Starting a practice log of my own after a few months of lurking - not because I think have too much of interest to share at this early stage, but my lurking has been equal parts inspiring and intimidating since more logs seem to start over a year into somebody's path. So maybe this will offer some value by joining a small minority of logs that start from scratch; I can chronicle my journey for other future absolute beginners!
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Why I'm here:
A few months ago, my default operating system for life had a bit of a breakdown. Nothing catastrophic - just... the gears started grinding, and then started to halt. It kind of all started when the startup I worked for was acquired: I made a small but nice bit of extra money (spending what I immediately spent of it proved disappointingly unfulfilling) and the addictive "chasing" inherent to startup life was immediately ripped away and replaced with the relative calm, low-stakes, "nothing to do" environment of an S&P500 behemoth. My egoic pursuit of more - bigger goals, more personal acclaim and notoriety, more money - made me increasingly neurotic, and eventually, burnt out. And then I had a mysterious sickness that lasted for almost two months, as if that wasn't a clear sign itself.
So I decided, as an experiment, to simply stop trying for a bit. To stop having any goals, stop striving, even stop working out - just to see what would happen. For a short period of time. I could always go right back to hustling, I reassured myself. But first I needed a bit of a recovery period... maybe I would go "monk mode" for a bit. (I did not really know what that meant, but I heard somebody say it online once and it sounded funny. I figured it should just mean "meditate a bunch".)
Chilling out and not trying proved surprisingly compelling. A month flew by without any temptation to go back to my habituated ways of operating. While I briefly flirted with Buddhism in college, in my seeking for meditation methods this time I came across MCTB and other books/perspectives that posit that "enlightenment"/awakening (whatever model you choose) is a very reasonable and attainable goal in this lifetime, if not in an exceedingly reasonable amount of time. I was already having a fine time orienting my life in a way that would be conducive to this pursuit, so I figured why not really go for it? Goal set.
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Where I'm starting from:
I'm currently just north of 50 hours of meditation in my log. There's been a lot of info downloading and map-making, certainly more thinking about practice than practicing in this first month or two, but I figure that's alright temporarily. Trying to get a beginner's understanding of the dharma outside of meditative techniques too.
Almost all of these 50 hours, after some initial exploration, have been spent trying to bootstrap some concentration. Largely just counting breaths, focused on sensations in my nostrils - as the first suggested practice in The Mind Illuminated goes. I'm certainly starting with an insanely noisy, ADHD-riddled mind - so this task might take some time.
After doing some trial runs of other techniques (body scanning, some of the guided meditations in the Waking Up app), they seem to kind of jam up my mind in a way that intuitively feels like I'm not quite ready for them, vs. breath counting which is certainly difficult for me but feels appropriate-difficult, if that makes sense. Generally, the descriptions I've read from teachers who advocate a balanced samatha-vipassana approach feel intuitively right for me - feels necessary for developing my personal machinery, feels more balanced/"safer", and besides I'm in no particular rush.
My sits are 30-60min, and I'm sitting 1-2x/day almost every day. As part of my effort to bootstrap concentration from 0, I'm tinkering with some supplementary practices too (Muse headband neurofeedback, Les Fehmi Open Focus work, and guided meditations from Henry Shukman's "The Way" app) - but these are secondary in priority and I expect to put them down as I develop further.
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Where I'm at:
I can kind of sense some early progress here - my mind is a bit quieter than when I started, although I still have a long ways to go. I am certainly more patient doing the sits themselves, it is very rare that my mind gets revved up and anxious to finish meditating - and I partially attribute that to the slower pace of life I'm cultivating overall. What is there to rush to?
I've noticed that most "thoughts" that appear are not conscious, rational, or intentional. They are random, subconscious, sometimes even dreamlike or utter nonsense. At this stage, they don't linger for too long - I don't get lost in minutes-long streams of thought - but they differ in intensity. Thoughts only appear for a few seconds, but sometimes I get engrossed enough in those few seconds to lose count of the breath, other times the thought appears but quietly enough that I still retain attention on the breath.
I'm also aware that I am more paying attention to the "count", to the act of the in and out breath, than to the sensations themselves. I can tell that my experience of the physical sensations is rather coarse and lacking detail.
But that's about it. I'll update the log as progress is made!
As for daily life, not a lot to write home about right now - and mostly the result of the decisions/changes I've made off the mat as much as anything else. I am probably a bit more patient. Emotionally everything is a bit "neutral" right now, kind of "blah" - more like a bit of indifference and dullness as opposed to equanimity. But it's nothing to complain about... probably my brain coming down off a decades-long dopamine trip.
What are you actually practicing? Welcome to DhO!