meditate regularly

I’ve been doing this pretty regularly for about a month now. I missed one morning when I was visiting my parents (they both smoke heavily, and I couldn’t handle breathing deeply through my nose!), and also one morning when I overslept – but I did keep it up while out-of-town at a conference (and having meditated in the a.m. probably helped with a presentation that I gave). I don’t know if I’ve really got the hang of this yet; I still struggle with controlling the monkey mind. But I do think it gives me a positive start to my day.

... for about ten minutes. It felt pretty good, and I accept that it will be awhile before I really get the hang of it and calm the “monkey mind.” I used the mantra that I mentioned in last night’s entry.

I am filled with perfect love.
Perfect love casts out fear.
Breathing in, I fill with love.
Breathing out, I cast out fear.

I set an alarm on my iPod to have a gentle nudge when my ten minutes were up. At first, I was going to meditate without music (just keeping my earbuds on to hear the alarm), but I had a harder time focusing without it. So I put on some neutral, New Age-y stuff, and that seemed to help.