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.
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.
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.
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.
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| This really screams "strong, independent woman," doesn't it? |
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 |
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.
I am really excited about your new project. I have also read Full Catastrophe Living and thought it was pretty mind-blowing. I also haven't committed to the type of daily meditation practice that's recommended/required by the book. I look forward to reading about your journey. -- JR
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