Meditation and mindfulness

I’m smiling at myself as I write this.

Blogging creates a record of the randomness of your thoughts and how pieces of your life evolve over time as you feel compelled to write about them.

Meditation and mindfulness as its aftereffect is one of those for me.

I started meditating consistently about a year ago, using Headspace as a daily ritual to start my day. In my writing chair with samthewondercat on my lap at home, in quiet spots when I travel.

I have a natural propensity for falling into meditative spaces with a technique developed years ago when treatment for an illness required that I find a deep concentrative and safe spot that I could remove myself to and encapsulate my thoughts completely extant from the reality of the situation.

Meditation, especially partially guided meditation that I practice, was a jumping off point from that with a series of tools and processes that you consciously practice. And when successful, a resultant overall poise that happens not only as you learn to navigate internal space but also as you move these learned notations into daily life.

To be clear, meditation to me is the process of sitting in silence, mindfulness the place I find when I’m successful in allowing myself to see the impact of the process on my overall state of well-being for myself, my habits and at certain times interactions with others.

My drive for wanting, even needing this, is connected to a confluence of things in my real life.

Aging and my sense of relevance towards my own profession and productivity. The ongoing need for constant learning and balancing pattern recognition of my own experiences with the incessant shifting of norms in technology and culture. The reality that poise and calm, not stress and movement engender knowledge and surface inspiration.

And that most simple and most powerful fact of all—that the littlest things create the largest changes over time.

Not suddenly but as tools and approaches. As the way, we reach backwards into comfort zones being at peace with ourselves to tackle stuff we aren’t familiar with. In our current world, where everything is crazily shifting, the skills of noting in the process of observing the ease or difficulty of becoming mindful during meditation becomes increasing more relevant and more useful to me.

To be clear.

This is not about religion. Or spiritualness for me in the slightest bit.

It is about the state of mindfulness that I can call on. That I am slowly learning to harness a little bit each and every day.

In physical moments when surfacing calm triggers a more flexible space. As recently at the top of an impossibly steep ski slope where I shouldn’t have been but was able to conjure up a poise that was neither bravado or stress, just calmness to move on forward. Or approaching a room full of people where I will be front and center. Or when faced with leading a decision-making process where there are no good decisions.

But more important to me, in those miniscule but telling personal steps I take, as when I examine the why of stuff that stops concentration and hinders productivity of things I really want to do, but fall into wasteful patterns.

Of addressing with a nuanced and logical light the laziness of making excuses, the lostness that I feel sometimes when the details of some new technical process mushrooms to obviate the importance of the greater task that comes from tackling the impossible nits of it all.

I find that when I lay out the tools on the table they seem quite facile and small.

The ability to scan my body from head to toe with x-ray precision to find the outline and shape of my own body as a reflection of my personal self. The core meditative action to note things within the process of navigating space, not judging diversion or wandering as bad, simply being aware of it.

And most important to me, being able to use this comparison of personal notations in different states as a way to acknowledge and motivate. For example, when I obfuscate my focus when something is hard to write or encapsulate, I’ve started to scan myself and note how I feel when I break thing down and push forward against when I lazily let it slide.

Small things learned through hours of meditation that are in effect super powers that I can call upon.

What continually amazes me is that mindfulness, in my way of harnessing it, is not about lack of self, it is about harnessing my self. Using tools learned navigating internal space applied to thoughts and decision making in real life that we are constantly called on to make as we grow and change.

Who would have thought I’d be writing this? Or more important benefitting from this in such formative ways.

Me the hyper kid and aggressive and anxious young adult back then to—well me today—still the same in many ways but channeling something to be more productive and self-observant and self-controlled without rigidity to process or preconceived self-image.

And mostly, as we all age, to embrace time as both fleeting and if we wish—as I do—to make it bend to our advantage.

Looking forward and channeling where we came from as energy motivating us to feel excited with the yet unknown.

If you’ve never given this much thought, never spent the time to think about the tools to navigate inner space as ways to make focused life more productive, I suggest giving it a shot.

Works for me.

And the more I work at it the more it does.