mouseonmars

Early September I participated in a 10-day Vipassana course. For 11 days I got up at 4 AM, ha ha! Sleepin time was 9h30 so we had 6h30 of sleep average.
I kind of miss the morning bell now, seriously. It wasn’t so hard to get up, I really miss this feeling of slightly hazy mind, showering and slowly mkaing my way to the meditation hall and then sitting there for the 2hour meditation. About half the students were there, it was still dark outside, and very calm.

But to be honest I had to get an hour of sleep after the first group meditation, so I slept again each morning between 10-11am. After that I felt really knocked out for a little while but after the lunch I had the energy to sit the other meditations for the rest of the day.

After the course I wanted to continue to practice morning and evening as recommended, so instead of getting up at 8am for work as I used to, I now get up at 6h30-6h45, and I sleep in at 22h30-23h.

I still get up between 8-9am during the weekend…

My sleep has gotten a little better since the Vipassana course. But I still need 7h30 of sleep on average.

I was told that with regular practice, when doing concentration or vipassana before sleeping, you will eventually get as much rest with 6h than with 7h or more.

I will consider this goal attained when I get up at 5h30 every day !

I participated in a 10-day Vipassana course as taught by S.N.Goenka early September. Since then I’ve been doing my best to continue to practice 1 hour each morning and evening as recommended. So I guess I’m back on track with this goal.

Some closing comments..

“Remembering the Kanji” works, plain and simple. It’s also incredibly easy… at least in theory. It turns out that the hard work, instead of rote memorization, is self-motivation, discipline, and just keeping at it.

All in all I started April 2005 and I had at least 3 full months breaks, so it took me approximately 6 months. Early on I had an average of 20 kanji a day, but past the halfway mark I slowed to about 10 kanji a day, and 1h30 sessions. I know some people have completed RTK1 in 4 months or less and others have spent nearly a year. So I think 6 months is a reasonable expectation one might have about completing RTK1.

I never really considered giving up past the halfway point, but often as I sat to study I wondered “WHY am I doing this?”. I think I wasn’t fair to my motivation in my precedent post. I’m not so stubborn as to finish such a goal for the sake of finishing it alone.

The fact is, I LOVE the kanji.

There is a quote that I found very inspiring from www.zhongwen.com :

”... Chinese characters, one of humanity’s greatest and most enduring cultural achievements.”

On top of the chinese writing system, I love how the Japanese writing system mixes the phonetic script, hiragana, with the kanji (I wish there was more kanji though..).

To get back to the method itself, another thing that kept my motivation going was a certain fascination for memory techniques, in particular mnemonics. I realised I had been using mnemonics before, as most people have, but never thinking about it as a technique in and of itself. In RTK1, mnemonics become a systematic technique for learning to remember how to write the kanji. The retention rate early on in so high that it can give you a great boost of confidence. This sparked my interest in mnemonics and also in “memory palaces”, and I am now looking into remembering all the chinese readings of the kanji using other efficient memory techniques instead of rote memorization.