over. So it seems much nicer just to hang out on the dropzone for 2 weeks and really land into the experience and be there for a long time, instead of rusing in and out in only one week. We are going to stay at the dropzone for the entire 2 weeks, and it seems like a nice summer-camp to hang out there. They have a sauna, and I'm sure I'll bring my rollerblades, and we are also going to bring our guitars, our drums, drawing equipment, a Chess-board, and etc, so that we can hang out there and have like a creative retreat at the same time. Almost like a yoga-retreat in a way, just that the thing we are doing is sky-diving instead.

Seems totally absolutely awesome!

Gosh, there was a lot of processing to land this. It is not completely decided yet, but almost. Both a lot of internal processing inside of me, and a lot of social processing between me and my friend. But this seems like the absolutely most possible awesome thing that we can do now under this boring pandemic period we are in. And it will so much enhance my interest in everything related to this really awesome interconnection between meditation-practice, flow states, creativity and extreme sports.

[Thittato]

3 rounds of Wim Hof breathing and 2 min and 55 sec in the cold shower today as well. 3rd day of 2 min and 55 sec. 2 more days, and then for the last 5 days it will increase to 3 min and 10 sec. I'm looking forward to that jump. It should be really easy, but I'm looking forward to what those extra 15 sec will do to round off the whole experience. This 20 day cold shower challenge has so far been much easier than the previous one. One of the reasons for that is that I don't obsess about this when I'm not doing the practice, and I'm not doing any extra practice either like doing the breathing several times per day to get extra high etc. In fact I'm not really striving to get high at all anymore. That is not the point. I was too hooked on getting high in the beginning of this project. But I guess that is what seduced me into this in the first place. But I'm more and more coming to a place where I'm totally OK with whichever state I'm in.

[Thittato]

3 rounds of breathing and 2 min and 55 sec in the cold shower. Very tired today. Been working night-shift a lot lately. But it was interesting that I don't resist the cold water when I'm feeling weak and tired. It feels refreshing even when tired.

[Thittato]

3 rounds of breathing today, and last day of 2 min and 55 sec in the cold shower. Tomorrow will be the start of the last 5 days where cold exposure will be increased to 3 min and 10 sec.

[Thittato]

3 rounds of breathing today (well actually before I went to bed after having worked night-shift, but I count them as today because my goal during this 20 day cold shower challenge is to accompany every cold session with 3 rounds of Wim Hof breathing, so this session is the one I’m stringing together with todays cold shower). I woke up late for work today. Working night-shift again. So I just had to run. Fortunately my co-workers allowed me to go and take the cold shower right now, so it was pretty refreshing to do a cold shower 3 hours into night-shift. This 20 day cold shower allows for 2 rest days after every 5 days, or you have to do 5 cold showers per week, but I wanted to see if I could do 20 days in a row, and fortunately now I’m still on track with that. This has been a really busy week of work working a lot extra, but next week will be more chill with only two days of work and I’m not going to say yes to any extra, so I’m really glad I managed to keep this up during all this activity, and now the last 4 days will be really easy to finish. Incredibly how this helps me process the challenges of daily life. I was totally worn down when I came to work tonight, and now I feel fresh as superman ?

[Thittato]

14 hours ago, modmyth said:

@Thittato  Amen.

And I feel like this is kind of a daft question, but how do you time your cold showers? I never timed mine...

Hehe! Not a daft question at all. I use the timer inside of the 20 day cold shower challenge inside of the Wim Hof app. It has a nice Zen-bell, and a count-down, and you see which day you have completed, and you get reward-badges after each completed week, etc, so it creates more of a ritualized support-system around the whole thing ? 

[Thittato]

More on skydiving.

So I felt inspired to do 3 rounds of Wim Hof breathing after I came home from working night-shift. It has been a really intense period at work lately, and now I will have some well-deserved days off. It was really nice to clear out my mind with some breathing after I came home now after having first cleaned up my appartment. I am thinking so much about becoming a skydiver these days. I really think it is the next step in my personal development journey. Me and my friend actually decided to join that 2 week course that I was talking about a few posts ago, and we had cleared out our schedule for it, so everything was set, but when we called to book it we were told that those early courses were very uncertain because of the Corona-situation, but that later in the summer they thought it was more likely that they were running as planned. So that was a bummer, and my friend is not sure he can keep his schedule empty for this later in the summer, but I told my boss I will take my vacation in August instead, so I think I will just go alone if my friend cannot make it. But the cool thing is we actually made the decision to go, and that felt very empowering. When he was not so sure he couldn't go when we couldn't go to the course we planned, I didn't knew if I wanted to go alone, but now I think this is just something that I have to do no matter what. I'm not saying for certain, because I want to give the process some more space to sort itself out on its own, but it seems like this is what is up for me next. I'm watching lots of skydiving videos on youtube, I'm talking about it with as many people I can, and I'm familiarizing myself with the whole phenomena from all directions, and seeing my own process very clearly leading up to this. I think it is a yearning for just totalt expansion. It is much the same feeling I get both with snowboarding and rollerblading I think, but I need to go even bigger and have even more awesome tools. I need to have the whole sky as my playground. I think there is a yearning in all of us to fly, and this sport must be as close as one can possibly get. I think all the groundwork I've been laying down into getting back into rollerblading and snowboarding as a grown-up will feed very well into this. I wasn't sure why I was having the intuition to get back into those things, there was a very strong pull, but it didn't seem that those things where going to be ends in themselves, but now it seems like it was a preparation for something greater. There is something about this whole thing which is about taking my interest in meditation and expansive mind-states and translating it into some sort of mastery of the physical world and then using my ability to navigate in the physical world to bring me into contact with the same type of experiences that I have been seeking inside - some kind of union between the inner and the outer world. I totally get a lot of those expansive flow-states both through snowboarding and rollerblading, and yeah, even totally with ice-bathing, and now the yearning is to expand even more. So fun to write about this, it makes me feel very expansive, creative and optimistic about life :-)

Edited April 26, 2021 by Thittato

[Thittato]

And here are some of the coolest skydiving photos I’ve found so far. Just had to include them :-)

[Thittato]

3 rounds of Wim Hof breathing today, 10 sun salutations, and 3 min and 10 sec in the cold shower. It has been seeming lately, that something in my psyche is getting further into balance. I had bipolar tendencies before. Like I would get really high, and then I would find some idea or mental concept or something and go crazy with my mental masturbation around it, and then I would wake up the next day feeling really burned out and sick of the whole thing I was so inspired by the day before. Now that skydiving is my focus, it doesn't seem like I milk it too hard as a mental concept the way I used to do with these things before. Like the attention and focus that I give to it is seem to be in balance with what it is natural that my relationship towards it is at this point. I guess I'm not trying to hype myself up to be more into it than I need to be at this point. It is like an interesting subject that I'm just studying at this point. It is not like it is the one and only savior that if I can get into it my life will finally end up in heaven instead of hell. So in other words my desperation seems to be gone. My life is fine right now, too. I guess this is why I used to fall so desperately in love before. It mistakenly seemed like I was so close to what would be the savior in my life. So close but so far at the same time. This same thing happened over and over again with the Wim Hof method this winter as well. Like getting a huuuuge kick out of ice-bathing and breath-work and then watching Wim Hof interviews and just trying to squeeze as much out of it as I possibly could. But it seems like I managed to ride out those waves successfully, and now I don't get so high from it, although it still makes me feel very fresh and powerful, but I guess it has turned into something I would say is more stable. Very interesting. Self-love and self-respect is growing, too. I'm finding love in the simple sense of being.

Well. This has been a very interesting second 20 day cold shower challenge so far. Only 3 more days to go. I'm looking forward to wrap it up and make a summary out of what this process has been for me. Feels like something that has been intensely rewarding so far.

[Thittato]

3 rounds of Wim Hof breathing and 3 min and 10 sec in the cold shower. So nice :-) This is like doing spa every day.

[Thittato]

3 rounds of Wim Hof breathing today as well, and then 3 min and 10 sec in the cold shower. Tomorrow is last day of this challenge. I have been very tired yesterday and today. Had a lot of night-shifts last week. But the cold shower was still very refreshing. Interesting this time with this challenge is that I don't feel going into the cold makes me weaker if I already feel weak. I'm not sure what to do after I finish this challenge. Probably I will take some days to decompress like I've done before. The interesting thing with both Wim Hofs breathing technique and his focus on the cold water is that they are both highly addictive, and especially in combination. Earlier I was thinking that I was going to go back to my regular meditation once this "winter focus" was over, but then the addiction to this method has brought me back again and again.

[Thittato]

3 more round of Wim Hof breathing today. Very nice.

[Thittato]

Finished last day of second 20 day cold shower challenge.

3 rounds of Wim Hof breathing and 3 min and 10 sec in the cold shower. I guess I was quite high here in the middle of the challenge with the sense of mastery at my job and the reflections about possibly wanting to become a skydiver. I was also working a lot of overtime last week, and I still feel tired from the combination of all of this that has been going on lately. But the tiredness was worst yesterday and the day before yesterday. Now it is like I'm starting to land from this whole trip I've been on lately. This challenge started as a curve, with it building up gradually, and then there was a peak of energy in the middle, and then a decline. It wasn't only necessarily related to the Wim Hof method. I tend to go through these cycles anyways, but I think there was a clear correalation. When I gather my focus around something like this energy tends to build up. Still it felt smoother and more stable than when I did this the first time. And the crash, yes, it was a little crash, wasn't all that dramatic.

It is not so clear I should still go skydiving. I mean, I still have my vacation set up so that I could go and do a 2 week course in the middle of August if I wanted to, but like how I feel now, in a bit more sobered and grounded mindstate, it is still quite clear that there is a feeling of lacking purpose and direction in life. Skydiving could potentially be a cool addition to my personal study in the correalation between spiritual practice, extreme sports, and flow-states, and maybe that has something to do with my purpose, but also it somehow also feels like an escape from what I should rather be focusing on, ie. finding my real purpose. It seems to be this I'm always coming back to. So the whole challenge was sobering. But I think this whole burst of energy I experienced and all the different landscapes in my mind that was opened up because of it will lead to some kind of integration. Especially reflecting on job-mastery was very helpful.

There is a sadness that always comes when a high like this fades and I return back to vulnerability. But I think this vulnerability is where growing up happens.

[Thittato]

3 rounds of Wim Hof breathing today and a cold shower (untimed). Very nice. Maybe now that I have trained with time during this 20 day cold shower all the way up to 3 min and 10 sec, maybe now I can just do them untimed according to what I feel like. I'm thinking about at some point to start to do the breathing exercises untimed as well.

Regarding skydiving. I'm still very interested in it, so regarded that course in the middle of August, I think I will just have to give it some space to see whether that is the right thing do to or not. No rush to decide. I'm following a lot of skydivers on instagram, and watch a youtube video about it every now and then, and it seem so fun and awesome. So I guess I can just keep it open for now. At the very least it is a very interesting interest as a spectator and as entertainment seeing all these people exploring how far they can push human activity. But maybe I will get into it too.

Edited May 2, 2021 by Thittato

[Thittato]

No practice yesterday, except for a lot of guitar-playing. Today: Weight-lifting, cold-shower and 3 rounds of Wim Hof breathing.

[Thittato]

3 more rounds of Wim Hof breathing today. I think I will do a 3rd session later as well. I need some extra punch to my spiritual practice today.

[Thittato]

3rd session of 3 rounds of Wim Hof breathing for the day completed. Wow. That was nice.