one hundred days of meditiation, one hour a day

www.ahundreddayblog.com

I am going to journal a personal experiment with meditation and make it public via the interweb. The plan: one hundred days, one hour a day.

I am choosing to make this commitment as a speculative next step in my own personal journey through life. In the past five years I have imploded a successful career as a film producer, abruptly left a stable long term relationship, moved from across the continent, started, ended, and restarted another long term relationship, dealt with the sudden death of my father, and grappled with a bout of severe depression. Through all of the this I have continued to actively seek happiness and a better understanding of my self — "self" and "happiness" being two concepts that often seem eternally elusive to me.

The purpose of the blog is create a real time record of my subjective experience as a living document of how the practice of meditation affects an individual. A big inspiration for this experiment is the Chinese text The Secret of The Golden Flower, as translated into English by Thomas Cleary. I will be quoting and paraphrasing freely from this book throughout this blog. I hope through my one hundred days of meditation to integrate concepts discussed in this text such as: "striding purposely without striving" into my personal path of understanding.

I do not see this as an esoteric exercise. I believe that the ancient wisdom and religions of our world have a similar message of the deep personal benefits of meditation as a path to personal integration. These benefits are supported by modern neuroscience and psychiatry.

I hope to transform my mind from a state where I am buffeted about by thoughts and emotions to place where my actions and decisions come from deeper within. For my own personal needs I will call this deeper place a well of creativity; the endless source of intuition, creativity, and inspiration. But I think the Bible is more succinct in saying "The Kingdom of God is Within."

I am choosing this particular practice because it requires no special dogma or philosophy, no specific ritual or icons. It is practiced in the course of daily life. It is near at hand, being of the mind itself, yet it involves no imagery or thought. It is remote only in the sense that it is a use of attention generally unfamiliar to the mind habituated to imagination and thinking. A direct method of self-realization accessible to you and I. It does not require one to be a hermit in a cave; on the contrary it requires that you stay engaged in your daily life.

I do not think it will be easy, it will require commitment and focus, but I am going to dedicate the next 100 days of my life to following this path with the hope that it will deepen my experience of life itself. Ultimately I am not striving for a modification of consciousness, but rather a realization of it's essence. For me this will require a leap of faith. Something I have only recently come to understand as: letting go of my intellect and trusting my intuition. This leap will require letting go of my conscious and unconscious intellect, emptying my mind, in order to let a deeper intuitive source flow through.

This blog space is a travel journal through these hundred days and you are welcome to follow along.

I will update to this blog on a daily basis and will post weekly here with the evolver community.

Here are the instructions for those who'd like to join in:

Rest your mind in your breath and your breath in your mind. Look inwards towards the source of your consciousness. Look towards the source. It is easy to loose focus, keep at it, eventually it will be steady. The intuitive source is not your unconscious. Your unconscious is part of your intellect and equally capable of producing the distracting thoughts and emotions as your conscious. Look beyond your unconscious to it's source; the root of creativity and intuition.