Still Here: Week 6 Retrospective and Week 7 Preview

So, I made it through Week 6 of my meditation program.

(As a reminder, during Week 6, I alternated 45 minutes of yoga and 45 minutes of sitting meditation each morning this week. Well, I actually only did 30 minutes of sitting meditation on my meditation days. 45 just seemed so…long.)

The tricky part this week was that my husband was out of town and my mom was visiting and sleeping in my normal yoga-and-meditation space.

As a rule, I don’t handle upheavals in my routine very well.

I moved my morning practice upstairs and, by some miracle, kept my schedule for six of the seven days of Week 6. Each night I set the alarm for 5am, and each morning, with the help of the cats, I got up before the alarm,washed my face in cold water, bribed the cats with freeze-dried liver treats, and then retired to the office for yoga or meditation. That quiet time was quite pleasant and perhaps even necessary to maintaining some degree of calm during my not-at-all-routine days.

After my husband got home Thursday night, I found the routine harder to keep. Saturday I skipped yoga but did an abbreviated practice before bed. Sunday (day one of Week 7) I skipped entirely.

But today, I’m back in action with a morning yoga practice (and a blog post), although not without a fair amount of bellyaching.

For Week 7, I’m supposed to stop using the yoga and meditation recordings and just do 45 minutes per day of some combination of practice on my own. I’m thinking about doing 30 minutes of yoga in the morning and 15 minutes of sitting meditation in the evening because I like the feeling I get doing yoga in the wee hours of the morning and I like having a little moment of calm and reconnection to look forward to in the evenings. I missed that during Week 5 and Week 6 when all of my practice was in the morning.

I’ve got a few other blog posts floating around in my brain, but blogging just hasn’t been a priority since I started my meditation practice. I’m not sure why, but it feels less important than it once did. I also feel like I’m having a more difficult time expressing myself in writing than I have in the past. Maybe all of this “pondering the mysteries of the universe” is leaving me speechless.

Or maybe getting up before 5am most mornings is just catching up with me.

Related articles

• On Overcoming a Jinx (imperfecthappiness.wordpress.com)
• Week 3: Still Sitting (imperfecthappiness.wordpress.com)
• Unintended Consequences (imperfecthappiness.wordpress.com)
• A Different Kind of Hedonism (imperfecthappiness.wordpress.com)
• Mindfulness Meditation, Week 1 of 8: Done (imperfecthappiness.wordpress.com)