Meditation Journal

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I've been meditating with lots of different techniques fairly inconsistently for years. I've had some brief periods where I was able to stick to a twice daily meditation practice from aypsite, but ultimately the routine always fell apart as I got caught up in more "material" stage orange type things, or I would always end up chasing states induced by weed and psychedelics.

I believe that I have gotten lots of benefits from weed and psychedelics, however I feel like I'm currently at an inflection point where they are starting to become a distraction and the benefits are seeming more and more illusory and are leading me into more self deception. I can tell that I feel reliant upon them to make progress, and this whole paradigm is causing me lots of suffering through craving the high state and feeling dissatisfied with regular sober existence + feeling like I'm not good enough to do almost anything, not just spirituality, to my full potential without the use of an external substance. 

I started learning the SeeHearFeel method from Shinzen Young the other day and have been trying it out a bit and I really like it- more than I liked the deep meditation and spinal breathing pranayama that I was doing from aypsite, so I'm feeling pretty good about getting into a regular habit with this, and ultimately letting go of the need for external substances and just finding deep satisfaction with regular sober existence.

 

The current goal I want to start with just to keep things manageable and not too far in the future is 90 hours in 90 days.

I did 30 minutes yesterday and an hour and a half today, so I'll start my tracking here on day 2:

 

Day 2 of 90

Total meditation time: 2 hours

 

 

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Day 3 of 90

Total meditation time: 3 hours

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Day 4 of 90

Total meditation time: 4 hours

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Day 6 of 90

Total meditation time: 5 hours

Had a crazy busy day yesterday and missed my hour and then another pretty busy day today but I managed to get my one hour in at least. I should finally have a nice chill day tomorrow so I should easily be able to get 2 hours in and get myself back on track.

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Day 7 of 90

Total meditation time: 7 hours

Managed to get 2 hours in today.

I struggled a lot through my first meditation this morning. I was feeling pretty shitty physically and I reeeeally had to pee halfway through, but I figured that created a good opportunity to be mindful of the discomfort that comes with all that, but to be honest, I don't think it worked well and if anything it just made my meditation way worse. As someone who's not an expert, I feel like there's a only certain level of discomfort that can be explored mindfully before it just becomes too much of a distraction that prevents me from going deeper. Maybe I'll change my mind on that later but that's how this morning felt.

My second meditation actually went extremely well. The full hour was pretty tough, but I managed to start creating a deeper separation between actuality and imagination. I've been doing the SeeHearFeel technique, and in this meditation it started becoming very clear that every time I "feel" something, only about 40% of my consciousness (as a really rough estimate) goes towards feeling, and the remaining 60% is still "seeing" things.

For example, if I feel my breathing, yeah I'm feeling those sensations, but so much of my mind is still visualizing a body breathing, but at a much more subtle level. Or if I feel my feet touching each other when I'm sitting cross legged, I still think a majority of my awareness is taken up by my mind visualizing what my legs look like and the seated position of my body vs actually just feeling the tingly sensation of my feet or legs.

It seems like it will take a lot of practice to untangle this, but I can picture massive benefits from doing so. This meditation alone started triggering psychedelic memories of what it's like to feel without the additional context of the mind visualizing a body or adding any other thoughts on top of the actual experience. Without all the additional context, the present moment starts getting very alien and "flexible" in the sense that it is able to change in weird ways due to not being grounded in so much context. Cool stuff.

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Day 11 of 90

Total meditation time: 9.5 hours

The past week has been stupidly busy. Funny enough, my life seems like it's the busiest its been in a while since I started this 90 day plan. It seems like almost everyday I'm getting slammed with back to back things after work so it's been hard to fit the time in, but I'm doing what I can.

I had a couples therapy appointment with my fiance after work today to try and work through some issues we've had for a while so we can go into our marriage with all that sorted out- particularly some of my past issues with weed and psychedelics that have caused us some serious problems.

In this appointment, I realized that my orientation in the spiritual journey has gotten a little fucked up. Turning inwards has become some sort of escape, whether I'm high or just meditating. Meditation should involve directly facing reality and accepting it, but it seems like my approach has sneakily twisted things into me trying to basically meditate my way out of this world. I've always been aware of this to a degree and tried to take it into account and course correct, but something about the realizations in this therapy session hit REALLY deep (it basically felt psychedelic) and made me realize I have much more work to do in figuring this stuff out. I still have so much to process but I'm so exhausted from this past week that I feel incapable of doing so right now. Hopefully I'll have more time over the next few days to understand everything more.

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Day 16 of 90

Total meditation time: 15 hours

I'm pretty much caught up on my meditation time now. It's only 1pm right now, so I still have time to get my hour in today.

These days I'm noticing how effective it is combining different techniques. I was feeling really burnt out from going hard with SeeHearFeel for an hour a day and it just felt wrong that meditation was making me feel worse in a burning out kind of way. I know it can sometimes trigger difficult emotions to start coming up throughout the day and other ego backlash things in that sense, but when it comes to just leaving me feeling exhausted it feels different. I've been burnt out many times before and it's always the same kind of thing where I simply need to chill more. To counteract this, I've been mixing in lots of mantra meditation (specifically the AYP deep meditation) while laying flat on my back, and it's been helping a lot.

 

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Day 17 of 90

Total meditation time: 16 hours

Today has been a really good day. Both today and yesterday I have felt very "on track" in life. I feel like I'm often finding myself in a state of consciousness where I just "get it", and this feels really good. I feel like I'm doing well. I feel like there is lots of progress to be made still, but in a fun way, like levelling up a character in a game. I'm getting random little glimpses of a feeling of love/bliss. Been experiencing some little synchronicities.

I hope to experience more of all of these good things, but I'm also feeling very content with this moment, and I'm cautious of letting my mind get too attached to these future ideas because I don't want to let all my attention get turned away from how amazing this present moment already feels.

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Day 30 of 90

Total meditation time: 20 hours

Went on vacation to Italy for just over a week and didn't get much meditation in there at all, but I'm okay with that. I do want to continue this journal though and get back on track with things.

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Had a realization today which I've also had a few times before- it's basically this idea that on some level I have some kind of boundaries or resistance to extreme levels of positivity/abundance. Like if there was a possibility for things to get really really really good all of a sudden, I tell myself that of course I would gladly take that, but there have been times where it feels like all my dreams are about to come true, and a part of me freaks out and resists.

I want to spend more time visualizing exactly what it would feel like if things got that good, and how it would feel to completely allow that to happen.

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Day 41 of 90

Total meditation time: 22 hours

I haven't been keeping up with my hour a day goal at all lately. Going to Italy really threw all of my routines off, but I'm not too worried about it. I think trying to come back to this journal more often is important though, so I will try and update it a more regularly. 

Similar to day 17 when I was feeling great and finding myself in that flow state of consciousness where I just "get it" and things make sense, I've found myself slipping in and out of that same state of consciousness over the past hour or so which feels really good. I'm going to bed soon, but I'm going to try and not lose focus, and maintain this state of consciousness until I fall asleep.

When I'm really in it, it feels so free. It feels like I'm reconnecting/remembering what my state of consciousness was like when I would have fun as a kid- just a very free flowing, fully immersed feeling of "flow" where I'm so involved in what I'm doing and all the additional mental baggage that accompanies my more regular state of consciousness, even at very subtle levels, is all gone. That mental baggage disappears because I know that I'm the one keeping all those thought structures in place, which means that if I want, I can choose to let them all go.

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Day 48 of 90

Total meditation time: 23 hours

Still struggling to maintain my hour a day, this time it's because my fiancee and I got a dog on Monday. I've never owned a dog before and it is definitely a big responsibility. I'm seeing that while it's easy for me to get into those nice happy flow states like mentioned above when my external environment is good, I still struggle a lot when I have to deal with external stressors.

All the meditation and spirituality work I've done over the past 8 or 9 years has definitely helped me deal with these kinds of problems better than I could have before, but I still think it could all be handled waaay better. I've been trying to not be too hard on myself to keep up with a really strict meditation routine because I've been very strict with myself before and it always ends in some kind of burnout, but the at the same time, discipline clearly has value. I will need to get a better understanding of how to balance this.

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Just some additional kind of unrelated thoughts:

I saw some people talking about Kanye on the forum and I saw the interview of him with Tucker Carlson. Then I started looking at the comments and seeing how invested people were in all of this and how completely polarized peoples opinions can be on stuff like this, and I just want to write this here to keep reminding myself to stay completely away from all that type of shit unless its being consumed in a super light hearted way or if I'm specifically analyzing those types of situations for a specific purpose. 

While my meditation habit has lots of room to improve, I think all the work I've done so far in my life, including all the spiritual "theory" I've consumed over the years, has made me soooo much better at not getting too caught up in distractions like these. I can't think of a better term for it than distraction. If my reality and my mind are infinite, and I can choose to focus on anything, why would I waste my time on things like that?

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Day 55 of 90

Total meditation time: 26 hours

Two key things happened this week:

I spent a couple hours working through this emotional scale: https://www.actualityofbeing.com/the-emotional-scale which resulted in a little breakthrough when I got to the boredom part. I realized that boredom is something I have a deep aversion to, which is obvious for everyone basically, but what was interesting was when I tried to figure out what the actual feeling of boredom is. Examining it a bit deeper, boredom seems to be a physical sensation, and I noticed that I experience it most while socializing. I've always considered myself an introvert, but it seems to be that I like being by myself because it allows me to sooth the pain of boredom most easily. The problem with constantly soothing the pain of boredom is that it doesn't seem to allow you to find out what you truly want to do. If you sit down with the goal of letting yourself be bored for 30 minutes, by the end of those 30 minutes, you will probably have some kind of conscious desire of where you want to channel your energy rather than just channeling it into scrolling on your phone or something because its the most efficient way to sooth that pain of boredom immediately. 

I also had a mini awakening while completely sober from just watching this video: 

It wasn't a very deep or stable awakening, but it still was the closest I've ever felt to being on a psychedelic while being completely sober. I haven't done psychedelics in years, but this video gave me such a clear reminder of what it's like when everything is exposed to be just one substance and that that substance is you. This was super exciting to feel again and even more exciting to feel without needing any drugs.