(Unedited notes from my meditation journal, 2019-08-29) 🧘✍️🧵 > Tried doing the "let thoughts pass through, stay uninvolved" thing but I don't think I was particularly successful at it (maybe this is missing the point?)
Meditation notes: boredom as a voice, not an experience
11 tweets · September 2019 · 26 likes · 0 retweets · read on Twitter
> Initially body was quite comfortable but my feet were kinda getting squashed, and eventually I switched my legs then even lifted one up
> I had quite a lot of narrative about being bored, wasting my time, being bad at the thing... And I think I was relatively able to differentiate that as narrative my mind was spinning rather than as true. Which maybe means I was doing quite well at remaining uninvolved! Ha.
(Above is unedited journal entry. What follows is reflection.) This experience was very profound for me, because it illuminated an insight: what if the part of me that was saying I was bored was... incorrect? what if I wasn't actually bored? what if I was just... sitting there?
Suddenly my complaint-voice just seemed like a voice, not necessarily a connected with an actual experience at all, let alone my whole experience. Simply a concept of boredom, or something like that.
This experience affected my experience later that day of being in conversations. I noticed the same complainy part of me was restless, vaguely wanting *something else* to be happening. Afraid of... something. But I found space to sit and discover what might emerge.
I realized today that this experience is similar to the experience of working out and a voice says "I can't, I'm done." Almost always, this is a concept of done, not the body actually giving up. I try to push this edge sincerely but not violently.
Journal 08-30 (next day) > Did "stay uninvolved" again, and didn't have nearly the level of complaint as yesterday, but near the end I noticed some impatience... the kind of waiting pattern that Kaj described. I tried to get curious about that, or moreover to just allow it to be.
> Earlier in the meditation I'd been thinking about a lot of things, interesting things, including the idea of somehow having a pricing model for complice.co like slack, where you can build up data for free but then can't access most of it until/unless you pay... 🤔
> Anyway yeah, I feel like I know what it means to stay uninvolved with judgement chatter, but less what it means to stay uninvolved with problem-solving or explorative thought. And this is related to my meditation notes/tweetstorm from a few weeks ago. 👇
Meditations since then have mostly been remarkably unremarkable. I sit. I am not as comfortable as I would like. My thoughts wander. They recenter. There's a kind of boringness to it and yet I'm not bored, I'm just there. My learning edge now I think is to stay clear & alert. 👁️
