A Month of Mindfulness

Salvēte omnēs!

I'm back!! Where have I been? Well, many places, including some excellent conferences, and I will have reports from those posted soon. But for the past month I have embarked on an interesting quest, partly inspired by reading the Zen Teacher (more about it, as well as Dan Tricarico, at his blog here.) Those of you that know me personally are aware of my yoga practice as well as my being a meditator. And those things have been going on for years, with tremendous benefits. But the book got me thinking about routines and self-care in a different way - such that I decided to actually establish a daily mindfulness meditation practice for a month. In the past, I meditated, but there was no consistent habit or routine to it. I just managed to incorporate it often enough. This was going to be different!

In fact, so different that at first, I couldn't decide how I wanted to do it. I could not choose between trying to build the habit in the morning or in the evening. Both times had advantages and disadvantages. I had two tools and I could not choose between them - mindful drawing and the tremendous Headspace App. Both tools had advantages of providing reminders and 'pulling' on me to keep up the habit. I was physically carrying around my art materials and the phone app could pester me with notifications. I also had some boosts along the way - Miriam Patrick had created her #take5latin challenge, providing inspiration, and my school had paid for a subscription on Headspace, allowing me to access to many, many options for guided meditations. But in the end, there were no firm decisions made about these. It just kind of happened the way it happened.

Here is the finished result of my time in mindful drawing -

As per Miriam's 'Take Five' challenge, it includes:

-arbor
-ruber
-charta
-scribere
-serpens

On the Headspace app, I worked my way through the first basic pack, a bunch of the minis and singles (the End of Day one is a favorite), plus portions of the Self-Esteem, Regret, and Stress packs.

If it seems like this post is lacking in detail, it is. It could provide statistics, or answers to questions like "when exactly did you start? are there other pieces of art? do you actually meditate every single day?" For that last one, I'm not quite sure - and I think that's the way a 'Zen Teacher' would have it be.