2012

The beginning of 2012 comes with a lot of self-imposed changes for me.  The word "resolutions" comes to mind, but doesn't quite fit somehow.

I must note the slow start to my formal and informal mindfulness practice, which was to begin in earnest December 27.  I have not done the body scan meditation every day.  And I have not made a real big effort to be mindful in my daily life.  And I have not even written in this blog as much as I want to.

To the extent I have disappointed myself by not starting strong on December 27 as promised, judging myself for missing that *date* cutoff accomplishes little and does not advance mindfulness.  There is an odd balance between nonjudgment/nonstriving, an attitude that is lauded in mindfulness teachings, and making effort for personal growth.  And--as my sister pointed out to me in explaining that this blog is itself not particularly consistent with her mindfulness path--there is more than a little tension in the notion of practicing mindfulness and writing about practicing mindfulness.  This merits a longer discussion in a separate post.

Here's to accepting 2011 for what it was, and nonstriving for a mindful 2012.

Body Scan 5 - 12/31/11

Time of day: 9:15 PM EST


Location: carpeted floor of my room

Distractions: cats, being cold despite wearing snuggie and space heater nearby, boyfriend calling me (I answered and then resumed meditating after)

Words on tape that caught my attention: "dissolve."  This is what Kabat-Zinn uses to transition from one body part to the next.  "Just let your toes dissolve," he says.  I'm actually not terribly keen on this imagery.

Wandering thoughts: I had thoughts about things I need to do, anxiety about work, thoughts about what I plan to wear tonight to the tail end of a New Year's party, thoughts about cleaning my house.  I have been having some vertigo/headaches lately, and some of my wandering thoughts were bizarre.

Sensations experienced: More this time in general.  Felt uterus crampy while on pelvis region.  At the end when he tells you to wiggle your fingers and toes I felt a very interesting sensation in my right hand fingers.

Comments: I didn't fall asleep but I didn't feel entirely awake for this one either.  I felt sort of in a dreamlike waking state off and on.

Body Scan 4 - 12/28/11

Time of day: 11:00 PM EST

Location: carpeted floor of boyfriend's bedroom

Distractions: none really

Words on tape that caught my attention: none, because I fell asleep too fast

Wandering thoughts: thoughts did not have time to wander

Sensations experienced: practically nothing

Comments: I fell asleep pretty much instantly after lying down to this.  I had exercised for the first time in a long time previously.  So, note to self, end of night probably isn't going to work as a time of day for this.

Body Scan 3 - 12/27/11

Time of day: 5:45 PM EST

Location: carpeted floor of my bedroom

Distractions: cats; cats playing with my feet; cats eating my pillow; cold temperature; feeling like I needed to shower very badly; knowing I had other activities on the agenda tonight; feeling like I'd left work too early

Words on tape that caught my attention: stillness, peace

Wandering thoughts: all over the place - blogging and having this little template for my body scan recaps,  what I needed to do tonight, my cats and how they were reacting to this, how cool the speakers my boyfriend got me are to listen to the meditation on

Sensations experienced: tingling in fingers, some neck stiffness

Comments: I consider this a pretty gargantuan failure.  I wasn't concentrating hardly at all.  I was bored, I felt that the tape was too long.  I was anticipating things he'd say, this being my 3rd time listening to this.  I even got up a few minutes before the end!  That said, I found a couple of good moments.  This was probably not a good time of day to do it - also, I probably should have just showered first, since I was not able to successfully distract myself from my perceived need to shower.  I also plan to make sure I am covered with a blanket or am otherwise not fixating on being cold next time.

Facebook update

I don't really miss facebook so far.  Every time my fingers go to type in "facebook.com" my brain remembers that I'm no longer on that site, and I stop and do something else (usually "chess.com" or "slate.com").

But what is interesting about this is the number of times during an average workday that my fingers tried to type "facebook" into my browser.  It was actually quite frequent, whenever I had a lapse in concentration - "facebook.com" was virtually automatic.  And although I am a fan of using the internet to bridge the gap when concentration fails, what was I really gaining from heading straight to facebook, every time?

Have I missed social invitations, etc.?  Not sure, but if so, I probably couldn't have gone anyway.  I don't feel left out yet.  The truth is that most of what I have missed is stuff I don't need or want to know.

The one downside so far is that of the handful of friends have noticed (I think four or five max, including my mother) - they say "either you left facebook or you defriended me."  I hope no one thinks I defriended them and hasn't spoken up!

So, five days in, I am happy I left facebook.  It was kind of a whim to quit in shock over timeline, but I think I would have come to it anyway as part of clearing the way for more mindfulness.

Body scan 2 - 12/25/11 - recap

Time of day: Approximately 10:30 AM EST

Location: boyfriend's brother's house, rug on hardwood floor

Distractions: boyfriend in bed in same room, going to pee, then going back to bed; discomfort from lying on the hard floor; cold temperature

Words on tape that caught my attention: "oxygenated blood"

Wandering thoughts: can't remember any specifically

Comments: I had a very different experience on my second time through the body scan - namely, the base of my spine grinding into the floor for 42 minutes.  I was on a rug, but I was still quite uncomfortable the entire time, a very different problem than I had had on my first go-round.  I went back and read the book after this experience.  Kabat-Zinn acknowledges this problem, and pretty much tells you to just follow the meditation.  Not terribly helpful.  He does suggest "minor shifts in your position," so maybe I won't torture myself on an uncomfortable surface next time.

First try at "body scan meditation"

Today I tried out the "body scan" meditation.  Kabat-Zinn recommends that the first two weeks of formal practice should include a forty-five minute "body scan" meditation every day.  Although the body scan is not the very first technique Kabat-Zinn describes (he begins with following the breath and a short "sitting meditation"), it is the first real staple of the 8-week program that he introduces.

The body-scan meditation is described in Chapter 5 of "Full Catastrophe Living":

When we put energy into actually experiencing our body and we refuse to get caught up in the overlay of judgmental thinking about it, our whole view of it and of ourself can change dramatically.  To begin with, what it does is remarkable!  It can walk and talk and sit up and reach for things; it can judge distance and digest food and know things through touch. Usually we take these abilities completely for granted and don't appreciate what our bodies can actually do until we are injured or sick.  Then we realize how nice it was when we could do the things we can't do anymore.  So before we convince ourselves that our bodies are too this or too that, shouldn't we get more in touch with how wonderful it is to have a body in the first place, no matter what it looks or feels like?  The way to do this is to tune in to your body and be mindful of it without judging it...

One very powerful technique we use to reestablish contact with the body is known as body scanning.  Because of the thorough and minute focus on the body in body scanning, it is an effective technique for developing both concentration and flexibility of attention simultaneously.  It involves lying on your back and moving through your mind through the different regions of your body.

... By the time we have completed the body scan, it can feel as if the entire body has dropped away or has become transparent, as if its substance were in some way erased.  It can feel as if there is nothing but breath flowing freely across all the boundaries of the body.

(FCL Ch. 5.)  The idea of "body scanning" for forty-five minutes every day sounded like a major challenge to me.  In my limited experiences with meditation (and yoga too), I have never really gotten much out of the mini-"body scans" the meditation leaders do.  In fact I usually find this part especially uncomfortable, as I don't really want to think about body parts as a group activity.  I also have to resist the urge to be a middle-schooler when the leader talks about the butt area, and I always wonder what word they'll use for it.

Augmenting my anxiety about the body scan tape was the book's anecdote of a woman in the clinic for whom the body scan meditation allowed her to recover repressed traumatic memories of her father sexually molesting her after she suddenly became mindful of the word "genitals" on the tape.  The timing of my reading this section was interesting, as I had just gotten done with a book called "Brain Bugs" that talks about how rare and unlikely it is for people to actually have such repressed memories.  I wasn't terribly fond of this anecdote's inclusion in the book, although I enjoyed many of the others.  But putting that whole thing aside, this passage caused me to be anxious about the idea of the tape saying "genitals" and wonder really, what is this guy going to be saying on the tape?

Also, one of the purposes of this passage was to illustrate that the woman had not even heard the word "genitals" on the tapes until several weeks of having done the body-scan meditation.  What words would my consciousness decline to hear for awhile?  (After that passage in the book, you could bet that it wouldn't be "genitals.")

So, I listened to the body-scan recording for the first time today.  I had wanted to try at least some of the tapes before the experiment officially started, to at least know a bit of what I was getting into.  Interestingly, I haven't been very inspired to do this so far.  For some reason I was this afternoon, even though many things made my circumstances less than optimal.  I am in a new location - my boyfriend's brother & sister-in-law's house in Memphis.  And my timing was interesting - when everyone except me decided to go out for a run, after taking an excessive two-hour nap in the middle of the afternoon.

Of course, my boyfriend's run was only about 15 minutes long so I got interrupted midway through ("are you asleep AGAIN!?") but otherwise I think it was a good first effort.  (Note: post about the tension between mindfulness and evaluation/analysis of mindfulness is forthcoming.)

The meditation is to be done lying down, ideally on a floor.  I plan to do this on my carpeted floor at home, but I just used the bed this time.

At the time I began the body-scan meditation I felt lazy and antisocial and was probably in an unconscious state of judging my body for its lack of energy, and of judging my mind for being a bookworm and always wanting to read.  The recording effectively emphasizes acceptance, and I felt much more positive at the end.

I did feel some anticipatory anxiety about the whole "genitals" thing, but for anyone curious, it turned out to be passing and unobtrusive - just a quick mention as part of the general pelvis area.  And actually, I felt that the recording went too fast at times.  It asks you to pay attention to certain regions of the body and any sensations there, but I rarely felt anything anywhere.  I looked for pain, stiffness, tension, anything - but even in my recently-injured neck, I found little.  Kabat-Zinn recognizes this among certain other "initial problems," but resolves it with acceptance of it:

When some people practice the body scan, they sometimes have a hard time feeling their toes at first or other parts of their body...[i]f, for instance, you tune in to your toes and you don't feel anything, then "not feeling anything" is your experience of your toes at that particular time.  That is neither bad nor good, it's simply your experience in that moment.  So we note it and accept it and move on.  It is not necessary to wiggle your toes to try to stir up sensations in that region so that you can feel them, although that is okay, too, at the beginning.

The tape makes this point early on - that if you don't feel anything, just note that - so that is generally the way I approached things.  I remember noticing some tension in the forehead while I was concentrating on that area, and I was just starting to notice some sensation in the left toes when the tape moved on from that area.  Nothing much else.

I also was pleased that I did not have too much trouble concentrating.  This was probably because it was my first time trying this out.  My thoughts did not wander too much, although there was a little difficulty initially settling down--I cast off my glasses and fidgeted several times in the first minutes of the tape--and I did have some anxiety when interrupted.  Also, Kabat-Zinn's voice isn't the epitome of uber-meditative (my boyfriend, for example, sounds pretty uber-meditative when he leads meditations).  But although it took a little getting used to, I liked that - he sounded human.

OK, I just got told to put my computer away and have dinner.  Until next body scan...

Put this on my timeline, facebook

I deactivated my facebook account last night.  This entry is going to probably me more soapbox-y than mindful, but I think it's important.

I didn't plan to quit facebook for this blog, but it actually works nicely with the theme of mindfulness.  Facebook has been a time drain that brings out the worst in me.  While I enjoy hearing of others' happy life events, it really does breed a kind of unbecoming discomfort that I do not believe I would otherwise have.  "How come Yolanda 'liked' Colleen's post about the a cappella gig and not mine?" "Even Hugh and Wendy are 'in a relationship' with each other now... how come I'm not?" "There are only thirteen people RSVPed for this show....PANIC" "OMG, Jeeves is going to that party, now I don't know if I want to go."  And facebook outright refuses to stop showing me engagement-ring ads, no matter how many times I tell facebook that I find such ads "offensive."

Clearing facebook out of my life will undoubtedly bring its logistical challenges, but it also undoubtedly allows more space for me to be mindful.  So I am resolved to stay off of facebook for these six months, maybe longer.

I was one of facebook's earlier users, signing up at the behest of my college friends back in 2004, when it was only available to alums of certain schools.  Since it got huge, I have been extremely--and vocally--wary of its progressively more brazen intrusion into people's information.  Now, I do not consider myself a particularly private person.  I have no concern sharing my information with grocery stores by using a frequent shopper card, etc.  I tell most people most of my secrets if they want to know.  I have a frigging blog and in fact have had a public site or a blog off and on since 1999.

But in the end, I need to feel that I have ultimate control over my information, which is something that I lack on facebook.

With facebook's latest addition of "timeline" - itself possibly the most absurdly bait-and-switch uber-contextualization of user information I have seen, even from facebook- two things concern me much more than in the past:

(1) facebook did this on the heels of an FTC settlement.  Meaning that either the FTC has accepted facebook's version of reality or facebook just doesn't care and knows it can strongarm the FTC.
(2) there is now an actual backlash against people who are concerned about their privacy and facebook's manipulation of data.  "Shut up, you just don't like change," articles and friends have said to me.  So I am apparently anti-progressive because I do not want people to be able to know my entire life story in easy-click year-by-year form.

After accusing me of hating on change, commentators/facebook junkies' next sentence is "you won't quit."  (The linked article, whose not-so-subtle conclusion is "you'll get used to it, just like you'll get used to whatever plate of steaming crap facebook hands to you in the future," is one of the most alarming things I've read in this topic area and was instrumental in my decision to quit.  Here's another.)

As I have been saying since at least 2009, facebook takes advantage of the fact that people depend on it.  They continually change the terms, and rely on the fact that protestations are futile because people want to see their friends' baby pictures more than they want to insist on controlling their privacy.   That's scary to me, and I have been considering how to extricate myself from their power net for some time now.  This one did push me over the edge.  I am actually very grateful for the convenient timing.

Please note that I do not judge you for deciding to stay on facebook and/or embrace the timeline.  This is a personal philosophy and a personal statement I feel I need to make, and it happens to line up with my life plan for this year.  But I'm really not evangelizing here.  Facebook away.  I realize that I will need to rely on my close friends to find out from facebook about some things that are going on anyway.

My response to other defenses of timeline/warnings about my decision to quit after the jump.

Mindfulness classes?

They are beginning a Mindfulness clinic in Atlanta on 2/20.  Should I take this?  Unfortunately I am not free on two of the eight Monday nights (I could probably cut it down to one), but this seems good for my mental health and too good to pass up.  It's also kind of expensive.  Hmmm.

http://www.atlantamindfulness.com/classes/Mindfulness-Based-Stress-Reduction-Class-Atlanta.html

I'm going to take this as a sign

This morning Amazon sent me an e-mail that Kabat-Zinn is publishing a new book the day after my blog is set to officially begin!

Coincidence?

Unfortunately it does not appear to be on Kindle.  But maybe that is because it's not released yet.  In any event, there is lots of reading material to analyze from my favorite mindfulness teacher.

Mindfully non-searching my house for the mindfulness CDs I bought two months ago

Kabat-Zinn recommends in "Full Catastrophe Living" that you follow the program, and that you do this through his meditation "tapes."  The repeated references to "tapes" discouraged me because it implied that I was unlikely to find instantly downloadable digital audio files, which in turn decreased the likelihood I would ever order said "tapes."  The fact that there was a website that also used the word "tapes," "http://mindfulnesstapes.com/," and utilized a nice tiled jpg background of sand, offered little comfort.

Ah, soothing, hypnotic desert sands...
makes me want to listen to some tapes.

Nevertheless, I forged on.  I found them at Amazon.com and, because I think I happened to be ordering someone's long-overdue wedding gift from there at the same time, I actually made it through the series of clicks to purchase the product!

It arrived a short while later, and boy, was I excited.  My new prized possession sat on top of my Clavinova for a week or two in its shrinkwrap.  At some point, I discussed it with someone, and took it out of its shrinkwrap, and played with the CD for a few seconds.  I considered by what means I could execute the listening to them.  I pondered the only two then-possibilities: my computer room, with the faint odor of cat litter, and my bedroom, on a DVD player from the late nineties that can only play things starting at the beginning of the CD.  I became mildly annoyed at the fact that my ipod nano was currently defunct and that my computer was conspiring against my ever accessing my music files again, deterring me from uploading anything new.   And then...

The CDs vanished!

Well no, they didn't vanish.  I picked them up, completely unconscious of myself, and put them somewhere.  It could have been in the vicinity of the aforementioned CD-playing devices in my house.  It could have been in a closet as a bandaid solution to clutter for the benefit of a rare guest.

LOST

Of course, this happens to me frequently.  I am always misplacing household objects under suspiciously similar circumstances of being not present.  And you would think I would have a method for finding these lost things by now, but what I have is more of a coping mechanism.  Usually I frenetically scan my house, and then give up unless it is an absolute necessity like my keys or my phone.  In that case, I freak out, wail, and demand that whoever's close by (siblings, boyfriends, cats) find the object.  A strikingly high percentage of the time, they do.

But when the thing I have lost is not something I literally need to leave the house, I usually just wait until later, when I have at least a half-hour.  Then start tidying things up and do not strive in particular to find the object itself.  About 30% of the time I will find what I am looking for.  More frequently, I will find something I was looking for in the past but had given up on.  I will not comment on how much of my house-tidying is due to Not looking for something I have lost.

But what's crazy and kind of cool is, this is exactly how Kabat-Zinn tells you you should approach meditation.

Almost everything we do we do for a purpose, to get something or somewhere.  But in meditation this attitude can be a real obstacle.  That is because meditation is different from all other human activities.  Although it takes a lot of work and energy of a certain kind, ultimately meditation is a non-doing.  It has no goal other than for you to be yourself.  the irony is that you already are.  This sounds paradoxical and a little crazy.  Yet this paradox and craziness may be pointing you toward a new way of seeing yourself, one in which you are trying less and being more.  This comes from intentionally cultivating the attitude of non-striving...

People are sent to the stress clinic by their doctors because something is the matter.  the first time they come, we ask them to identify three goals that they want to work toward in the program.  But then, often to their surprise, we encourage them not to make any progress toward their goals over the eight weeks.  In particular, if one of their goals is to lower their blood pressure or to reduce their pain or their anxiety, they are instructed not to try to lower their blood pressure nor to try to make their pain or their anxiety go away, but simply to stay in the present and carefully follow the meditation instructions.  

As you will see shortly, in the meditative domain, the best way to achieve your goals is to back off from striving for results and instead to start focusing carefully on seeing and accepting things as they are, moment by moment.  With patience and regular practice, movement toward your goals will take place by itself.  This movement becomes an unfolding that you are inviting to happen within you.

(FCL 12-13%.  My Kindle does not tell me page numbers, sorry.)

OK, so as irritating as it was to realize that I had misplaced my damn meditation CDs the morning after my momentous introductory blog entry where I announce my intention to adhere to them strictly, at least I have some experience with this whole non-striving thing after all.

Update:

Introducing my next blogsperiment

Hello.  I am a young-ish (early thirties! yes, that IS young!) female lawyer in Atlanta who spends most of my free time doing music and/or Jewish activities.

In January 2010, I started an anonymous blog called "Six Months of Rules," where, having recently become single, I devoted the six months before my thirtieth birthday to governing my dating life according to The Rules by Ellen Fein & Sherrie Schneider.

This really screams "strong, independent woman," doesn't it?

The premise being that I, bearing the pseudonym "Rulebreaker," have had trouble setting the kind of boundaries the Rules require and thought I could benefit from forcing myself to behave in that way for awhile. While my adherence to and ultimate conclusion about The Rules was a little suspect, I liked the sense of purpose and the motivation to write that the experiment provided.  Also, the idea of a dating blog was a little fun and I actually got some readers. After the six months were up, I wrote in my Rules blog off and on, but it lacked cohesion. I tried to come up with subsequent experiments on the same track, but they fell flat too.  I eventually realized that the Rules chapter of my life was over, and closed that blog. If you are interested in reading those archived entries, you can request access to it, which I will probably grant unless I dated you or considered dating you during that time period. http://sixmonthsofrules.blogspot.com.

But I still like to write, and I still like to force behavioral experiments on myself in an effort to self-improve. So I'm going to pick a new set of flaws, and try a new six months of something I'm baseline skeptical of.

"Mindfulness" has been a relatively recent addition to my vocabulary.  The working definition I use for this word is being fully present in a moment, in contrast to being a zillion different mental places at once.  Mindfulness's origins appear to be in Buddhism, which I'm extremely skeptical of, but many writers have de-religion-ized it for me already.

Recently I had begun thinking that this would be a good candidate for my next writing and growth project.  Unlike The Rules, I am not philosophically opposed to "mindfulness" itself once you drain most of the Buddhism out of it.  But unlike The Rules, "mindfulness" isn't really as inherently funny and mockable and thus perhaps less interesting to people.

But like The Rules, boy, do I suck at mindfulness.  I am always forgetting where I put my keys, I constantly multitask, am easily bored when I try to focus on just one thing (with some limited exceptions), I hurry in everything I do, I am always moving, I can't sit still, even now I am doing a chess lesson on chess.com while writing this entry.  This personality writing about trying to meditate for at least 45 minutes 6 times a week should provide at least some level of entertainment.

And I feel much, much more daunted by this challenge than I did the Rules.

I base this round of six months on the book "Full Catastrophe Living" by Jonathan Kabat-Zinn.

My blog's inspiration

Kabat-Zinn runs an eight-week mindfulness-based stress reduction clinic at the University of Massachusetts.  This book basically walks through that clinic.  I tore through the book basically by accident a few months ago when I downloaded on my brand-new Kindle Kabat-Zinn's better-known book "Wherever you go, There you are."  In the first chapter of that book, he briefly described the stress clinic and cited his other book.  It sounded so intriguing that I immediately abandoned "Wherever you go, there you are," downloaded "Full Catastrophe Living," and was immediately and fully inspired.  I started embracing the concepts and selling them to try to solve all my friends' problems.

What I did not actually do was any of the suggested techniques in the book, despite the book's recommendation.  Perhaps because I was not desperate enough - many of Kabat-Zinn's patients are referred to the clinic to deal with very difficult life circumstances such as illness, chronic pain, debilitating anxiety, or other major issues.  I am doing pretty much just fine right now (though, to be clear, this has not always been the case with me) so I wasn't terribly motivated to put in the serious time and SERIOUS effort -- SERIOUS because of how difficult meditation and the like is for me -- to turn my inspiration into implementation.

This blog is to try to get myself to take that extra step.  My pseudonym this time around is a similar poke at my ineptitude - Halfcatastrophe, signifying the ways in which I fall short of living the "full catastrophe" as Kabat-Zinn portrays (quoting something else, but I'll get into that later).  But this is mostly for fun - the reason my previous blog was anonymous was more to protect the identity of my dating victims than myself.  Okay yes, and to increase the probability that there would be such dating victims.  Neither of those are applicable here, but I also don't want to jeopardize my professional life by overexhibiting candor in my portrayal of my negative qualities.  So, while I haven't decided to what extent I'm actively going to advertise this blog yet, I'm not trying to keep my identity secret.

Six months begins December 27 (1st of Tevet) and ends on June 20 (1st of Tammuz).  That's right, we're doing Hebrew months - in part because one of the things I'd like to be more mindful of is the Jewish calendar, in part because commencing resolution-like endeavors on January 1st is just so DONE.