NaBloPoMo 2023 Day 1: Pause

Happy November! NaBloPoMo, or National Blog Posting Month, is a month-long writing exercise that occurs each November. The concept is as simple as this: bloggers post something every day. I've had severe writer's block/ inertia with blogging lately. I frequently write blog posts in my head but never get around to typing them out. On a whim, I've decided to blog every day this month. Posts may be long or short. They may be centered around food on some days, but are more likely to be pointless, rambling musings. Consider yourself warned. 

And because there are no NaBloPoMo police, I'll take days off blogging if I have to, for instance, if our sweet Dunkie's condition worsens. It is hard to tell if we have days or weeks or months left with him. We had a hospice vet come by to visit him last week, but Dunkie is still continuing to do well and is napping and snoring softly near me as I write this! 

In my first post of 2023, I jotted down a few goals for the year, and a thematic word of the year- "Pause". The word aligned well with one of my goals, which was to start meditating regularly. 

As of today, we have only 61 days left in 2023. How did I do with these goals of pausing and meditating? Well, meditation and mindfulness are the work of a lifetime and not a goal to be reasonably achieved in a year, not by mere mortals anyway. I don't always PAUSE but I sometimes do. I don't meditate everyday but I sometimes do. It has been a gratifying journey so far in that I have learned so much in a few months- I am starting to understand and appreciate the concepts. Internalizing them and living them will be the journey of the rest of my life.

On the subject of meditation/mindfulness, there are an overwhelming number of books, blogs, podcasts, programs, retreats, guides, leaders, gurus, apps out there, and they more or less converge on similar concepts. It is really a matter of who you happen to come across and who resonates with you. These are ancient concepts that are being packaged and repackaged in different ways, and increasingly being studied and evaluated in different settings. 

I picked up this book from the library a few months ago: Waking Up by Sam Harris. The reason it appealed to me was the subtitle- A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion. Many people conflate being spiritual with being religious and I quite enjoyed this frankly atheistic point of view. And as with most books in this genre, there were chapters that appealed to me and chapters that did not. Here are some quotes I jotted down, to give you a flavor of the book:

• Our minds are all we have. They are all we have ever had and all we can offer others.
• How we pay attention to the present moment largely determines the character of our experience and therefore the quality of our lives.
• We seem to spend most of our life in a neurotic trance as we shop, gossip, argue, and ruminate our way to the grave. But an alternative exists.
• It is always "now".
• Learning to meditate is like acquiring any other skill. With practice, the difference between it and ordinary thinking will become increasingly clear.
• As a matter of your experience, you are not a body of atoms, molecules, and cells- you are consciousness and its ever-changing contents.
• The goal of meditation is to uncover a form of well-being that is inherent to the nature of our minds.
• A middle path exists between making religion out of spiritual life and having no spiritual life at all.

I ended up downloading the Waking Up app- one of the very few apps that I've ever purchased in my life. (There are many good, free meditation apps out there too.) It has been very useful for me. I worked my way through the introductory course, and now try (ahem) to do the daily meditations. I really enjoy listening to the theory sections with short and long audio lectures. 

(It is very characteristic of me that I lean towards learning concepts rather than practicing them. Unfortunately meditation is not a thinking activity but a doing one, or rather a not-doing one, so this is a very uphill battle for me.)

The book I picked up next was Meditation for Fidgety Skeptics by Dan Harris. I liked this one less than that first book, but still took away a few things, like these-

• The word “meditation” is a bit like the word “sports”; there are hundreds of varieties.
• You are breaking a lifetime’s habit of walking around in a fog of rumination and projection, and you are actually focusing on what’s happening right now.
• Getting lost and starting over is not failing at meditation, it is succeeding.
• Thinking is a wonderful servant but a terrible master.
• The internal narrator/ego/monkey mind is insatiable and dissatisfied. How many desserts, movies, and vacations have you enjoyed and are you done yet?

More on this subject tomorrow, including my thoughts on the best book I've read all year. Do you meditate or, um,  think about meditating? How is that going for you?