Day 2: Adaptation

This morning as I woke to my alarm clock going off, the first question that I had for myself was, what should I do first. The decision was between either getting my days exercise completed and then meditate afterward or the other way around, I ended up doing both.

My initial action this morning was a 20-minute meditation. The entire 20 minutes went by quickly, however, my mind was jammed full of pointless noise, it was very frustrating, all I wanted was alleviation from the narrating voices. About half way through, I switch my headphones from my regular music to the voice guided meditation in an attempt to clog some of the unwelcomed noise. I tried to just let the thoughts be in hopes that they would take care of themselves, quite the opposite happened. The more I resisted the thoughts, the louder they grew. I had no choice but to cave allowing them to chatter overtop of the one voice I was trying to give my attention to, the guide of the meditation. After the 20 minutes was up, I opened my eyes to now face my anger and frustration. This territory is more familiar to me. My anger is now a tool in my training. Every time it decides to grapple with me, I get the opportunity to display to myself that my anger does not have dictatorship over me. In an effort to provide proof of control, I went for a 3 mile run after my meditation. I needed to give my mind another job to do, something else to focus on. My anger became a provider for my run, it translated into pushing harder, thus, improving my average run time. Once I had completed my run I decided that perhaps it would be a good idea to try and meditate once more. I set the time for another 20 minutes and closed my eyes. The noise, though still there, was muffled just enough to get through the meditation. It was still very hard to keep focus but it seemed that the release of physical tension helped noticeably. When I finished my second 20 minutes of the Isha Kriya meditation, I decided to get a little bit creative by closing the meditation with 5 minutes of Wim Hof breathing. I made this addition based on my feeling at that moment, it provided a final exit for my frustration. I am going to play along with the idea of combining the Isha Kriya with a breathing method more this week.

Meditation is the practice of watching yourself, learning your very own patterns with the goals of being able to have the power to change them. In meditation, I always try to look as low as I possibly can. When you look low enough, the only place left to go is skywards.