Since the 2024 presidential election two and a half weeks ago, I have thought a decent amount about what, if any, underlying values are necessary for people to both be able to vehemently disagree with one another, while at the same time genuinely respect their experience and viewpoint.

A lot of assertive ideas have been bandied about as universal starting points, only to have a huge portion of the country utterly toss them out as bogus. Some common refrains I hear from a variety of sides:

• Trust the experts – What qualifies someone as an expert? What if the experts disagree? What if the experts are disconnected from the average person’s experience?
• Have faith in God’s plan – Can we prove God even exists? How can we be sure we are interpreting God’s plan correctly? What if God’s plan turns out to be evil?
• Believe in science – Why is science any more valid as a starting point than faith? Who decides when scientific consensus is reached? How can science instill values?
• Avoid extremes – What if an extreme position is the right position in some cases? Who decides what is extreme? Wouldn’t this cause us to shift values every time we visited a different culture?
• Use common sense – Does this essentially mean just trust our gut? If someone else’s gut doesn’t align with ours, does that mean they have the wrong type of common sense? What if Einstein was right when he said,

• Do what’s right – How can we know our feelings of morality are anything more than just saying “Boo!” or “Hooray!” in reaction to certain ideas and actions? If what is right is not dependent on what we feel, to whom should we sell our soul: Our perception of God? Pure rationality? Popular consensus?
• Avoid tribalism – How big does a group have to be before it becomes a tribe? Isn’t unity a desirable quality? If ancient human survival depended on being part of a group, are we asking people to discard an essential part of what it means to be human?

To be fair, I have used all of these refrains at one time or another in my life. Usually I would preface them with the word ‘just’ to emphasize the seeming simplicity of it all. Just trust the experts! Just have faith! Just use some common sense! Just do what’s right! It’s as if I thought the answer to all life’s problems could be illuminated in a single-sentence epiphany.

Looking back on my usages of these talking points, one common thread stands out to me: Arrogance. I really have the audacity to believe that in my paltry time on earth, I have figured out for myself – much less FOR EVERYONE – the obviously simple truth that informs all behavior, all morality, or all truth? A truth that countless philosophers, scientists, politicians, and theologians have debated for eons?

No, I think the only way to experience a sense of connection that is independent of a person’s fundamental epistemology, political alignment, or personal values is to embrace humility. I’m not proposing this is easy; in fact, it might be one of the hardest mindsets to live out. No one likes uncertainty. However, if you care at all about wanting to understand people that are radically different from you or learn from experiences that are utterly foreign from your own, I don’t see another option.

Maybe you are thinking to yourself, “Nah, such-and-such is the truth and that is just the way it is!” If so, I would encourage you to try this simple exercise. Ask yourself the question, “How do I know?” If you can give a compelling answer, then ask the question again. Usually, it only takes about 4 of these queries to get to the point where you honestly have to admit, “I don’t know.”

That. That right there is the bedrock of humility.

Humility does not mean giving up your convictions. However, the recognition that we don’t have absolute certainty can at the very least instill in us some curiosity and compassion for the beliefs and practices of those that are fundamentally different from our own. It can bring some much needed grace into our lives and relationships.

For me personally, I would like to transform my reactive “that is stupid” response into a more humble, “Hmm, that doesn’t make sense to me. What am I missing?” Every time I have chosen to take this approach, I have never been unhappy I did so.

Namaste.

I sometimes have people ask me, “What is a Buddhist like?” My thought upon hearing this is ‘pretty much the same as any other lovely person that exists in the world.’ However, I think what the question is driving at is: What virtues are at the core of Buddhist life? When you set aside the philosophical aspect of non-attachment and just look at character qualities, what would I expect to find?

One of the spokes of the dharma wheel is skillful effort, which involves cultivating what in Buddhism are referred to as the 4 heavenly abodes. I remember these using the acronym SCEL (and yes I realize this is not an actual word).

• Sympathetic Joy: experiencing the joy of others as if it was our own
• Compassion: experiencing the pain or sorrow of others as it if it was our own
• Equanimity: holding a balanced mixture of all emotions
• Lovingkindness: exhibiting complete and unrestrained friendliness

Of these four, equanimity is probably the most recognizably Buddhist, probably because of its association with meditation. However, a lot of people (myself included in the past), picture an equanimous person as someone who is never ruffled no matter what life throws their way – someone who is imperturbably calm and steady.

This stereotype is understandable because in the macro-sense, this is true. However, in the moment-by-moment sense, this is not so at all. In fact, pure equanimity implies feeling all emotions in their fullest sense, without judgment or embarrassment.

When something unjust happens, we can feel deep anger that leads to righteous action. When something painful happens, we can feel unabashed sorrow. When something exciting piques our interest, we can feel incredible passion. However, cultivating equanimity means accepting the truth that hanging out in any of these valences for an extended period of time is tiring. So after fully experiencing the anger, sorrow, or passion, we hold it in gentle awareness and come back to a balanced center.

Over the last couple of months, I have experienced increasing levels of equanimity in the midst of daily life. Sometimes, it seems inexplicable. A week and a half ago, I had a pretty rough day at work and felt like just stewing in a cloud of negativity on my drive home. However, I decided instead to practice curiosity and compassion: to acknowledge and unpack what I was feeling in all of its intensity without judgment or reaction.

A weird phenomenon occurred when I did this. I arrived home and almost suddenly started feeling upbeat and almost euphoric (not a normal occurrence for me following a bout of negativity). I decided to be curious about this as well and embrace the feeling without attachment. After a while, my mood settled into a more balanced position. The negativity and euphoria were still within me, and both had their purposes, but integrating them into my natural resting state was ultimately more comfortable than hanging out in either extreme.

I experienced a feeling of deep contentment. The cool thing about this experience is that it is completely replicable. Normally, the swing in my emotional disposition is not so pronounced, but as I have cultivated this mind state, I have discovered that although I can’t banish unpleasant emotions, I always have access to finding this place of balance. Just realizing this opens up a well of gratitude.

I am feeling more emotions at this point in my life than I have in a long time. I also feel more at peace with myself than I have in a long time. These things are not contradictory. In fact, I think they are intricately connected with a proper understanding of equanimity.

Namaste.

A few months ago, I embarked on a month of loving my former self. Ever since leaving med school, I have experienced a boatload of guilt and/or shame on a semi-regular basis. Even after working through a lot of the issues that lead to my breakdown multiple times over, I still retained a cacophony of unpleasant emotional noise from the past. My diagnosis was that I held bitterness at this earlier version of myself and my prescription was basically an elaborate self-forgiveness challenge.

I learned and grew a lot from the challenge. I unpacked most of the various threads that lead to my unraveling and the unpleasant current emotions that had glommed onto each thread. However, at the end of the process, although I gained an enormous amount of context and compassion for myself, I still felt like the whole mess was largely unresolved.

My eventual epiphany was that the root of my emotional turmoil was not guilt, anger, anxiety, or bitterness (even though these were close outgrowths), but rather deep embarrassment. I think one reason this is the case is that with most of the other uncomfortable emotions, I feel a sense of familiarity and confidence in dealing with them, even if it is painful and difficult work.

A podcast episode I listened to recently (either from Modern Wisdom or Ten Percent Happier) challenged the well-known idea that all growth comes when we get out of our comfort zone. The guest coined the phrase ‘uncertainty zone’ and proposed this to be the place where the rubber really meets the road in terms of learning about oneself and accomplishing not just personal growth but radical transformation.

Embarrassment is one emotion I feel deep and abiding uncertainty in navigating. In fact, it was this emotion more than any other that led to my general feeling withdrawal when I was a teenager. It induces in me a sense of panic, of unworthiness, and a host of downstream emotional ripples. It turns on my fight/flight/freeze/fawn reflex to full capacity.

I’m struggling to even write this blog post, because just contemplating the concept of embarrassment unleashes a cascade of moments and sensations from the past that causes my panic level to start rising. This is the zone of not just discomfort for me, but an abiding and almost existential aura of uncertainty.

I would love to say that this understanding opened up some sense of release and acceptance towards myself and the past, but that is not the case. If anything, I feel like I have regressed to the age of 13 and am struggling to breathe through the murky and toxic fog of an adolescent brain.

However, one positive thing I have experienced very recently is a feeling of resilience. This has been cultured through my firm commitment to middle path in all situations, developing a daily practice of intrapersonal validation, and my trust in the meta-narrative into which my life fits.

It is from this newfound sense of resilience and optimism that I write this post. I’m not sure how I will learn to sit with and accept my Achilles’ Heel, but I do know that being honest about it is the right action for me in this moment. All life is a series of moments and I trust I will be able to take the small action necessary at each juncture.

Namaste.

The inspiration for this challenge came from an episode on the Modern Wisdom podcast. I believe the guest being featured was Derek Sivers. However, even if I am misremembering the contribution, I do know that listening to this conversation resonated with a lot of the thoughts and challenges I have been experiencing over the last few years. Focusing on believing and doing things because they are useful instead of because they are “true” has become very central to the way I wish to operate.

I have kept a gratitude journal on and off for a few years now. The benefits of gratitude have been widely studied and reported. However, I personally have experienced that without engaging in underlying personal validation, expressing gratitude can feel a bit inorganic and performative.

This month is all about establishing and maintaining a more positive and healthy emotional baseline. I believe doing so will make gratitude more spontaneous and less transactional.

Here are the particulars of the challenge:

• Write 3 “good job” entries to myself each day using the Gratitude app journal –
  These could be done all at once at the end of the day, or singly as I recognize wise action in myself throughout the day. I can get more creative with the entries as I progress, but I want to start out simple. E.g. “Good job taking a few minutes to sit with the unpleasant agitation you felt after 8th period instead of giving in to avoidance.”
• If possible, focus on times during the day where I consciously used middle way –
  
  In addition to supplying daily doses of personal validation, my other goal is to create a ritual that affirms my empowering spiritual beliefs, primarily consciousness conservation and karma. As I believe good karma is acquired by living in middle way, I want this to be the main emphasis. This could be on a more macro systems-level or micro situational-level.
• Share one of these entries with someone else at least once per week – As valuable as INTRA-personal validation is, I want to also cultivate opportunities for INTER-personal validation as well. I have several obvious venues I can think of for this: Unitarian fellowship, Secular Buddhism zoom call, affirmative prayer sessions, or weekly blogs. However, I want to think about sharing in other contexts as well when appropriate.

I am incredibly excited and optimistic about this challenge. I am hopeful about this expanding to include expressions of validation about other people and related events around me as well. Maybe this will become an actionable way to appreciate the Universal Self.

Namaste.

People that have in-depth conversations with me would probably say I am over-focused on properly defining words. In the recent past, I would have worn this as a badge of honor. However, I now think they may be right, at least in part. I still believe standardized and agreed-upon definitions is a prerequisite when having any kind of grounded philosophical discussion. However, I am attempting to be less triggered by others’ use of language I find to be imprecise or just plain wrong.

All words are of course social constructions. They can mean whatever we want them to mean. What matters at least in the moment is that both parties are understanding each other. To this end, I want to adopt a usefulness metric, by asking myself 2 questions:

1. Is a precise definition necessary in the context of this discussion?
2. Do I foresee a reasonable chance that we can come to an understanding in a relatively short time span?

In the majority of conversations, I feel the answer to at least one of these would be a ‘no.’ In these instances, my options are either to steer the conversation into less troubled waters, avoid using words that need defining, or provide a conceptual framework that is obviously not intended to be a denotation.

This last option I have played around with a lot of late. Specifically, I think defining a word in the context of an equation can be an incredibly useful device.

Here are a few I have used recently:

• Suffering = pain x resistance
  This communicates the lesson that our suffering is as much caused by the resistance we experience to the life we have or the emotions we experience as it is caused by the physical or emotional stimuli themselves. My ability to eliminate pain from my life is limited; however, I have a lot more direct control over my level of acceptance.
  ⠀
• Happiness = # of things acquired / # of things you think will make you happy
  Viewing happiness as a fraction or an index gives us 2 nodes from which to increase it. A lot of people, myself included, spend most of their time trying to increase the top number. However, you can receive the same happiness boost by lowering the bottom number. Also sometimes increasing the top number doesn’t really affect happiness at all, because every time we do so, we add another thing to the denominator.
  ⠀
• Achievement = skill x effort
  In order to develop skill, we need both talent AND effort. I observed a stark example of this my second year of university as a music student.

  I attended two senior recitals in the spring of graduating piano majors. One had a boatload of talent but always put the bare minimum effort preparing for her performances. The other had much less natural talent but put a prodigious amount of time into practicing her recital pieces. At the beginning of the year, the first student was able to perform adequately. During her recital at the end of the year, she again performed adequately (nothing special). The second student choked the first half of the year when trying to perform her selections, but by the time she did her recital, she was highly competent.

  Achievement requires taking the skill you have developed in an area and finding an effective application. So, you could actually give an alternative equation for it: talent x effort squared.

My goal is to create more useful concepts like these to describe the words I employ and leave a more thorough denotations for particular formats and venues.

Namaste.

There are two monthly challenges I need to evaluate: my most recent challenge with lifting small weights, and the one I completed before that which involved transforming my self-talk.

I don’t have a lot to comment on with regards to the weights challenge. It was a terrific way to get back into resistance training and I plan on continuing to follow the protocols I created going forward. As much as I love Bikram yoga, it is nice to complement that with an exercise that is more strength-focused and progressive.

The evaluation of my self-talk challenge is more interesting and necessary, so I will devote the rest of this post to that.

What I learned:

• Running is a great training ground for self-talk – I learned a lot about my thinking process during my long-distance runs during this challenge.
  

  I started out having all of these negative thoughts (e.g. judgment for pushing myself too little, judgment for pushing myself too much, guilt from years ago when I stopped running, anxiety about my jacked up left foot and ankle, etc.).

  After going through a couple notice/soften/reframe procedures, I started to counter the negative thought with a positive reframe that I had come up with the previous week.

  By the end of the month, my inner narrative had mostly died away and I just ran without any internal voices, which was incredibly peaceful.

• Cognitive journaling is helpful, but I hate it – Taking the time each night to write down the specific process I had used that day was great for accountability and locking in affirmations. However, I always resented the time dump for something I probably will never post publicly.

• I love posting phrases around the house – Having the walls peppered with personalized affirmations and empowering suggestions was dope. The only problem is they were a bit visually tacky.
• Using terms of endearment and physical gestures towards myself feels forced – This just didn’t feel like me. It never stopped feeling like an act. I’m not saying it didn’t ever help in some way, but I felt really awkward doing it even when there wasn’t anyone around.
• Softening is a revolutionary practice for me – I’ve done noting practices with thoughts and emotions a decent amount both through meditation and non-meditation practices. I’ve also used affirmations and reframes in the past. However, actually carrying out a dialogue with my inner critic is not something I’ve purposefully done before and definitely not to this extent. As someone with INTJ preferences, I felt this to be completely natural and aligned with myself.

What I plan to continue going forward:

• One-sentence daily journaling – I love the idea of a daily journal, but it has to be very targeted and brief if I am going to keep it up and feel the derived benefit is worth the time input. I would like to have a specific topic each month that I focus on (motivation, time management, socialization, etc.) and just give a one-sentence update from that day pertaining to that topic. To make this more meaningful, I could turn these entries into a blog post each month.
• Purchase some sort of digital wall display to upload affirmations – I would like a way to continuously be updating my pithy quotes that is simple but also classy. Maybe the way to do this is with a digital picture frame, or maybe there is a better alternative I will discover for this specific purpose.
• Incorporate this strategy into some of my meditation sessions – I have a lot of different meditation practices and techniques I cycle through on a semi-regular basis, and this would be a great addition to that list. It is similar to the RAFT technique, but with a bigger emphasis on challenging the thoughts that are arising as opposed to just noticing and releasing them.

I feel like I thoroughly understand the concept of self-compassion but still struggle to actualize it on a regular basis. This challenge greatly helped in that regard and I feel much more confident in my ability to utilize this skill after going through this experience.

Namaste.

I am already half-way through the monthly challenge I am currently completing. My laxity in publishing blog posts is not mirrored in my commitment to challenges and I am hoping to remedy the former starting today. School started up a week and a half ago and I am teaching 5 days a week until September. That on top of the stress of moving to a new city has compromised some of my intentions, but no more!

The challenge for this month is focused on forgiving myself today for the breakdowns I had 5 years ago by choosing to send love to that former version of myself. I realized I was harboring a LOT of bitterness at myself for traits I possessed in the past, some of which are barely present at all in my current state.

Several years ago, I harbored deep bitterness towards certain people in my life and was able to process exactly what I was bitter about, productively share some of this with these people, and consequently experienced a huge burden being lifted off of my emotional bandwidth. This article from Psychology Today proved immensely useful in clearing up a lot of the hang-ups I had with the concept of forgiveness and enabled me to realize forgiveness did not depend on the other person’s current actions or on what I felt about them.

I want to do something similar concerning the bitterness I harbor at myself related to what I went through 5 years ago. There are 2 main daily components to the challenge:

1. 10-min RAFTT meditation – This is in addition to my regular meditation. RAFTT stands for:
   • Recognize = identify the emotion, thought, situation, or experience that causes discomfort
   • Allow = accept the above without judgment; send it love
   • Feel = really sink in to the emotions that arise; feel them in your body
   • Tease out = disentangle the different components of what you feel, especially if there is a lot of resistance or confusion
   • Trust = believe I have the capacity to weather the storm and grow from it
2. 5-min breakdown reflection – Immediately prior to meditation, I want to spend some time identifying and processing the various components that led to my breakdown and the bitterness I feel at my former self for engaging in them.

As I have already been engaged in this for the past 2 weeks, I can share some of what I have dug up already.

• Focusing on destination over process
• Embracing a nihilistic worldview
• Deprioritizing social engagements
• Having reticence to spend money and time on enjoying life in the now
• Turning anxiety into guilt
• Being embarrassed to ask for help or be vulnerable
• Committing to figuring things out on my own
• Believing “coming back” from a depressive-addictive spiral was simple
• Believing the arrival of a new day would magically solve things
• Failing to budget time and money on loving myself
• Choosing limiting beliefs because of an attachment to “truth”

When I write an evaluation of this challenge next month, I will elaborate on some of these insights and share what I decide to say to myself to get to a place of forgiveness. An unexpected benefit I’ve already experienced is that I have been absolutely LOVING my meditations, both the targeted ones and the more general ones. They are the highlights of most of my days.

Namaste.

I have intended to add resistance training to my exercise regimen for quite a while now. Currently, I do the following on most days:

• 20 minutes of abs
• 10 minutes of stationary bike
• 50 minutes of Bikram yoga
• 10 minutes of push-ups, planks, +/- hyperextension exercises
• 10 minutes of running

On Saturday, I usually run 10+ miles. I feel like the addition of weights would help round out my regimen; however, when I have done this in the past, I’ve usually overdone it and ended up in incredible back pain for sometimes days at a time.

Protocols of challenge:

• Start each day with Turkish Get-Up – I will start with no weight and work up to a 5-lb kettlebell and stay there for the remainder of the challenge.
• Use 1-lb weight on new exercises – I want to always start out with as little weight as possible and ensure correct form before adding amount.
• Don’t skip weights – When leveling up to a higher weight, I want to choose the lowest increment (never more than 1-lb heavier) and shift back down if needed.
• Do at least 15 minutes every day – This includes non-weighted Turkish Get-Ups and all weighted activities including breaks.

I have compiled a list of possible weight exercises from the Livestrong and Healthline websites that are listed below.

• One-Two Punch
• Lateral Raise
• Superman
• Hip Lift and Extend
• Triceps Kickback
• Renegade Row
• Front, Back, or Overhead Squat
• Weighted Glute Bridge
• Lunge
• Floor Press
• Bent-Over Row
• Floor Chest Fly
• Arnold Press

Whichever of these I choose to do on a given day, I want to finish 10-20 reps at a time and do 2-3 sets per session. I can do the same exercises each day or shift to do specific sequences on specific days. I will allow myself the freedom to find the pattern that works best for me.

Namaste.

I have witnessed a few instances over the past couple months where someone used the ‘appeal to authority fallacy’ to dismiss someone’s claim. Usually, it was someone who wanted to not feel irrational holding something to be true that a consensus of experts disagreed with. When this was pointed out, they just fell back on ‘appeal to authority fallacy.’ I believe this is a misunderstood and potentially dangerous application of logic.

The first thing I would like to say is that just yelling ‘fallacy’ and throwing a label on it does not automatically make it illogical. You need to be able to explain both what the fallacy means and show that it specifically applies to the case in question. If you cannot do both of these, then by using the word fallacy, you are the one who is attempting to stifle rational discourse.

If you are someone on the receiving end of this, a good way to handle it is to just start asking questions. What does that mean? Why do you think that? How does what you are doing not commit the same problem? The last question deals more with hypocrisy, but can be a good litmus test to see whether the person actually cares about logic or is only using it when it seems to confirm what they want to believe.

Now, to be clear, the appeal to authority is a real problem and is used ALL the time, especially in advertising. The graphic below is a very basic example of this.

Just because an authority figure in your life tells you something, that doesn’t make it true – obviously! Also, someone could be an authority with respect to one claim, but not another related one. Again, this should be rather obvious.

I believe that appealing to valid authority is the appropriate and, dare I say, morally responsible thing to do most of the time. The natural question is: what is a valid authority? First, this is NEVER a single person, except for the remote possibility that they are the only expert in a given subject both past and present. No, what I consider a valid authority is a CONSENSUS of ‘experts.’ To me, what this means practically is: greater than 90% agreement by PhD scientists and peer-reviewed researchers in the field of study.

If you didn’t appeal to ANY authority (even the valid ones), that would mean in order to accept or believe anything, you would need to personally do all the experiments and research yourself. While I applaud someone who genuinely desires to do this, to make this a requirement of valid belief robs us of the ability to assimilate large amounts of information quickly by standing on the shoulders of all the giants that came before us. This frees us up to pursue new avenues of knowledge and personal growth, instead of continually reinventing the wheel.

I want to clarify an important distinction between belief and acceptance. We use a range of words to denote the level of confidence we have in a belief. ‘I know’ is stronger than ‘I believe’ which has more oomph than ‘I think’ which trumps ‘I feel.’ However, acceptance is on a completely different axis, or is at least operating from a different level. Namely, it communicates alignment with expert consensus on a particular topic.

For example, I accept a lot of things: anything where there is a greater than 90% agreement on among experts, in subjects where I am not an expert myself (which is pretty much every subject). This includes the spherical earth theory, the germ theory of disease, the theory of evolution, the general theory of relativity, etc. I listed scientific claims, but the same applies to historical claims as well. Some of these I would say I know are true; others I would say I feel are true, but all of them I accept to be true because doing so only requires I can show there is consensus, not that I can actually provide specific proofs as to their legitimacy.

In the norm, I don’t think any of what I said is controversial. It only becomes so when someone is confronted with something they REALLY WANT to be true but a consensus of experts disagree with them. Then, suddenly, authority doesn’t matter at all! The appropriate question to these people then becomes, why do you believe in a conspiracy? Because that is exactly what it is.

Now, maybe there is good evidence of a conspiracy in a particular case which would invalidate the consensus, and if they can provide that – fantastic! But if not, don’t get sucked down the ‘What about this?” or “You can’t explain that” trap. In all likelihood, whatever evidence you could provide wouldn’t convince them anyway, since the real motivation for almost all beliefs IS appeal to authority. It just so happens that, in these cases, it is an invalid authority (e.g. “Half the population believes this” or “These 100 scientists agree on this”), and thus a genuine logical fallacy.

You can waste a lot of time researching things that don’t really benefit your life in any tangible way. If it is your job to do so, then that is a different story, and if that is you, more power to you on your journey of discovery! For the rest of us, trust the experts (not individuals but the consensus, assuming there is one), release your attachment to knowing, and embrace the myriad of things you can do right now that CAN greatly enrich your life and be a blessing to those around you… like standing on your head counting marbles, or petting dolphins on the moon. 😎

Namaste.

The challenge I recently completed was one of the simplest and yet most profound ones I have completed to date. It is one thing to be mindful in the context of meditation or yoga. It is an entirely different ballgame bringing that mindful awareness into the unpleasant, the mundane, and the crazy moments of our lives. This is what my challenge attempted to accomplish and I believe did so with smashing success.

What I learned this past month:

• Every moment is pregnant with liberation – I heard this phrase used while listening to the Ten Percent Happier podcast this past month. It is a beautiful reminder that liberation is always possible, waiting for us to open up to it. Happiness can be quite elusive, especially on a moment-by-moment basis. The pursuit of happiness in the long-term is manageable, but we have access to liberation at any time.
• Deep breathing and willing hands are key – When I started this month’s challenge, I didn’t always know what it meant to completely embrace the present moment and live one-mindfully. I’m still not entirely sure, but 2 elements that are almost universally involved are deep, audible breathing and an open hand posture. Half-smile is also extremely effective. When I started utilizing these techniques regularly, flowing with the present became much more understandable and organic.
• Starting with mindfulness feels right – Prior to this month, I would generally begin my daily meditation practice with breathwork, followed by lovingkindness meditation, and ending with some type of mindfulness practice. This was to prevent me feeling overwhelmed with random thoughts and emotions at the beginning of the practice. However, by starting with just a couple minutes of mindfulness, I could get into deeper meditation more quickly, but also with the knowledge I could kick it over to some other modality if I needed to.
• Lack of weekend parameters = fail – One of the biggest strengths to my challenges is their precision: having extremely clear guidelines of expectations. I did not do that with regards to weekend mindfulness, with the predictable result of being incredibly lax in this regard. There is a time and a place for leaving things open-ended; challenges do not fit that bill.

What I will continue to do going forward:

• Choose 1 activity for the week – For the most part, I found my experiences living one-mindfully very nourishing and liberating. That being said, going forward, I think just picking 1 daily activity per week, that I proactively choose to practice as an active meditation, will be more meaningful and require less maintenance.
• Begin every yoga segment with intention – I generally do about five 10-minute yoga sessions scattered throughout each day. I want to begin each of these with a sense of mindful presence, even if just for 30 seconds. Most of the time, this will end up lasting much longer, but having a lower up-front commitment ensures I will consistently follow through.
• Increase meditation time to 10 minutes daily – I’ve been doing just 5 minutes daily, and then 7 this past month, with one 45-minute practice on Wednesdays. My practices have become increasingly standard and enjoyable, and I think it high time to extend them and insert a bit more variety. There is a 30-week meditation challenge that I am joining with my Secular Buddhist sangha that should supply some inspiration.
• Embrace one spontaneous event during the day – Being on the lookout for opportunities to maximize downtime, utilize mindfulness, or notice critical thinking patterns makes both the routine and not-so-pleasant experiences much more survivable and meaningful. I want to commit to one unplanned mindful connection each day. If I don’t remember it during the day, then I will complete it the first thing upon starting New Day protocol that evening.

I am definitely interested in infusing my philosophical appointed time (PAT) periods with some extra doses of mindfulness. However, I don’t want to mandate this so as to allow for spontaneity during this more unstructured space. What this means is that I am just extending the invitation to myself to embark on mindfulness adventures, even if that is something as simple as making tea, taking a slow walk, or enjoying a luxurious bath.

Namaste.