Meditation, fuck yeah.

Think I briefly mentioned that one of the first things I wanted to do with my now abundance of free time after FIRE’ing was to embark on the 60 for 60 meditation quest. I first heard of this on the Tim Ferriss podcast, where he interviewed Naval Ravakant. Apparently this Naval guy is a big deal, and therefore has some suggestions on how to effectively pursue both success and happiness. One can quantify his ability to achieve success in business ventures, so perhaps his recommendations on how to increase happiness in life may be valid.

One of Naval’s recommendations is to make meditation a regular practice in life. This should be no surprise to anyone, meditation is so hot right now. And I guess there’s some decent research which suggests that meditation does indeed improve various aspects of life. I too fell into all of the hype, and began meditating awhile back. In fact, I just consulted my workout/habit tracking sheet( NERD ALERT: I’ve kept a google sheet documenting all of my workouts as well as any habit I’ve intended to adopt since 2016, previously I did this using a spiral notebook), and it shows that I started meditating in May of 2017. Holy crap, it’s been almost 5 years!

I went down the rabbit hole, reading books by John Kabat Zinn, Tara Brach, and Sam Harris. I initially did 10-20 minute guided meditations at least once a day, and used the ones provided for free by Tara Brach. After a few years of this, I paid for Sam Harris’s waking up app, and did that for a couple of years. His stuff was good, but though all of the extra content was interesting, I found I just didn’t use it that much. During that time, I found that the VA put out a free mindfulness app. Between the free guided meditations provided by the VA and Tara Brach, I had plenty of variety, and could no longer justify paying for Waking Up. I’ve been doing the free thing for about 4 months now, and have noticed no difference in the quality(if that’s even a thing?) or quantity of my meditating. I’m also at a point where I occasionally meditate without app based assistance; it’s now not that big of deal to do some breath focus, followed by a body scan, and then maybe some general mindfulness on my own.

With all of that, my chi should be centered as fuck! I should have reached level 9 of enlightenment by now. My experience is paralleled by the literature; general improvement in reducing my reactivity to stuff, and the increased ability to calm myself down when shit goes sideways. It’s not like I’m some jedi-monk dude though. I still get pissed, still get depressed; all the normal human shit. To paraphrase that Sam Harris guy, meditation gives me the opportunity to reduce the half life of such shit. I notice that I’m tense or whatever, fully experience it, and it goes away quicker on it’s own after having noticed it. Coupled with ooodles of therapy, I think overall it’s been good. But like all things, I know I could always improve. Hence the Naval influenced 60 for 60 thing.

From Eric Jorgeson’s The Almanack of Naval Ravikant, here’s how Naval describes the 60 for 60:

“…just sit there and you close your eyes for at least one hour a day. You surrender to what- ever happens—don’t make any effort whatsoever. You make no effort for something, and you make no effort against anything. If there are thoughts running through your mind, you let the thoughts run.
For your entire life, things have been happening to you. Some good, some bad, most of which you have processed and dis- solved, but a few stuck with you. Over time, more and more stuck with you, and they almost became like these barnacles stuck to you.
You lost your childhood sense of wonder and of being present and happy. You lost your inner happiness because you built up this personality of unresolved pain, errors, fears, and desires that glommed onto you like a bunch of barnacles.
How do you get those barnacles off you? What happens in meditation is you’re sitting there and not resisting your mind. These things will start bubbling up. It’s like a giant inbox of unanswered emails, going back to your childhood. They will come out one by one, and you will be forced to deal with them.
You will be forced to resolve them. Resolving them doesn’t take any work—you just observe them. Now you’re an adult with some distance, time, and space from previous events, and you can just resolve them. You can be much more objective about how you view them.
Over time, you will resolve a lot of these deep-seated unre- solved things you have in your mind. Once they’re resolved, there will come a day when you sit down to meditate, and you’ll hit a mental “inbox zero.” When you open your mental “email” and there are none, that is a pretty amazing feeling.
It’s a state of joy and bliss and peace. Once you have it, you don’t want to give it up. If you can get a free hour of bliss every morning just by sitting and closing your eyes, that is worth its weight in gold. It will change your life.
I recommend meditating one hour each morning because any- thing less is not enough time to really get deep into it. I would recommend if you really want to try meditation, try sixty days of one hour a day, first thing in the morning. After about sixty days, you will be tired of listening to your own mind. You will have resolved a lot of issues, or you have heard them enough to see through those fears and issues.”

Well all that sounded great! I was especially interested to try it in order help me process a bunch of shit and to help figure out what the hell I actually want to do with the rest of my life (as if that’s even possible to determine, but I’m nothing if not stubborn and stupidly ambitious). Of course working more than full time, taking care of two kids, and being constantly sleep deprived kind of hindered my ability to try this in the past. I considered waking up early to do this during my working years, but knew that in my sleep deprived state I’d quickly fall asleep if I just sat down for more than 10 minutes. Hell, that used to happen all of the time. Hence I always pushed the goal of these consistent hour long meditations to post FIRE.

Then the RE of FIRE finally happened, and it was no time like the present to tackle this challenge (man, I bet anyone who is an adherent of the meditation shit is cringing at the use of “tackle”, “challenge”, and any other type A/aggressive sounding language being used in conjunction with mediation. Yeah, I kind of am too, but that’s just who I am and my default mode of thinking. I’ve learned this and accepted it after all the years of mediation, therapy, and general introspection. How ‘bout that for some meta shit?). I first gave myself a few weeks to flip from a night shift sleep schedule to a normal person one, as once again I knew that I’d just fall asleep if I tried this too soon. Once I stopped feeling the constant desire to take a nap, I set forth on the 60 for 60.

As of this post, I’m 32 sessions deep into this practice. As I mentioned before, I created a google form to track my thoughts and emotions I experience during this process. I recall enough of my grad school survey design courses to know that’s it’s imperfect, but I tried to keep it from leading my responses to much. It tracks the date and time, and then asks my mood before and after the meditation, asks what I think I should do next( current choices include paramedic, trade, research assistant/part time instructor at junior college, writer, rental investor, renaissance man, PhD, investor, something something internet, Chill, full time stay at home dad, tactical trainer, and a fill in the blank spot for whatever else). This section allows multiple responses. I then ask how much I want to do that thing, ask how interested I am at getting back into BJJ(Brazilian Jiu Jitsu), and the final question is a fill in the blank for whatever random thoughts or notes I want to make.

When doing the meditation, I try not to specifically guide my thoughts to think about what I want to do next, but wanted to judge how I felt about the subject after my mind was clearish. Right before RE’ing, the urge to get back into BJJ came back, so I figured I’d track my feelings on that. And of course I don’t know what I’m doing with this RE space. Am I taking a mini-retirement, before going back to something that resembles a career? Am I going to do a hodge-podge of random shit, some of which makes money and may require additional education? Or will I space out for hours on end until I drown in a puddle of my own drool? This lingering question spurred me to make the “what should I do next” question, to hopefully get some clarity on what my interests actually are.

Here’s what google form dashboard shows so far:

It should be noted that I keep adding options to the “what to do next” list. I just added “chill” and “medic” yesterday, after writing them in the fill in the blank section a whole bunch. Everything below the first “chill” response were my fill in the blank responses.

Before I interpret the data, lets talk about the qualitative side of stuffs; the feels about this meditation process. I googled other people’s experiences with this practice, and

1. at first it was really hard for them to sit still for an hour, sometimes taking weeks to be able to do so without constantly fidgeting or checking the clock

2. they had realizations that caused them to break down and cry, but were cathartic

3. they had life changing perspective shifts about who they are as a person and what they wanted to do with their life

4. they had near psychedelic experiences like feeling they were floating above their body or went large portions of the session without having a single thought while feeling at peace

Given, I’m just over halfway through this thing, so maybe that stuff will still happen, but so far not so much. Disclaimer, I’m not doing this practice completely as prescribed. I do the meditation in the middle of the day, at inconsistent times, as that’s when I can reliably experience an uninterrupted hour because kids. Also due to some lingering injuries, it’s occasionally not feasible for me to sit for an hour, and I end up having to lay down. So maybe my lack of life altering experiences may be due to my imperfect practice.

It was a minimal struggle for the first few days to sit still for an hour, but I quickly got used to that. I’ve also tried to think about some specific emotional things, but no crying. No amazing life changing extreme perspective shifts. And I haven’t tripped balls yet; that’s probably the most disappointing one lol. I’m still holding out hope to experience points 2 through 4 in the remaining 28 sessions, but looking at other people’s experiences, I should have experienced some of them by now.

Here’s why I think I haven’t had similar experinces:

1. A good chunk of my life, both as a soldier and a cop, has been spent doing what’s called pulling security. This amounts to staying in one position for a long period of time, say laying behind a tree in the woods, kneeling behind a rock on a mountain, or standing behind an armored vehicle. While staying in this position, I would remain with my weapon ready, and scan a certain area for a possible threat.

On the cop side this could be waiting for a barricaded murder suspect to exit the front door of a house as negotiators continually tell him to surrender peacefully via PA for hours. In such a situation, it’s always a possibility that the suspect may come out shooting in an attempt to escape or to insure they don’t spend the rest of their life in jail.

On the army side, we generally operated or trained in non permissive environments-or better said-in place where many of the people either wanted to actually kill us, or find us to win some training scenario. So any time we stopped to rest, regroup, communicate with HQ, etc., about half of the soldiers who were resting, eating, working the radio or whatever would be surrounded by at least the other half soldiers who would form a circle around those doing work/resting. Those forming a circle would face outwards, and wait for an attack from the enemy. Those doing work/resting would switch with those pulling security in shifts, and we would do this for hours on end. I also spent a good amount of time in both professions conducting surveillance, which you guessed it, involved me staying in one spot for hours waiting for some specific person to show up and do something.

If I was lucky, I’d have a partner during any of the above, and we could maybe whisper back and forth. This would help to keep us awake, and in the countless hours I spent doing this I traded entire life stories with many a fellow soldier or cop. Those are some of my best memories of my service, despite the austere conditions we found ourselves in. More often than not though, I spent many of those hours alone, as manpower was always just barely at the minimum to get the job done. This means I’ve gotten pretty used to sitting and doing nothing, while remaining somewhat attentive to what’s going on.

2. As to the cathartic crying, I think I’ve processed most of the issues that would cause this due to ALL OF THE THERAPY (see the PTSD chapters for more on that).

3. As for life changing perspective shifts, I don’t think there’s been one specific meditation session where some realization hit me like I was shot with a diamond in the forehead. Rather there has been a few subtle shifts.

4. No idea on the lack of psychedelic stuff. Still holding out hope though, sounds fun! Maybe I’m just too square, man…

The slow perspective shifts have been nice though. In the months leading up to RE’ing, and immediately thereafter, I really started latching onto the idea of some clearly defined goals like enrolling in a PhD program and also getting back into regular BJJ and earning a blue belt( before kids I did no-gi for four years, but only did a year in traditional gi stuff). Now my goals seem to have drifted to much loftier pursuits such as:

1. grow my hair to at least my shoulders

2. be more present with my wife and kids

3. chill

4. mountain bike some more

5. take more naps

6. space out occasionally

7. (filler goal to provide me space to nothing)

8. maybe do a smattering of unrelated stuff that requires less of a time commitment, like write these posts, maybe renew my EMT cert, volunteer with Team Rubicon, maybe help with a little research but only if it’s interesting and fun, learn to weld, etc.

I think I gravitated to the much more challenging but clearly defined goal of earning a PhD because it was like my career; had specific things I could do that would give me meaning, community, and there’s specific checkpoints along the way that would keep me on track. The interest in BJJ was similar; a clearly defined goal with built in regular social interaction and skill progression. As I’ve been doing these long meditations, it slowly occurred to me that these two goals were a lot like what I’ve been doing the past 20 years. And I gradually got used to the idea that this RE’ing is giving me a chance to do something different with my life, and approach things in a less linear fashion. I knew this stuff intellectually before bouncing from full time work, but the long meditations has helped reduce my anxiety on not having a defined direction going forward. I’m not completely ruling that stuff out, I just have come to terms with the idea that I really don’t want to do a PhD or go full BJJ for awhile, if ever.

A brief note on the quantitative side. The dashboard doesn’t indicate when I inputted each choice, but I recall that most of my 17 PhD responses were in the first 17 days. In line with my mussing above, my interest in that program and BJJ seems to have tapered off. If I’m feeling super motivated, maybe I’ll get into the data when when I’m done with these 60 days, and build some cool charts that track my frequency of each response over time. No promises, I’m pretty busy with growing out my hair and naps though.

There you have it, just over halfway through this 60 for 60 thing. No world altering results yet, but it’s been nice having built in time every day to focus on nothing. You’ve just read almost three thousand words spanning all sorts of mediation related musing, and while I could keep going on about my other thoughts related to this and what my practice will look like once I’ve done these 60 days, I think we can all agree it’s about time for me to call this post good. If you made it this far, thanks for sticking it out. If you skimmed a few things and skipped to the end, I don’t blame you. Either way, I’d be interested to hear your experiences related to meditation, as well as any post RE paradigm shifts.