i’m trying to get into the habit of meditating every day and then journaling. we read something taoist first (right now we’re working through a book of stories by lieh-tzu, translated by eva wong), meditate, then come here to journal. i think it’s working well but with any kind of daily thing, we have to know it may not stick. it’s okay if it doesn’t stick. i really do miss journaling. i miss keeping a record, finding myself, feeling that the past did not slip into nothingness.
we haven’t actually meditated on the text we read – it still just somehow seems like a good rhythm, to read first. we try just counting our breath, focusing on our breath, and letting the surface thoughts rise and fall. ideally i guess they wouldn’t rise, but come on. our brain goes a million miles a minute. it should still count if i can’t get to zero (miles a minute). conveniently, when we breathe slowly and count, a minute almost exactly adds up to 10 breaths. so we can keep track of our time without glancing at the clock. today we did 10 minutes, then tried to let feelings and thoughts from insiders come up. it’s crazy how useful checking inside can be, and how easy it is to just go along forgetting to do that.
today is sunny, and our mood is pretty good. scheduling has actually helped so much. we’re always wary of getting too organized, because it has tended not to be sustainable. but we’ve been doing a thing where we block out what we want to do for the next few hours, in order, and then use a time-stamp macro to record how much we spent on each thing. and it really seems to make it possible to get a lot more done. we’re trying to balance each day out between different areas of life that we need to maintain… it’s kind of silly, but susan came up with were these categories: creativity, cleaning, administration, self-care/self-improvement, and fun. so if we can keep a balance right now between all those areas, more or less, our days go much more smoothly. getting things done is soooooooo much less depressing than not getting them don…[read more]
