My meditation journal

[Thittato]

Cold shower today, and then I did 3 rounds of Wim Hof breathing afterwards. Wim Hof says to do the breathing before the cold, but I find it pretty nice to do it afterwards as well. It seems like I can go deeper into the breathing when I have first been in the cold, especially since showering is a nice way to shake off the morning-grogginess. It was super-nice to do 3 sessions of breathwork yesterday - I could feel I had a lot more punch in the breathwork I did today because of it. I will do 3 sessions today as well. There has been a lot of process lately, so it is nice way to clear out my system and get my power back.

[Thittato]

3rd session of 3 rounds of Wim Hof breathing for today finished. So nice, and needed, today.

[Thittato]

45 min meditation today. I needed to just sit and enjoy stillness and rest.

[Thittato]

3 rounds of Wim Hof breathing and then cold shower. Nice, nice, and nice.

[Thittato]

2nd session of 3 rounds of Wim Hof breathing today. So damn awesome. I went to the skatepark with my bestfriend this evening. Finally it is open again. It was super-ultra-awesome. Then I came home and played Chess online together with my Chess-buddies on Skype for the rest of the evening. That was also super-awesome. And now I just had to do a second session of the Wim Hof breathing to ground all this awesomeness. I felt ecstatic while doing it, and paradoxically also very calm at the same time. But the skating was the best. I've been in much process lately, and the skating can really shake it loose like few other things can and bring me into a very expansive mind-state.

[Thittato]

Had to do a 3rd session of 3 rounds of Wim Hof breathing today as well. So nice. I'm going to work night-shift for 4 nights in a row now, so maybe I'm loading up for that. It was nice with some days off work now. Managed to do a lot of fun stuff and get my mind on other things than just work.

[Thittato]

3 rounds of Wim Hof breathing today.

[Thittato]

3 rounds of Wim Hof breathing and a cold shower today. Very nice.

[Thittato]

45 min meditation today, and then a cold shower. Very nice. Seems like sometimes I need to do the Wim Hof breathing, and sometimes I need to do my regular meditation. Both techniques are centered around the breathing process, so I think they complement each other very well.

[Thittato]

And then also today 3 rounds of Wim Hof breathing now before I'll go to bed after having worked night-shift. This was the 3rd night in a row. One more night to go. Such a good atmosphere at my job these days. I love working with the group I'm working with this weekend - our chemistry is just really nice. So I came home inspired, and now I have been watching extreme sport documentaries and skydiving and wingsuit flying on youtube for a couple of hours, and it is time to go to bed and I needed to seal off this awesome day and night with some rounds of breathing. Also I finished the 3-part documentary on Netflix on extreme sports called Don't Crack Under Pressure. It is 3 movies lasting for approximately 1,5 hour each. So awesome and inspiring watching those cool people pushing the bounderies of human experience through various extreme sports. So glad I got back into snowboarding and rollerblading again, and how I relate it back to my spiritual practice, and how I now might also go into skydiving myself, but even if I wasn't going to go into skydiving I have my own reference point in extreme sports with snowboarding and rollerblading, and it is actually pretty fucking abundant just exploring these types of sports as a spectator as well, like next to my own snowboarding and skating. My number one favourite thing they always say about these people in these documentaries is "he had such a passion for life." A lot of them also has a very interesting philosophy about death. They say that would rather die doing something they love, than live an unfulfilled life, especially since we are going to die anyways. That is something I can calm myself down with should I go into skydiving. Skydiving is pretty low-risk, and they say that your are far more likely to get killed on driving to the dropzone than when you jump out of the airplane. But still, it still feels like a pretty vulnerable situation throwing oneself out of an airplane, and I think it is better to have the attitude that you are actually willing to die doing this (which is very unlikely to happen) than to do it in a very fearful state praying for the canopy to open. I think my attitude in life should be: "If this is the time to go then this is time to go." Not that this is energetically what is going on in myself. I'm still very much clinging on to life. But I like to start to challenge this clinging more. I think I should be more ready to go when that time comes. A lot of people have said that spiritual practice is about learning to die well. I'm far from settled about the issue of mortality, but I like how my interest in extreme sports brings this issue closer into my life in what I consider a healthy and balanced way.

[Thittato]

45 min meditation today, and then a cold shower. So nice. Last night working night-shift 4 days in a row. I think I will do 3 rounds of Wim Hof breathing when I come home again.

[Thittato]

Completed those 3 rounds just now. I get such a buzz after having worked night-shift. Maybe that is why I like it. Anyways. It is pretty nice to do the Wim Hof breathing method in that buzz. And it is a nice way to balance that buzz and become ready for sleep.

Edited May 10, 2021 by Thittato

[Thittato]

3 rounds of Wim Hof breathing today. I woke up and was very tired after these 4 night-shifts. Immediately some of my Chess-buddies called and wanted to play Chess online and on skype together. I joined them for a couple of hours, and then I saw another extreme sports documentary on Netflix, by the same guy who made the Don't Crack Under Pressure series, but this one is called Hooked on Life, but pretty much the same crew and the same theme. And then I did 3 rounds of Wim Hof breathing just now. I think the common theme for everybody who wants to push their own limits, whether it is in sports, art, music, meditation, love, etc, is just this longing for expansion. To break out of the limited sense of self and to feel whole and expanded. Many paths, but the same yearning. Maybe it is as simple as that. And then there is the balance between just surrendering into life and accepting it as it is now VS. longing for those expanded states of mind, and somehow you need both, but the balance is not always easy to figure out. Even in the peak-moments of life there is very much a sense of surrender and just being at one with the groove. I've had many experiences where everything was set up to be pretty cool, but somehow there was some resistance towards that experience that sabotaged it, especieally this can happen if one is jamming together and one had really big expectations towards the jam, but then it turns out one couldn't find the groove immediately - fortunately with experience one learns to work through this resistance and in many cases it dissolves if one continues. I've experienced this a lot in the skatepark lately. It takes some time to warm up and get into the groove.

Maybe there is some conflict in me between these to sides of my self - the boring side and the ecstatic side. Maybe it is as simple as that sometimes I need to sit by the ocean and just look out into the sky and enjoy a coffee, and other times I need to do something more extreme. Sounds pretty simple. Everybody has those different sides to themselves. My problem seems to be that I identify really hardcore with whatever I'm doing in the moment, and that makes it difficult to integrate all these different types of polarities. In the end I think it is just a matter of giving up control. Just letting everything be as it is. Did I choose to sit here and write these things, or did it just happen? When I'm in another moment, it also just seems like somehow it just manifested by itself and somehow I'm just there and have to surrender into it.

Maybe life is inherently a conflict. What would my life look like if this conflict dissolved?

In that question I think the answer to what to do next lies.

Just let it happen.

Edited May 11, 2021 by Thittato

[Thittato]

Cold shower, and 3 rounds of Wim Hof breathing today as well. Just finished the breathing right now. So nice. Still a lot of processing around this whole skydiving thing. I've been reading some articles about the relationship between meditation and skydiving today. So interesting! Maybe one would think that skydiving is more of a wild and crazy type of experience, but actually many people describe it as much closer to meditation it seems like. It doesn't matter so much to me right now whether I will actually become a skydiver myself (which is very likely btw,) but it seems to be its own reward to process my fascination with this thing on a mental and emotional level. I can totally accept that a few of us are pioneers and explorers collecting interesting experiences for the rest of us to be entertained, educated and inspired by, without the big majority of us actually needing to do those things ourselves. I have like a really fun new phenomena to continue to explore on youtube and through reading articles about it these days. It is always so interesting when you start to get the overview over a phenomena like this. Like who are the leaders and influencers in this field, how are they related to each other, and what do they think about the various disiplinces in this sport, how have they turned wiser as they have matured in this sport, what kind of perspectives does it shed on their lives, etc. So much to explore! It also sheds some very interesting perspectives on the risk-taking that I have to take in my own life. Like how to plan certain operations. I'm planning on jumping from the fence around the half-pipe down into the half-pipe on rollerblades as soon as I feel that it is responsible. I can already jump when I sit on the fence and have my feet standing at the ledge half-way from the top of the fence, but soon I would like to stand and balance on the top of the fence and jump down into the half-pipe, so now I'm training for how to make that possible. I will just have to get very comfortable jumping from this halfway step, and also drop a lot from all the tallest drops around in the skatepark, and eventually I will become so comfortable dropping from tall places that I would want to push it further because I feel so in control at that point. My other ambition is to be able to do a frontflip in the halfpipe. That probably requires even some more training - but both these goals are related to each other. The control I will feel from being able to accomplish the first one will help me with the second one, and vica versa. It is very interesting when the mind lets go of frustrations and limiting-believes and instead starts to focus in on ones ambitions and finding joy in having such ambitions. The mind expandes into future possibilites, and how to manifest those possibilites, instead of shrinking down around limiting-believes. With skydiving now I'm mostly thinking about how afraid I am of it, but probably soon I will start to dream more about how fun and rewarding it would likely be.

[Thittato]

3 rounds of Wim Hof breathing and cold shower today as well. Ultra-super-nice :-)

[Thittato]

Two week skydiving-course booked that includes 20 jumps finally booked! :-D

So today I did 2 more sessions of 3 rounds of Wim Hof breathing each. So in total 3 of these sessions today. I needed it to ground me, because finally I booked the skydiving course! Hurra! It is starting already 23rd of May, so that is going to be very soon. It turned out they could finally confirm that these courses would go as planned due to society going in the right direction regarding this gradual opening up of society again in this pandemic. I also had some more vacation days that I could take out, and I only needed to take out 5 days in total to free up this whole 2 week period.

So much pre-processing leading up to this hahahaha..... ;-D

Such a relief finally having landed on it.

My only job now is to trust the process.

And that is broadly speaking my only job here in life.

This is the next step regarding the exposure therapy that I have been getting out of ice-bathing - like exposing oneself to discomfort and learning to relax in it. Now I'm going to do something even scarier and learn how to relax in the situation of throwing myself out of an airplane far above the ground. I trust that the same type of benefits that I have received from learning to relax in cold water is something that I will also receive from this process.

I was also in the skatepark again rollerblading, and that, once again, as usual, was just totally awesome. Seems like that is also something that very much contributes to fear and anxiety leaving my system. There is an embodiment that comes with it. Learning to inhabit my body and do acrobatic stuff with it. One has to release ones neurotic energies to experience that type of flow. Or the neurotic energies are exposed and purged in that process.

Holy crap what a neurotic and sensitive dude I've been hahaha. But a lot of it has certainly been released in this good process I've been in these last years. As I've said before, I think I'm finally starting to experience life as how a normal, integrated, and relaxed person is supposed to experience it (not that there are necessarily a lot of those in todays society).

[Thittato]

Yesterday: 45 min meditation and cold shower.

Today: 3 rounds of Wim Hof breathing and cold shower.

[Thittato]

3 rounds of Wim Hof breathing, 20 min of meditation, and cold shower, today.

[Thittato]

45 min meditation today. Tired lately. Meditation gives me some more energy and clearing out all that has been going on lately. Maybe it was a very demanding process leading up to deciding to go for this skydiving course. It has been pretty all-consuming for a couple of months now. And now that the decision has been made I'm very tired. Maybe I was over-mobilizing for a long time to process all this, and now I can finally rest. Or something like that. Anyways - so good to just sit in silence today. Totally needed.

[Thittato]

3 rounds of Wim Hof breathing today, and then a cold shower. So nice. Feeling more energy today, even though I worked night-shift this night and only slept for 3 hours. Seems like the skydiving processing is lighter today. Yesterday I was like: "What the fuck have I gotten myself into?" Seems like I'm getting more realistic about the whole thing. The enormous fascination that I've had with it and all the amazing people who are into it has to be tempered with the very real sense of fear I will most likely feel, and already feel a lot of just by thinking about it. It has been an emotional rollercoaster already, and it will most likely continue to be so. It is not like this is going to be a purely awesome thing. It is more like a training for personal development that will be very demanding sometimes, but other times also very rewarding. It is not the single feeling of skydiving I'm seeking. I'm seeking the total end result of how I will feel and how my perspectives will have grown after those 2 weeks of doing 20 jumps are finished. There will probably be a lot of resistance before the sense of flow will arrive. So this is not really for fun. It is for growth.