Notes on three months of consistent meditation
Three months back, I pulled my copy of The Mind Illuminated off my bookshelf and began a consistent meditation routine. It was kind of on a whim, but since I've had a fair bit of unstructured free time this summer, I decided to give meditation an honest go to see what would happen.
In the past, I managed to maintain a meditation streak of nearly a year, but the quality of my meditation during that time was not very high. I often meditated for only 10-15 minutes per day during that time, and I didn't have a clear sense of what I should be doing during my sits or what I should expect to happen.
Thankfully, The Mind Illuminated is very explicit about the instructions to use at various levels of progression, what the experience at each stage feels like, and what progress you can expect with continued practice. Following the book's directions, I've worked my way up to a much more substantial 45 minutes for most sits.
A few observations of the effects I've noticed this time around:
- My caffeine sensitivity has greatly increased. During stressful or busy periods of my life, I'd often drink 3-4 cups of coffee per day, and during more typical periods I'd settle at 2 cups before noon. Now, anything more than one small cup early in the morning makes it hard to fall sleep. This is quite strange since I've never had problems with sleeping before.
- Comparing the experience of meditating early in the morning to how it feels later in the day makes it obvious how quickly distractions accumulate. It's much easier to maintain stable attention in the morning than in the afternoon or evening. And after I've spent some time on the computer, the state of the mind during meditation is very agitated.
- Boredom and agitation during sits mostly disappeared within a few weeks. A 45 minute session doesn't feel like a struggle.
- In the day to day, it doesn't feel as if I've become more productive or that working feels any easier. But looking back on my work logs, it's clear that I've been getting a lot more done after I started meditating in earnest. I don't know if this relationship is causal, since I've also been making adjustments to my work habits, but it does seem worth mentioning.
Meditation is a lot like physical exercise. But maybe closer to cardio than to strength training. An untrained individual starting strength training could potentially observe significant improvements within a week -- an increase of 5-10 reps for a given weight/exercise, for example. My experience meditating has not been like that at all. It's much more like running, where session-to-session changes seem imperceptible, but looking back to where I was a month ago, I can tell that my capacity has improved.
I've been using a small tally counter as a tool during my meditations. Whenever I notice that my mind has wandered away from the object of meditation, I give it a very satisfying click, and then bring my attention back to the object of meditation. At the end, I can look at the number to get a rough sense of how distracted or settled my mind was during the session.
I haven't been writing down these results anywhere since I don't want to get too attached to the number. The goal isn't necessarily to get to a lower number, since more frequently catching your attention drifting is a good thing. But it is interesting to observe how the number fluctuates over time.
I can't say that my day-to-day mental state has changed much compared to three months ago -- I'm generally a calm and content person by natural disposition -- but it is obvious that my ability to direct attention during meditations sessions has improved. Not sure what that's worth, but I intend to continue practice to see how things progress.