Meditation by Intent

About a month ago I decided to try some meditation in order to settle myself into a calm center. Seeing as I had dabbled with it quite a while ago I figured it would be easy enough to just step back into, sort of like riding a bike. The thing is it feels like a different bike. I am different than I was so many years ago so I must look at the inner self from another angle now, which I suppose was to be expected.

Finding the time to create a quiet atmosphere seems to be the trick. Once things get going in the morning and everyone is up and getting ready for the day there is no real quiet time until everyone settles into bed at night. That ranges from about 6 or 7am until some time after 10pm. I tried meditating late in the evening but found that I would just fall asleep. Seeing as I already like getting up early to capture some of that quiet time before the sun rises I figured I would just time things to have more of that time to myself. As a result my new optimum wake up time is 5am, which poses the problem of getting enough sleep to function for the rest of the day.

Getting a minimum of eight hours of sleep a night is a decent goal so I now just set my alarm (ipod crickets) for eight hours after I go to bed. This has my wake up anywhere from 5 to 6am if I can get to bed by 10pm. At least as winter approaches and night creeps in much earlier this is not so hard. We also heat with wood so on the really cold windy nights I might be up at 3am anyway re-stocking the woodstove.

I went looking for some online information about meditation as the one book that I have is a small "Easy Guide to Meditation" by Roy Eugene Davis. While it is a good start it doesn't cover as much as I would like, although I am not sure what there is to cover really.

Like everything else there is very little signal to noise online so my BS filter has to be set on high gain while I dredge through all of the possible online links. I ended up not really finding anything that suited me, most were trying to sell audio meditation aids, so I am just going to push on and do my own thing.

My own thing seems to be working just fine anyway.

Jeff.