Meditation Mondays

Apparently this is evolving into a biweekly feature, whether I want it to or not!

First, some stats for the past couple of weeks. Things are definitely more consistent than the last time I took stock of my daily practice.  I’ve only missed two days in the last ten, and the week of 10/6 had over 60 minutes of time logged, while this past week was a whopping 80 minutes. October is shaping up quite nicely overall.

Looking at the long term, Fridays are still the day that I have the most trouble being consistent. The percentage of days where I have at least one session is now down to 46%, but hopefully that will improve with time. The total time spent in meditation is 12 hours, 21 minutes, with an average session time of 9.8 minutes.

Goals for the next time I post include achieving another 10 days in a row, raising my average session time to a full 10 minutes, and get my percentage of days closer to 50%.

Now that the quantitative stuff is out of the way, from a qualitative perspective the mind monkeys have been rough this past fortnight. I made at least three journal entries where I mentioned them.  The other prominent feature was meditating on Cerridwen and the cauldron, which makes perfect sense considering that I’ll be completing the Cauldron Born ritual in a few weeks time. And of course, in the interest of full disclosure, there were the two or three times that I completely dozed off while “meditating.” Sometimes these gave the gift of lucid dreams, sometimes not, but the fact that I made the time to sit and try meditating is more important to me at this point than worrying about keeping my eyes open!

I’ve been doing a decent job of taking thoughts and fragments of meditation (or dreams that I’ve remembered while meditating) and putting them to work in everyday life.  Probably the best example of this was a dream where I was going to play at a coronation and walking to the cathedral my violin case opened up and my favorite bow flew out into the middle of the street where it was promptly run over by a garbage truck. (Symbolism much?)  I’ve been trying to make the switch from classical violin to Irish fiddle, and it’s been going reasonably well, but one of the things that has been challenging is the more accented, rhythmic bowing patterns.  So, I took a cue from the dream and switched bows–from my lighter octagonal (which is wonderful for early period Baroque and such) to the heavier, louder semi-octagonal.  I’ve been very pleased with the quality change, and even more likely to practice because of it.

Yes, Virginia, meditation can improve your life in tangible ways. Just make sure you don’t get hit by the metaphorical garbage truck in the process.