Feeling Awareness: Reflection

It’s been well over a week that I shared my aspirations for the third phase in Maitreyabandhu’s life with full attention. Time to reflect on and adapt my strategies! I’ve ordered them per topic below.

Health audit

In the health audit, I continued a diary of my physical health habits: sleep, being outside, exercise, eating, and drinking on a 5-point scale (as explained in a previous post). I was happy with the second phase’s results, except for the scores on eating and drinking. The goal was therefore to get the latter from 2.9 (eating) and 3.2 (drinking) above 3.5.

While my score for drinking has remained the same, I managed to improve my eating habits (now 3.9) while maintaining good scores for the rest as well (all 3.9 or higher). I’m quite happy with the result, although I know it will be hard to maintain them throughout the winter holidays. All the more reason to try and do better on the in-between days!

I will maintain the health diary, but probably not reflect on it further in these posts during the rest of the course since I don’t see myself modifying my approach on this any further.

Body scan

I have neglected the body scan, in part due to the fact that I haven’t been consistently meditating over the past 4–5 days. I will re-incorporate this and try to get into the habit of writing one sentence about how I feel after every mediation. To make that a bit easier for myself, I will think of some prompts to answer, which I will share in the next life with full attention-post.

For now, I was thinking about things such as “where did I feel most relaxed?” and “where did I feel most tension?” Any suggestions are more than welcome!

Mindfulness walk

Again, I haven’t done many of these, even though I’ve thought about doing them quite occasionally. I feel like a big issue is that I’m seated at the eighth floor of a building and going up and down alone already takes me quite some time, so there’s a bit of a barrier for doing it on office-working-days.

Nevertheless, I still want to try and make it work, so I’m going to start rewarding myself for going out. For the next time, I will actually mindfully walk toward the local sports café to treat myself to an espresso (which are really good there). Let’s see if I can manage to do that at least once in the soonest workweek (which will be 3 weeks from now due to winter holidays).

Vedana diary

The most recent habit introduced by the course was the vedana diary. For that, I deviated a bit from the book and added the following principle to my momentum cycle:

Whenever I experience a particularly pleasant or unpleasant sensation, I pause for a moment to neutrally observe the sensation, after which I write down (1) the sensation, (2) where and how I feel it and (3) what the sensation might try to tell me, so that I become more aware of the sensations in my body and experience life more freely.

So far, I have 4 vedana diary entries: 1 positive, 3 negative. However, I have noticed that I’ve become much more mindful of these feelings overall. That is to say that, even though I did not always write them down, I did ‘complete’ several more vedana entries in my head.

I think that essentially, this is the goal of the whole exercise; to learn to observe sensations when they come up. As such, I’m quite happy with the results. Nevertheless, I’d also like to get into the habit of noticing more subtle vedana. Therefore, I’m going to look into the possibility of sending myself a random reminder during the day, in which I write down (1) what I feel, (2) where and how I feel it and (3) what the sensation might try to tell me. More on that in the next phase’s starting post!