A LUCILIUS PARABLE: REBOOT/RENEW

January 1st, 2023

After a month Lucilius woke up. He breathed deeply and sat up, and saw himself in the mirror. He stood and walked toward it until he was standing face-to-face with himself. He looked at the skin of his face. Raise a hand to it and felt how smooth it was. He smiled, watching the change, then moved his expression through a series of extremes: surprise and fright, sadness and delight. All the while watching how his face changed. He laughed and shook his head, amazed. He didn’t look a day older than 16 years old.

He checked out of the facility and started to jog home. He’d gotten a ride to the facility but feeling so limber, with so much energy, it felt as though his body just wanted to run. So he did.

And while he glided along, taking route by the water along the city, his mind drifted back to the work that waited for him. The work he’d been at for many years now. Progress had slowed and slowed until it was clear the demising returns pointed at only one thing: Lucilius wasn’t going to figure out how to finish the project. He knew the subject, the field so well, but as he’d aged and as the project has grown in complexity, his thinking only seemed to solidify. Of course he discovered new and useful data, but there was something he sensed about the mental acrobatics required that finally made him take the plunge. 

This was how most people were handling long term projects, and the method was discovered by accident. It had long been known that the flavor of intelligence a person has changes over time. In youth intelligence is fluid, depending on a powerful short term memory, but as humans age fluid intelligence eventually gives way to crystalized intelligence, one that operates based on a vast array of knowledge and expertise. But anti-aging tech had been undertaken for more obvious reasons: being young - the ultimate products a draw for everyone. 

What people discovered though, was when they returned to their projects and problems after anti-aging therapy, it was often accompanied with incredible breakthroughs. It became clear very quickly what was happening. It wasn’t just the bodies of these people that was going back in age, the very structure of their brains were effected, and the once lost fluid intelligence was regained, but the memories of long study and work were still retained. By regenerating their bodies and minds people were able to see old problems with fresh perspectives, contorting and twisting ideas in ways they’d never considered. 

Many people now, Lucilius included, now used anti-aging and age-forwarding as methods to fast track progress on projects. Depending on what stage a project was in, people were calibrating their biological clock to best fit with the style and flavor of thinking required.

Lucilius was extremely old by this point, but he ran with his body now looking and performing like the 16 year old he once was so many years ago.

It felt good to run, and by the time he was finally home he’d gone over the project in his mind. He didn’t even stop to take a shower, he immediately pulled the project up on holographic digi-screens, raised his hands and started ripping components apart, spinning them, and reassembling. Vast conduits of information and function ceased, severed and rebound before him, and he smiled, finally seeing the solution that he’d been missing.

LEGITIMATE ADVENTURE

December 28th, 2022

Adventure is a cute word. It’s used with children and it’s the stuff of fairy tales and action movies. It’s a quaint concept on the surface, but only because so few people actually take the idea seriously. No, seriously, is your life turning out to be a legitimate adventure?

Well, what would that mean? What are the components of an adventure?When scraped of all potential gravity, it’s something we think of as fun. But is adventure fun all the time? Think of your favorite adventure stories. Was the hero always having a blast? 

Not at all. And this is perhaps the hallmark of adventure: it’s hard. There are challenges so overwhelming that they often put the hero’s very life at risk. Could anything be less superficial?

Modern life is so replete with comfort and safety that the very notion of life being “at risk” is so foreign, so utterly removed from the norm that adventure, as a result, is a concept most people cannot properly fathom. How many times has your life quite literally hung in the balance? Or how about the times when life was truly uncomfortable - not due to stress, like financials and relationships, but when you were so cold you were worried you might not wake up? Or when you literally could not figure out a way out of a situation? Trapped in a glacier? Or met with oncoming trucks in both lanes of a highway?

Likely most people have a moment or two that they can recall when life drew to a pinch in a wholly unexpected and nerve-wracking way. But how many people set up their lives with a goal that requires venturing into risky situations? Certainly law enforcement and military falls into this category, and perhaps the converse of crime life and hard drugs..but outside of these extremes, legitimate adventure can be hard to come by. Short of becoming a homeless ascetic, life is equipped with soft bumpers on all sides. Caution notices that point out absurd safety measures. Danger is practically, literally, outlawed. So what kind of lives does this situation leave us to live. Do we have as many options that were on offer 200 years ago? 500? 10,000?

We were a nomadic species, gathering food and hunting enormous beasts, twisting the raw components of our environment to ingenious advantage. And now we squeeze our souls into the confines of tedious jobs and flimsy relationships.

Part of this can be solved with reframing. We don’t battle the enormous dragon with a sword. Those are analogs for far less flashy items: the dragon is an ethereal force dragging you down, and the sword is often just discipline, perseverance and perhaps a dash of ingenuity required to recognize one of the rare ways to leverage some asymmetric advantage in this cluttered and complex world. The fairy-tale-video-game analogy is best reversed though. It’s better to see life’s obstacles (debt, depressing job, toxic relationships) as the dragon, as the puzzle-temple to solve. The magic of life is lost in its bland tedium and nacring over our eyes with a flashy analog can help rustle up ancient reserves of creative determination. Imagine your life, not by the stale terms we define it with, but as a patch work constellation in the mythic form, the way a child might see it. But even then, don’t forget that legitimate adventure is always on offer. It’s just no longer the default, as it once was when our species was clawing at the face of reality just to survive and a chance to thrive. In fact, the real adventure hidden in and around the normal safe facets of life may in fact be the only way to thrive.

MEDITATION DRAFT SESSION 6: FAILURE IS IDEAL

December 26th, 2022

On Monday Tinkered Thinking releases a draft of a lesson from the forthcoming meditation app, currently called The Tinkered Mind (If you can think of a better name, please reach out. I'm not crazy about the current one, but I'll be damned if I let an imperfect name keep me from developing a good idea.) The rationale here is simply to stave off project stagnation by taking a wish to work with words on a daily basis (Tinkered Thinking Posts) and combine it with adjacent projects. This also gives regular readers a chance to get a preview of what I'm cooking up and to get feedback before the app launches, which is a tactic that has proved extremely useful with other projects unrelated to Tinkered Thinking. 

One further introductory note: The goal of this meditation app is predominantly aimed at helping individuals build a robust daily habit by breaking that habit down and tackling it's consitituent parts one at a time and aiding the process with a new and innovative way of tracking progress, the likes of which has not been seen in other meditation apps or habit tracking apps.

Again, if you have any feedback, please reach out via Twitter  

Session 6: Failure is Ideal

Take a moment to sit and arrange your posture. Maintain a straight back with plenty of space for the abdomen to expand and do your best to stick to the posture instructions while seeking comfort. There is a sweet spot that will arise when the crossed legs and the back all sink into a place that feels simultaneously strong and relaxed.

Once you’re ready begin breathing with deep exhales. Again, the idea is to have a relatively quick inhale and a slow, longer exhale. I’ll count out a few 4 count inhales followed by exhales with a count of 8

Inhale till 4, starting on 

1 - 2 - 3 - 4

hold for a moment and then exhale  

8 - 7 - 6 - 5 - 4 - 3 - 2 -1

Then..

Inhale again till 4, starting on 

1 - 2 - 3 - 4

hold for a moment and then exhale  

8 - 7 - 6 - 5 - 4 - 3 - 2 -1

Continue this for a couple more breaths, and feel free to allow the exhales to be as long as you want. And once you are ready let your breathing transition to coherence breathing where inhales and exhales are the same length.

So when do we get to the meditating? You may have wondered this over the last couple days while we get a few foundational habit rolling. Today we’ll attempt to engage with a mindfulness exercise, and as the title of the session implies, the idea here is to fail.

This isn’t a trick or a quaint and contradictory repackaging designed to glide under the radar. We are very deliberately going to seek out a very specific instance of failure.

Popular preconceptions of meditation maintain a notion of a mind that is somehow serene and empty, devoid of thought and emotion - a perfectly inert place. This sort of idea needs to be pushed aside for the time being. The aim here is to develop a very practical ability to instantiate instances of mindfulness. 

Say for example we are going to spend 15 seconds concentrating solely on the breath. With this kind of task there’s a clear condition for suggest and failure. But instead of success, we are aiming to detect failure. So during the 15 seconds of silence that we will engage with, do try to focus on the slow even rise and fall of the breath. But, most importantly, be on the looking out for thoughts that pop up that have nothing to do with focusing on the breath. Remember, there is no need to shun these thoughts or feel negative in anyway that they occur. Just gently attempt to bring the mind back to the breath. Enjoy the next 15 seconds of breathing and see if at the end you can identify one single thought that was off topic.

15 SECONDS OF SILENCE

So how did you do? Were you able to focus solely on your inhales and exhales during that 15 seconds or was there a stray thought or two… or three that crept in?

Perhaps you are a rare individual and you were able to maintain focus solely on the breath for this brief period of time. If that’s the case I suggest setting the silent timer for an hour, after this session and seeing if any thoughts pop up during this time.

Otherwise, it’s more likely that thoughts did pop up, but it was so subtle you didn’t even notice you were having the thought. This is what’s happening most of the time during our waking lives. It’s actually much like a dream - thoughts are happening and we don’t even realize they are happening. 

If you were able to detect a thought, and at the end of those 15 seconds you were able to recognize: oh, I had a thought about this, or that, then congratulations, you succeeded in the simple task of noticing failure.

This is what the bulk of mindfulness training entails in the beginning - simply noticing that your mind is preoccupied with some sort of thought. The preoccupation and presence of a thought can be thought of as a “failure” to focus on the right thing, but the simple ability to simply recognize that the thought is present and in the way of the real object of focus is mindfulness!

It’s almost as if we develop a second attention. One that takes a bird’s eye view of the mind and which can eventually see quite quickly and swiftly that the mind has become distracted. Many people seem to think of meditation as a kind of flow state - where the mind is in a single unchanging state for some period of time. But it’s better to think of it as quite the opposite: as a very active period when you are on guard to notice what happens in the mind. Each thought that pops up is like a weed that we need to pull. Or it can even be like a game of Hungry Hungry Hippos where thoughts are popping up left and right. Most of the time we are simply oblivious as if hypnotized by all the commotion. But in the beginning, mindfulness is a very active process of noticing thoughts and recognizing them as they emerge.

Even as you are hearing these words, there’s likely a whole commotion of thought bubbling up around each syllable and sentence as you are reminded of other things or as distractions and worries bubble up.

So let’s engage with another 15 seconds of silence and try to see how many times the mind wanders off the task of focusing on the breath, starting now.

15 SECONDS OF SILENCE

Perhaps you noticed a few more thoughts this time? In the beginning it’s quite likely that the mind is absolutely buzzing, and if you only notice one thought, or if you can barely pay attention to a single inhalation without thoughts flooding your experience, that’s completely ok. Noticing just one stray thought during these periods of silence is a fundamental success.

One useful way to think of this business of thoughts and the sheer number of them that can exist is to think of them all as a huge backlog of thoughts you haven’t given proper space and attention to. In a way, thoughts are a lot like children. Anyone who has spent significant time with children knows that a child is almost constantly trying to get an adult’s attention, and often that’s all they need. Once we give them a little of our time, attention and energy, they seem satisfied and get back to their play. Thoughts are just like this. They can bubble around the periphery of our consciousness, causing stress and tension, but once we notice and deliberately recognize the thought, poof, it vanishes. So imagine an enormous backlog of thoughts like this. Like a long line of children who are all waiting to get a little slice of your attention, but who let you be once they’ve got it.

Instead of seeing the near constant stream of thoughts that crop up as somehow being bad or failing at meditation or mindfulness, see it instead as the main work. Your task is simply to notice each thought and give them a tiny bit of attention until they vanish and you can go back to focusing on the object of attention you wish to have - in our case, focusing on the breath. After enough sessions doing this, the backlog of thoughts will thin, and grow small. Now, it certainly replenishes, but if we can remain consistent and deliberate in our practice, we eventually get through the backlog of thoughts and then we experience these brief and lovely instances of being present. This doesn’t happen overnight, but in time these instances of peaceful presence grow larger and more numerous, and eventually it becomes something we can invoke at will during any part of our day. It becomes a muscle that we train daily which we can use when anger flares up unexpectedly, or when we wish to sink deeper into a pleasant experience.

But most importantly remember this takes time. Tt’s why there is such an emphasis in this program to aim for a long term habit of meditation. This isn’t a weekend get-away, it’s not a spa treatment, it’s more like cleaning house - a house that has never been cleaned, and that takes time and deliberate attention. So there’s absolutely no reason to beat yourself up or think you are “bad” at meditation if the silence we explore here seems to leave you drowning in thoughts. That is completely fine and it’s expected. In fact it should raise some suspicion if it’s not the case. If it doesn’t seem like you have many thoughts, then it’s likely they are not getting noticed at all. This simple and subtle act of noticing a thought can take time to find and get good at. It’s a bit like noticing a dream. Few can do it and it rarely happens spontaneously. Luckily, thoughts are a little more explicit because we can consciously invoke them, and often do.

Now, as this session wraps up, let’s transition from coherence breathing back to deep exhales, and try to notice any thoughts that pop up as we go through out counts.

Inhale till 4, starting on 

1 - 2 - 3 - 4

hold for a moment and then exhale  

8 - 7 - 6 - 5 - 4 - 3 - 2 -1

Then..

Inhale again till 4, starting on 

1 - 2 - 3 - 4

hold for a moment and then exhale  

8 - 7 - 6 - 5 - 4 - 3 - 2 -1

Continue like this for a few more moments while the session ends and think about how these simple breathing techniques are something you can carry with you through out the day - practices you can use whenever you need a sense of clarity and calm. 

MEDITATION DRAFT SESSION 5: RITUAL INCENTIVE

December 19th, 2022

On Monday Tinkered Thinking releases a draft of a lesson from the forthcoming meditation app, currently called The Tinkered Mind (If you can think of a better name, please reach out. I'm not crazy about the current one, but I'll be damned if I let an imperfect name keep me from developing a good idea.) The rationale here is simply to stave off project stagnation by taking a wish to work with words on a daily basis (Tinkered Thinking Posts) and combine it with adjacent projects. This also gives regular readers a chance to get a preview of what I'm cooking up and to get feedback before the app launches, which is a tactic that has proved extremely useful with other projects unrelated to Tinkered Thinking. 

One further introductory note: The goal of this meditation app is predominantly aimed at helping individuals build a robust daily habit by breaking that habit down and tackling it's consitituent parts one at a time and aiding the process with a new and innovative way of tracking progress, the likes of which has not been seen in other meditation apps or habit tracking apps.

Again, if you have any feedback, please reach out via Twitter  

Session 5: Ritual Incentive

Take a moment to sit and arrange your posture. If the sitting instructions from the last session are still a bit of a confusing haze, don’t worry. Simply try to maintain a straight back with plenty of space for the abdomen to expand. And remember you can always repeat past guided sessions. This will preserve your access to lessons and increase your momentum score.

Once you’re ready begin breathing with deep exhales. Again, the idea is to have a relatively quick inhale and a slow, longer exhale. I’ll count out a few 4 count inhales followed by exhales with a count of 8

Inhale till 4, starting on 

1 - 2 - 3 - 4

hold for a moment and then exhale  

8 - 7 - 6 - 5 - 4 - 3 - 2 -1

Then..

Inhale again till 4, starting on 

1 - 2 - 3 - 4

hold for a moment and then exhale  

8 - 7 - 6 - 5 - 4 - 3 - 2 -1

Continue this for a couple more breaths, and feel free to allow the exhales to be as long as you want. And once you are ready let your breathing transition to coherence breathing where inhales and exhales are the same length.

Making a habit of taking time during each day to sit is more important than anything we try to do with the mind during any given session. This is particularly true in the beginning, but it will always be true: a session of meditation that feels like a complete waste of time is better than no session simply due to the fact that it adds to the momentum of our habit of meditation and makes it more likely that we will discover the benefits of the practice as a mature and long lived habit. It’s important to really let this long term idea sink in: the real benefits of meditation are mostly in the future. Yes, right now we are taking time to consciously breath in ways that create immediate beneficial changes in physiology and this is certainly a short term benefit but our real target is more distant, and in light of that, a large part of our focus is devising mechanisms to ensure that we practice today and practice tomorrow. In some ways this is our main goal. 

This is the case with any habit: going to the gym every day no matter what - even if you do nothing but check in and leave - its bound to lead to realizations about your body and physical fitness.

The idea here is to entertain and educate on the topic of meditation while the initial stages of a setting habit and a breathing habit develop. All while the back strengthens, the breathing techniques have their daily effect  and your posture shores up.

Many people struggle for years by fits and starts, each time trying to become a habitual meditator. It’s the philosophy of this meditation program that most apps and teacher and programs ask too much of beginner and fail to give enough practical and logistical information about how to incorporate the practice into the rest of life. Perhaps this is because experienced meditators who have become teachers fail to remember just how difficult it can be in the beginning, especially for someone who would like to have a meditation practice but who doesn’t necessarily have the level of passion and enthusiasm that most meditation teacher no doubt exhibited when they first started. And as a result, a lot of people renowned for meditation are likely blind - not only to the challenges that face the beginner, the skeptic or the person who just doesn’t have much energy for it, but such “gurus” are inevitably also blind to potential solutions to these problems they aren’t necessarily aware of. Or in simpler terms: how does an ordinary person without such overwhelming passion for meditation still succeed at creating a meditation habit? That’s the area where this program is acutely focused.

Now, in support of trying to make things easier in the beginning, it can be very effective to design a set of ritual incentives that take place in tandem with your meditation practice. A ritual incentive is just some sort of little reward that makes it a bit more likely that you will sit down and practice.

This can be as simple as meditating while the morning coffee brews or cools to the perfect temperature. Taking that first sip of coffee as your reward for having completed a meditation session can go a long way to helping this habit stick. It certainly doesn’t hurt that coffee can be a bit addictive due to the caffeine content. That’s sort of the goal. In some sense a good habit is simply a beneficial addiction.

Remember you can always put that coffee in a thermos and have it in front of you waiting while you meditate in order to keep it hot. Or just put a plate over your mug to keep it hot longer, and think of it as a reward. At this stage in the game it’s completely fine to leverage the simpler, limbic components of the brain to help generate a robust habit.

So be it a cup of coffee or a hot shower, or sitting with your to-do list and planning the day, give it some thought and don’t be afraid to play around with different ideas. Try to find a consistent place in your day - at the same time - when you can sit and commit to this practice. Reward yourself in some small way after each session - ideally something positive and if that reward is something that’s already a part of your day,  then all the better as this habit will have a higher chance of lasting if it’s paired with something that’s already a robust part of your routine. 

Now, as this session wraps up, let’s transition from coherence breathing back to deep exhales.

Inhale till 4, starting on 

1 - 2 - 3 - 4

hold for a moment and then exhale  

8 - 7 - 6 - 5 - 4 - 3 - 2 -1

Then..

Inhale again till 4, starting on 

1 - 2 - 3 - 4

hold for a moment and then exhale  

8 - 7 - 6 - 5 - 4 - 3 - 2 -1

Continue like this for a few more moments while the session ends and think about how these simple breathing techniques are something you can carry with you through out the day - practices you can use whenever you need a sense of clarity and calm. 

MEDITATION DRAFT SESSION 4: A SITTING PRACTICE

December 12th, 2022

On Monday Tinkered Thinking releases a draft of a lesson from the forthcoming meditation app, currently called The Tinkered Mind (If you can think of a better name, please reach out. I'm not crazy about the current one, but I'll be damned if I let an imperfect name keep me from developing a good idea.) The rationale here is simply to stave off project stagnation by taking a wish to work with words on a daily basis (Tinkered Thinking Posts) and combine it with adjacent projects. This also gives regular readers a chance to get a preview of what I'm cooking up and to get feedback before the app launches, which is a tactic that has proved extremely useful with other projects unrelated to Tinkered Thinking. 

One further introductory note: The goal of this meditation app is predominantly aimed at helping individuals build a robust daily habit by breaking that habit down and tackling it's consitituent parts one at a time and aiding the process with a new and innovative way of tracking progress, the likes of which has not been seen in other meditation apps or habit tracking apps.

Again, if you have any feedback, please reach out via Twitter  

Session 4: A Sitting Practice

Today is about posture and how to sit while meditating. But to begin with, let’s take a moment for our habit in terms breathing. Take a comfortable seat, and once you’re ready begin breathing with deep exhales. Again, the idea is to have a relatively quick inhale and a slow, longer exhale. I’ll count out a few 4 count inhales followed by exhales with a count of 8

Inhale till 4, starting on 

1 - 2 - 3 - 4

hold for a moment and then exhale  

8 - 7 - 6 - 5 - 4 - 3 - 2 -1

Then..

Inhale again till 4, starting on 

1 - 2 - 3 - 4

hold for a moment and then exhale  

8 - 7 - 6 - 5 - 4 - 3 - 2 -1

Continue this for a couple more breaths, and feel free to allow the exhales to be as long as you want. And once you are ready let your breathing transition to coherence breathing where inhales and exhales are the same length.

Meditation is very much about being able to sit quietly alone, and as Blaise Pascal once said, all of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone. He might not be completely right, but he certainly has a good point worth testing. With enough practice meditating a lot of problems do seem to melt away, not all of them of course, but when the mind’s attention is well trained, many problems prove to simply not be worth the attention.

Today we explore another habit that makes up the small collection of behaviors that result in a meditation habit. We’ve explored breathing, and each day we now take time to dedicate to the practice, and today is all about the mechanics of sitting and the reasons behind them.

You’ve likely seen images of the buddha or other meditators sitting cross legged, often on a small cushion. The buddha, for example, is purported to have sat on a tree root with his legs crossed.

Now, unless you are medically bedridden, do try to make every effort to practice sitting in the way that we’ll describe here. This sitting posture we’re going to go over might be uncomfortable or feel a bit odd at first, and that’s understandable, that can be expected. But, keep in mind how adaptable the human body is. Give muscles, tendons and joints a little time in a new position and they figure out how to be right at home, and forewarning, you will need a sturdy cushion of some sort for future lessons. If you have one that you can use during this session now, feel free to pause and get it.

The whole point of the a meditation posture is to make breathing with the diaphragm easier and more comfortable. Consider this counter-example: we all have a very difficult time breathing when bent over as though trying to pick up something off the floor while standing. In that awkward position the abdomen and chest are cramped and there’s no space for things to expand in order for air to fill the space when we breath. We want the exact opposite when we sit to meditate: to comfortably orient the body so that breathing can be as effortless as possible. This also means breathing in a way that doesn’t require the chest to lift.

Try it right now: take one breath by expanding the chest upward and out, letting the shoulders rise….

And then try a second breath without moving the chest at all, and instead pushing the belly out.

The second method is what we’re after and in order to do this comfortably, we need to make as much room as possible for the diaphragm to pull down from the bottom of the ribcage and into the center of the abdomen. Notice that this is quite easy while standing. There’s nothing in the way of the abdomen to expand in any direction. But how do we do this while sitting? This is where a traditional meditation posture becomes so useful: it creates enough space for the abdomen to expand so that we can breath effortlessly. So how exactly do we do that?

Keep in mind there are visuals for everything I’m about to describe if you go to the posture section in the app, so if any of these descriptions are confusing, that section should clear up any failure on my part to adequately describe what’s going on with this business of sitting.

Imagine for a moment what it’s like to kneel - or in fact, do it right now: kneel as though in prayer, either by sitting on your heels with your shins and the tops of the feet flat against the floor, or with the bottoms of your feet facing the space behind you, and your toes curled forward.

In this sort of posture - with a straight upright back - the profile angle created by your torso and your thighs is greater than 90 degrees - and that’s the key takeaway here. Your thighs and your knees are pointing downward toward the ground, away from your abdomen, and this allows your abdomen and the area of the stomach and diaphragm to have plenty of room to expand outward and down through the front of the pelvic area while breathing. Try it, while kneeling, breath by pushing the belly out. Notice there’s more room for the belly to expand between the belly button and the pelvic floor.

Compare this to sitting in a chair, where the angle between your thighs and your torso is more acute - about 90 degrees if you’re sitting upright and not slouching, and this actually cramps the space needed for an expanding abdomen. Slouching cramps this space even more, forcing our breathing to be accomplished more by lifting the chest which is what we want to keep away from. It’s a bit similar to the feeling you get when it’s hard to breath because you’ve over eaten. The reason is the same. Your abdomen is cramped for space, and can’t accommodate the diaphragm trying to pull down into it.

The difference between kneeling as though in prayer and the meditation posture is that the knees, while still pointing roughly downwards, away from the body are spread out and the feet and ankles are Brought forward in front of the body and crossed. Opening the legs this way creates even more room in the lower abdomen. But of course if we shift from kneeling to this meditation posture, we’d no longer have our own feet to sit on, and we’d fall backwards, hence the need for a cushion to sit on.

Keep in mind this profile angle between your torso and thighs as you try to get comfortable on a cushion. You might need a couple of pillows. Keep your legs crossed on the ground in front of the pillows, and realize also this can take a little while to get the hang of. If you feel like you’re sliding forward off the pillow toward your ankles… well then you’re not quite there, but you’re making progress. So fool around with it. After some time, be it a couple days or even a couple weeks, you’ll get it and it’ll feel perfectly natural and very comfortable. Most important is to keep your back straight, right up through your neck, so your abdomen has as much space as possible. This posture, as opposed to just sitting flat on the ground also ensures that the legs don’t fall asleep. If your legs are falling asleep than a likely cause is that the fusion you’re using isn’t giving you enough vertical support and you need a taller cushion.

Now, the type of cushion used can make the task of figuring out this meditation posture much easier and quicker. Down pillows used for sleeping will crush down to virtually nothing if sat on, and stacking a few can make the entire enterprise a bit wobbly - especially for a beginner. Cushions filled with a more solid material like a small bean bag or ones filled with buckwheat work very well and these can be found online quite easily by searching for “buckwheat meditation cushion.”

So to quickly review the practicality of the meditation posture, the idea is to elevate the body with a cushion while keeping the legs crossed in front of the cushion. This opens the area of the abdomen by keeping the thighs angled down and out, away from the body. With a straight back and hands resting lightly on the thighs, breathing with the diaphragm will be very comfortable and easy. There should be no need for the chest to rise while breathing, and our practice won’t be hindered by any limbs that fall asleep.

Of course you are welcome and encouraged to listen to these sessions multiple times, so feel free to review these instructions for sitting and take a moment after this session to check out the visuals in the posture section of the app if you haven’t already. But at the start here, don’t worry if it’s uncomfortable or if you “don’t get it” the most important part is that you have started and you keep tinkering with the posture. I promise given a few days, or maybe even a couple weeks, the body will start to figure it out. There’s no need to overthink it too much.

Now, as this session wraps up, let’s transition from coherence breathing back to deep exhales.

Inhale till 4, starting on 

1 - 2 - 3 - 4

hold for a moment and then exhale  

8 - 7 - 6 - 5 - 4 - 3 - 2 -1

Then..

Inhale again till 4, starting on 

1 - 2 - 3 - 4

hold for a moment and then exhale  

8 - 7 - 6 - 5 - 4 - 3 - 2 -1

Continue like this for a few more moments while the session ends and think about how these simple breathing techniques are something you can carry with you through out the day - practices you can use whenever you need a sense of clarity and calm.