Today’s practice marked two… what? … milestones perhaps?
I hit my target of 20 minutes. Moreover, I did so without almost no thought of time during my period of meditation. Early on I was cognizant of the increased duration and wondered very briefly if I would be able to keep from thinking about it as I approached the end. But that was it. I did not once think about time again until the timer sounded that my 20 minutes was up. It caught me by complete surprise. I now need to ask myself if I want to up my target to 30 minutes moving forward. I hadn’t even considered that a possibility when I started this exercise.
The other change today caught me completely by surprise. stated on the first day of this, I had done a bit of reading that talked about meditation. But in none of that reading did I come across what I experienced today. My typical pattern for the last week has been that for the first 15-30 seconds, I have been able to immediately drop into a state of total relaxation without any monkey-brain—just mental relaxation and focus on my breathing. But shortly thereafter, keeping in that state became a balancing act with a rather high-gain feedback controller. I had to actively push myself back toward focus on breath and the silencing of the internal dialog. Doing so without thinking about doing so has been the challenge. Today, I hit a state where I found a stable equilibrium for a prolonged period (probably 10-15 minutes). During this period, the internal dialog yielded to imagery. I vividly recollected memories (visual, not narrative) spanning nearly all of my life. First person scenes from my childhood, high school year, college years, PK marriage years, the birth of my kids, and their childhood years came in rapid-fire succession. These were memories I had not thought about in years—or in some cases decades. They were not in any apparent order. I have no idea what to make of this. It was a very delightful surprise.
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