I am posting this before 4 weeks is up because I will be starting a new monthly challenge on Monday. I don’t like my blog posts to be too close together so am finishing this week’s reflections early. Here are selections from my journal this past week:

DAY 22

Right now, I feel grateful to be alive. May I remember this feeling and be able to find it again when the next crisis hits me. The concept of PAT is so important and valuable to me; I think I am finding the right rhythm in my week. All is not well with the world right now, but all is well enough for me at this moment.

DAY 23

I heartily enjoyed playing a violin solo for church this morning with Randa Parker. Performing gives me such energy; I really should try to set up more “performances” even if just for family in the evening. This could be a huge motivation booster for me.

DAY 24

I slept in this morning. I did this yesterday morning as well, but it was by less than an hour and it was a Sunday, so I didn’t think much of it and treated it as a fluke. That was probably my first mistake. This morning was significantly worse. However, I eventually did get up and surprisingly did not feel that much guilt about it, mostly just sorrow over the lost time. This is a welcome change and totally appropriate.

DAY 25

I endured/enjoyed a 45-min heartfulness meditation session this evening via zoom. I try to do one of these per week. I attach my TENS unit before starting and set up a few yoga mats and pillows to create a meditation station. I always find these challenging both mentally and physically, but usually feel calm and centered afterwards. My motivation seems pretty stable.

DAY 26

I know as a mindset this won’t always work, but whenever I can it helps to view my sleep time as sacred and have rituals that communicate as much (such as lighting candles when going to bed and waking up). The importance to my motivation level of getting to bed on time, enjoying restful sleep, and following a predetermined plan in the morning after my alarm goes off CANNOT be overstated.

DAY 27

I had a glorious meditation practice this morning. It was a little bit cooler than it has been, there were some beautiful swirls of clouds in the sky and the sun was just up over the horizon. I think I am becoming better able to appreciate and be grateful for the beautiful things I encounter everyday instead of only fixating on the big picture.

I love compiling insightful and motivational quotes whenever I come across them. I read this one by Winston Churchill the other day and it immediately resonated with me.

“Success is stumbling from failure to failure with no loss of enthusiasm.“

Sometimes I feel like I “fail” at every thing I do. This quote reminds me that success is not a destination but a mindset. Timeless wisdom.

Namaste.

I was sick for 3 days this past week which made for an interesting case study on my motivation level. Though I obviously didn’t enjoy the experience, I was able to remain fairly zen despite it. Here are some brief samples from my journal:

DAY 15

I completed a 50-mile bike ride this morning carrying a 30-lb backpack full of clothes, water, and my laptop! It was incredibly exhausting, but I did it! It took somewhere between 5 and 5^1/2 hrs. The rest of the day was interesting.

DAY 16

I noticed a lack of desire to do my 15-minute segments in the afternoon. I believe part of this was due to being more physically tired than usual, part due to my tendonitis pain acting up, and part due to wanting to spend as much time with Benj and Marina as I could.

DAY 17

When I got home just after 11AM, I felt physically sore but not particularly fatigued. This was a big change from Saturday! What this also meant was that I was able to jump right into my priority hierarchy and have a very productive rest of the day at home.

DAY 18

Getting up this morning was a little bit tough, as I still felt pretty sore and also itchy several places on my body. However, my morning routine worked like a charm and I sit here typing this feeling very excited and optimistic about the day.

DAY 19

I woke up sick this morning! Headache, low fever, achy feeling all over. I took some ibuprofen mid-morning, which helped, though I still felt incredibly sluggish. On the bright side, my motivation stayed strong and I didn’t suffer any noticeable loss of productivity. This is huge for me!

DAY 20

Though still sick today, I treated my symptoms more than yesterday and enjoyed a productive and mostly pleasant day. I had a back pain spike after a couple of hours of lessons and piano practice. Normally, I would want to apply my TENS unit, but no one was around to put it on for me. I didn’t panic and instead opted for laying on my acupressure mat, which worked wonders. I am definitely starting to trust my motivation more now, which is both incredibly exciting and anxiety-provoking.

DAY 21

I am writing this as I reestablish equilibrium after a crisis. I was cropping photos and started seeing a lot of pictures that included me. The more I saw, the more I hated what I saw. I hated everything about that representation of my body I was seeing in those pictures – my back, my hair line, my neck, my smile… you name it, I hated it. The more pictures I cropped, the more disgust I felt at what I saw. The action of cropping photos is not something my back likes when in a neutral emotional space; adding intense disgust on top was a recipe for mounting disaster!

Thankfully, I remembered my contingency plans. As I lay down on my acupressure pad with my head still swirling with emotions, I remembered self-compassion. “This is exactly what I need,” I said to myself. I began using mindfulness to create space between myself and my emotions, and then texted a ‘HELP’ bitmoji to one of my brothers and chatted with him for 15 minutes. My motivation is weak right now, but I have restored confidence in myself.

This last journal entry reminded me of my self-compassion pain mantra:

“This is a moment of pain.
Pain is a part of life.
May I be kind to myself in this moment.
May I give myself the compassion I need.”

I try to use this whenever I am dealing with a physically or emotionally painful situation. Just saying the mantra several times can put me in a much better head space to deal with the situation from a wise-mind perspective.

Namaste.

I am posting this a few days late. This is because I biked almost 100 miles round-trip to visit one of my brothers and didn’t bring my Clicky Keyboard, so I passed on doing a lot of typing (regular keyboards make my wrists burn). Here are some snippets from the week.

DAY 8:

The cloud was still there, but there was light coming through. I found I was able to access some skills to navigate and even enjoy learning from the situation. Hopefully, this experience will be a reminder to me that although I cannot directly control my emotional state, I can indirectly alter it by choosing to smile or make other physical adaptations of willingness and acceptance.

DAY 9:

One new event I experienced today was a secular Buddhism zoom call, which was very wholesome and encouraging for the most part. The one small problem is that I experienced a minor ego hit when I shared some thoughts and got crickets for a response. It goes to how incredibly sensitive I am that this would actually somewhat significantly bother me. What I can say in hindsight is that I desperately crave validation from someone outside of myself pretty much all the time with few opportunities of getting it.

DAY 10:

It is a dreary day outside and I definitely can feel the effects now. Dreary days don’t generally start taking a toll on me until around mid-afternoon. To prepare for this, I may want to check weather forecasts for the week in advance and plan some special pick-me-upper for days when it will be gloomy outside.

DAY 11:

I have enjoyed putting some motivation reflection in my morning check-ins. This is also an uplifting time to do this, since my motivation at this point in the day is probably the highest. However, while this may skew my reflections in a more positive way than is the reality, I actually think I am able to reflect quite truthfully when in this state.

DAY 12:

In my motivation check-in time this morning, I reflected on the 3 things that made it difficult to maintain momentum at the end of the day yesterday. I realized these facets are true generally.  First, there is the importance of having regular energy pick-ups. Second, there is the importance of recognizing when it would be imprudent to test my motivation capability. Third, there is the importance of creating a sensorially pleasing environment within which to operate.

DAY 13:

My physical body definitely feels pretty great and I am wondering if the slight drop in starting motivation level is because of the extra work I am putting into my physical exercises which is just making me slightly more generally tired. Honestly, if my pain level is lower and controlled, I think that more than makes up for any slight to moderate drop in motivation.

DAY 14:

Today was difficult. I am not exactly sure why, but my pain just spiked. Was the shirt I put on over my athletic T too tight, did I overdo my hyperextension exercises, did I practice piano too much? I don’t know. It has calmed down a bit after laying on my acupressure pad for 15 minutes. Needless to say, this didn’t help out my motivation which was already flagging due to aggravations with getting my new phone set up.

I don’t want to end on a negative note, so I will say that I enjoyed and learned a lot about motivation during my extensive biking over the weekend. Stay tuned!

Namaste.

Per my challenge requirements, I am posting some excerpts from my motivation journal the past week. I had intended to elaborate, but the excerpts pretty much speak for themselves. I have greatly enjoyed and benefited from the experience so far.

DAY 1:

I noticed a big drop in motivation level today after I started watching the new Black Widow film. It was great and that was part of the problem. I realize I need to completely swear off of watching an TV, movies, and other videos not on my subscribed YouTube channel list, even (and maybe especially) on weekends.

DAY 2:

I am choosing to not condemn myself; the falling off of a time paradigm was due to my mistaken belief that I could have controlled times of watching videos during Philosophical Appointed Times (PATs) and that this would actually be good for me. Neither of these suppositions is accurate, at least at this time. I blame the faulty programming I had previously inputted, not my current low-motivation state for the relapse.

DAY 3:

I have accepted that chronic physical pain is just a part of my life – something I struggle with, something I gain insight from, but ultimately something I just accept. My confusion stems from how this affects my motivation level. It feels like the more ‘productive’ I become, the more my pain tends to increase until I have an inevitable ‘breakdown’ of sorts.

DAY 4:

I want to enjoy higher motivation levels whenever I experience them while also not dramatically increasing my expectations of performance. In other words, when I experience a higher motivation level, I want to use it to really throw myself completely into whatever plans and activities I have scheduled without allowing new ambitions to raise my expected productivity level.

DAY 5:

I have found in the past that whether I am overwhelmed or overexcited from an event or experience, the result tends to be the same = CRASH! When I get overwhelmed, it is more of a desperation crash, while with overexcitement it is a post-event depression crash, but the ending is the same.

DAY 6:

I find that my motivation level is always highest immediately following my communion run/ meditation/check-in sequence in the morning after my shower. This makes perfect sense, especially if I successfully followed my rise-time protocol. I got up, enjoyed a shower, had some exercise, centered myself, and checked-in with my emotions. However, after this point, it seems to generally be a negatively sloped line in the motivation department.

DAY 7:

My motivation level is definitely affected when I’m around other people, especially when I’m  visiting someone (i.e. hanging out) as opposed to just doing an activity with them. This is not necessarily a good or bad thing: it’s just something I am aware of. I believe the key to harnessing this to boost my motivation without having ‘dead’ feelings after leaving the interaction is integrating aspects of mindfulness into as many aspects of social interactions as I can.

So far so good. I will finish by sharing the lovingkindness meditation I use daily.

May we all be free from danger.                                                                                                        May we all be liberated.                                                                                                                      May we all make friends with our bodies.                                                                                        May lovingkindness manifest throughout all our lives.

Namaste.

To start off, I want to recognize that I have neglected to post for a few months. My last challenge of drinking tea mindfully ended 2 months ago. Very briefly, what did I learn from this challenge:

• I enjoy the idea of drinking tea much more than the actual practice – This is something I subconsciously already knew, but became readily apparent about a week or so into the challenge. Don’t get me wrong; I do enjoy having tea, but I much more enjoy thinking of myself as a tea drinker. Why this is the case I am not entirely sure, but I think it probably has a lot to do with my correlation of tea drinking to mindfulness.
• I would like to use this as a way to have new sensory experiences – This is definitely true. I get very excited whenever I hear about a type of tea I haven’t had previously. If I’m being honest, my genuine attraction to tea is sensorial. With this in mind, I would like to focus more on experimenting with different types as a way to incorporate new sensory experiences in my life rather than using it as a mindfulness practice.
• If I really want to practice drinking tea mindfully, I need to use a much smaller mug – There are many times I like having a large mug of tea. Peppermint is one of my favorites for this purpose. However, as a mindfulness exercise, having a much smaller cup that I sip out of instead of drink would be preferable.
• I miss tea houses – I did not go to them very often when I lived in Houston, but I liked having them around and the atmosphere they provided. Where I live now, it is only about coffee. There are even tea rooms I looked up that don’t have any type of tea listed on the menu!

For this month, I am going to do something simple and straightforward, yet at the same time something that requires discipline and reflection. I have had passing thoughts of keeping a journal on multiple occasions in the last couple of years. Most prominently, I contemplated starting a chronic pain diary and/or depression/anxiety diary. More recently, however, I decided what would be most helpful for me is to have a motivation journal. The biggest challenge I face today is dealing with my chronic low motivation level, so this will be the primary focus of the journal I am starting.

Here are the details of this month’s challenge:

• Have at least 5 minutes of reflection on my motivation level sometime during each day. This could happen during my morning communion run or check-in, at the end of the day before retiring to bed, or while I am journaling. Basically, I want to make sure that I am reflecting on my motivation level regularly. I would like this practice to continue whether or not I stick with journaling.
• Write something down each day. It can be as little as 3 sentences. I downloaded the desktop application ‘Digital Diary’ yesterday to have a simple program I can use to record my journal entries. I can use my keyboard or my computer microphone to input my thoughts. When I have journaled in the past, the hardest part was just deciding to sit down and write something. Once I did that, I generally would have to stop myself from writing a novel. So the focus is not on amount, but consistency.
• Put up a blog post once a week to share with the world. I have been desirous of increasing my blog posts from once or twice a month to weekly for some time. This will be a perfect opportunity to start reaching this goal without having to put much more time or effort into it, since I will simply be sharing some of my journal thoughts from the week.

I am greatly looking forward to this monthly challenge. If this or any of my monthly challenges inspires any of my readers to do something similar, I would love to hear back from you and to know if there is any way I can support you.

Namaste.

This monthly challenge is inspired by a blog post I read years ago by Leo Babauta. I could not find the original article, but please check out his blog. It was one of my biggest motivations to starting this blog.

This month I would like to up my tea drinkage, but more importantly cultivate an activity to practice mindfulness each day. Ever since I began my health journey and especially when mindful living became a major part of that journey, I have felt a sense of power and peace at the mental image of drinking a cup of tea. This image and the feelings it evoked have remained constant regardless of whether or not I actually consume tea on a regular basis or even at all.

I would like to experience the full breadth of feelings that can come from mindfully drinking tea. At this point, making tea still seems like a minor chore sometimes. Therefore, I would like this challenge to shift my experience of making tea from a deliberate action to an automatic one, and possibly become part of the baseline routine of my life. Whether that ends up being the case depends of course on how the month goes.

Here are the details:

• Choose a mug before the first day of the challenge – This will be my special tea-drinking mug for the month. I want to choose one that vibes fullness and equanimity AND that is the appropriate size – not too big nor too small. I purpose to treat the mug with the same reverence that I want to experience while drinking from it. Once I finish a cup and wash up, I will store the mug in a special place.
• Make a mug of tea each day of the challenge – This is pretty straightforward. Sometime between when I wake up and go to sleep each day, I want to prepare a mug of tea. The most likely time candidates are first thing in the morning and last thing before getting in bed. Another possibility is after a meal, especially one I am eating alone. However, any time is fine as long as I make at least one mug per day.
• It’s about drinking tea, not preparing it – I have researched and experimented with tea meditation previously. Usually this involves mindfully doing every activity from the intent to prepare the tea all the way through to the washing and putting away of the tea mug. The goal is to make the entire experience a space to practice and enjoy being fully in each moment. My challenge does not concern the tea preparation or cleanup. I am primarily focused on the tea itself and cultivating the ability to savor the sensory experience.
• Do the act mindfully, but not necessarily meditatively – I absolutely love Jon Kabat-Zinn’s definition of mindfulness: awareness that arises through paying attention, on purpose, in the present moment, non-judgmentally. This is a mindset we can have regardless of what we are physically doing. Meditation, on the other hand, is an exercise designed to help us reach a state of pure awareness, where we remove ourselves from being caught up in our emotions and thoughts and simply observe them from a 3rd-person perspective. I practice meditation at least once a day both formally and informally. This challenge, however, is about cultivating a spirit of mindfulness that I can carry with me through the rest of my life. It is perfectly okay to follow and explore whatever thoughts or emotions arise in this scenario, or to just BE if that feels right.

I will conclude this post with this quote by English essayist Thomas De Quincey:                                     “Tea… will always be the favorite beverage of the intellectual.”

Namaste.

A couple of weeks ago I ended my monthly challenge of daily gratitude and no gossip. I use the word ended instead of completed or finished for a reason. While I learned a lot from the month, in no way did I conquer or fulfill the challenge. A big part of the problem was my screen addiction reasserting itself after my 30-day long hiatus the month before last. Some part of me felt I had ‘broken’ my addiction and while still considering it an issue, thought it was on the way out. I couldn’t have been more wrong; in retrospect this seems obvious. However, other problems aside, let’s discuss my successes, struggles, and observations from this previous month.

Daily Gratitude – For this portion of the challenge, I had created 4 specific objectives, which you can review here. The first week of the challenge I happened to be residing at my brother Brian’s house in Bryan, TX. I had intended to just spend the weekend, but Snowvid had other plans. The environment this created (no power, unable to travel, surrounded by kids) was coincidentally perfect for cultivating gratitude. I specifically remember one morning going for a walk and to meditate. On the way back to the house, I became enraptured with a feeling of connectedness. Reflecting on the experience later, I realized that the several inches of snow on the ground completely erased the normal boundaries that existed – between road and field, between field and yard, between forest and clearing – everything was connected on one huge white landscape. It was breathtakingly beautiful and evoked natural vibes of lovingkindness.

This first week was overwhelmingly successful. I expressed gratitude to various members of the group I was interacting with for that week, as well as texting and calling other family members to express gratitude. I loved using the gratitude app I had installed before the challenge and posted several pictures alongside my entries. I was grateful to Nia (my sister-in-law’s lab) for being my walking and meditation partner, I was grateful to Eden for being my yoga partner, and I was grateful to myself – a practice made easier by the introduction of lovingkindness meditation.

However, as all things eventually do, this week ended, the snow cleared, and life returned to pre-snowvid normal. I found myself much less naturally disposed to gratitude, and the renewed use of technology combined with my recently ended ban on screens, reignited my screen addiction.  If there is one thing screens seem to be very effective at for me, it is zapping my instinct or desire to be grateful. I’m not sure why this is, but I definitely notice the more I am around screens (whether productively or destructively) the less prone to gratefulness I am.

For the last 2 weeks of the challenge, my commitment remained very low. I would think about gratitude usually several times a day, but actually using my gratitude app or sending a thank you text to someone or just noticing and appreciating beauty in my life was a huge struggle. When I did push through the resistance, I experienced great rewards, namely an enhanced sense of well-being and a feeling of connectedness with not just the person or object of my gratitude but people and objects in general.

No Gossip – This part of the challenge I was much more successful at fulfilling. Because it involved a negative action rather than a positive one, it proved less difficult to maintain in my more depressed state of mind. The gist of this part of the challenge was to not talk about people who were not present in the conversation. I was mostly going for avoiding rumors that cast those discussed in a negative light, but was more broadly trying to make conversations exclusively about the people involved, not random third-parties.

The biggest lesson I learned about gossip is that it takes the focus off of enjoying conversation with another human being and converts it into a festival of judging and flattering. I noticed that whenever I felt the urge to gossip, it was usually because I was uncomfortable, bored, or empty and wanted a quick fix for that. Generally, however, my previous feelings would simply be converted into self-righteousness, frustration, or pity. To use Buddhist language, I had moved from aversive energies to explosive energies. Neither are optimal.

What am I going to continue moving forward?

• Gratitude app – I plan on continuing to use my gratitude app on a daily basis. I am also exploring some of the other features on the app – affirmations, daily zen, and vision board.
• Gratitude days – Once a month, I would like to have a ‘gratitude day.’ During the course of the day I will purpose to have a grateful mindset and express gratitude to as many people and in as many ways as possible.
• News only on Philosophical Appointed Times (PATs) – I definitely found being more disconnected to news and politics seemed to correlate with increased gratitude and less negativity. While I like staying up on current events, I think I can adequately do so even if I just follow or listen to news on weekends.
• Limiting “positive” gossip – Only positively speak about other people not present in the conversation once per day
• Justifying “negative” gossip – Never negatively speak about other people not present in the conversation unless absolutely necessary and ultimately for the purpose of edification

May my life be filled with gratitude. May I live in peace with others.

Namaste.