Day 4 – 15 Minutes

I increased my time to 15 minutes today.

I started out fairly strong—keeping focus on my breathing and keeping the extraneous thoughts vying for my attention at bay. But that only lasted a few minutes. Valerie didn’t realize I was doing my new daily practice and asked me a direct question. That tripped me up a bit. It was a different form of external distraction. I tried to note the deviation from focus and to move on, but it took me a while to stop analyzing the experience… and the subsequent analysis of my inability to not analyze the experience.

Once I recovered focus, I was able to begin examining my breathing in a new level of detail. But that triggered another distraction—I noticed the ebb and flow of breath kinda tickled my throat. I felt the urge to cough. At first, I tried to note the sensation and move on, but quickly realized that this was not going to be an easy task. I allowed the cough (actually 2 of them) to happen and then was able to move on.

As I started nearing the end of the 15 minutes, I noticed a change in the monkey mind’s thought patterns. They became more dream-like in the sense that they started following a stream-of-consciousness line of thought with strange connections from one idea to another. I was in a weird state of not falling asleep, but not really present either.

I think I will repeat 15 minutes again tomorrow rather than trying to increase time.