This is the main reason I’ve been shaky in recording the last few days, and why my word count has jumped from a few 100 words to several thousands (13,000 per day the last few days). I ended up telling myself I wasn’t going to try it this year, and ended up starting on the 25th, finishing in a week.

My book was specifically on meditation and anxiety relief techniques - it has been something I’ve been working on, but I wanted to dedicate it to my mother, and other friends who have been having problems in this area.

I wanted the book to be simple and practical without any of the extreme esoteric nature that most meditation books have. The emphasis is on practicality.

It also gave me a place to really delve into techniques that I had read once and forgotten - I have gigs of videos and books, but many of the techniques were hidden in hours upon hours of recordings or pages. So it was a place to remind myself, and also a place to compile all the most effective ones.

It also gave me time to figure out a good implementation plan. I currently do fixed meditation, but I want to rotate the types of mental exercises in this established super habit in order to have a well equipped arsenal of techniques.

I also want to hone a progression for dynamic meditation - I tried this a long time ago to great success, but dropped it from my program because it was just too exhausting to do for the entire day.

In my book I describe a progression based on time - 20 minutes (in Tiny Habit form!) of just noting. And then either increasing times while doing techniques OR increasing time while countering one negative mental habit (like bodily stress) until it slowly encompasses the whole day.

This is exciting stuff - and I will continue to have to experiment with these to see which one works best. It is exciting because it is a practical progression to really changing the self, and in my mind, achieving something lasting.

Anyway despite the exhaustion and the missing recording, it was a fantastic experience, and I’m glad I did it.

Day 162 Record Keeping SRHI = 84
Day 130 Fixed Meditation SRHI = 82
Day 76 Bodyweight Exercise SRHI= 79 (3 bridges, 1 min wall plank)
Day 3 Writing = 21
Day 176 Eating SRHI = 62
Good sleep, bleary wakeup. Depression, irritation and loopiness yesterday. Perhaps went too low in the carbs - also had very intense burpee workout yesterday.

Scaling Fixed Meditation
I’m noticing quite a bit of improvement in my bodyweight training - I’m pushing, and I’m able to improve daily. I like that feeling, and I want that to occur in all the habits that aren’t static. Record keeping and eating are pretty static, as flossing will be when I get around to it.

But writing is scaleable - and I already have a plan for that - I want to get faster, I want to have more of a minimum daily amount, like in my burpee habit, and I want to get it so it’s eventually a polished, publishable article that I write per day.

But meditation hasn’t been like that. What I’m currently doing is the same thing I outlined in my initial meditation protocol (Described a bit HERE and HERE).

To recap, I do an extension of Vipassana. In Vipassana you observe emotion. By observing the emotion and describing it in your head, you refuse to give it fuel, and it eventually fades. In this extension you observe the emotion, imagine it leaving your body, transform it into positivity, and reintroduce it back into the body. I realize this sounds very woo-woo but it works incredibly well, and has completely changed how I deal with bad moods. Suddenly, bad moods and depression are things I have a choice about - If I stay in a bad mood, it’s my own fault.

But how can I scale meditation? Well for one, I can time it. It has naturally gotten quicker to do, but ideally I want it to be instantaneous - or as close to that as possible. I can also add different types of meditation. For example, I should be able to relax myself totally at will. And eventually I want to be able to do very advanced practices like Tummo - fire meditation.

So for now, I think it would be profitable to make a progression, just like bodyweight exercises, that I can follow to stay out of meditation plateaus.

I Just Won National Novel Writing Month!!

Day 162 & Scaling Fixed Meditation