Category: personal development
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1 year an Upāsaka
Halfway through last year I described my year-long commitment as a lay devotee of Buddhism in the Thai Forest Monastery under Ajahn Sona. I completed the commitment at the end of December and was given the Pali name of Sanghapāla — “protector of the Sangha (the Buddhist community).” I use that name now when in…
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6 months an upāsaka
At the beginning of the year I undertook a commitment to take my Buddhist learning to the next level by becoming an upāsaka, or “lay devotee.” Last fall I applied to and was accepted into the upāsikā program at Birken, the Thai Forest Monastery near Kamloops where I have attended a couple of different meditation…
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Meditation stats snapshot
It has been a while, so I took a bit of a snapshot of my meditation tracker data on Insight Timer today, exporting it into Numbers for some visualization. Some quick stats: 930 Total sessions 14,800 Total minutes 753 Days with at least 1 session Timer 37% Guided meditations 63% Meditation 99% Chanting 1% Consecutive…
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Journaling Part 2: The Daily Note and Morning Pages
A quick review of my journaling setup as per my previous post: A simple bullet journal for daily habit tracking Morning Pages Keeping a Daily Note I detailed my BuJo approach in the last post. That is the quickest part of the routine. You could just keep a BuJo and gain lots of benefit. Since…
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Getting started with a journal
I have always been a sporadic journal writer, only regularly documenting daily experiences while traveling, winding down during the end-of-day decompression in my room. Many years ago I made it 1/5 the way through a 5-Year Journal. This year, I’m giving journaling a serious try, and have found it to be like a delayed mindfulness…
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A better process for reading, writing, and thinking: zettelkasten
I read a lot. Maybe too much… I am not a particularly fast reader, and I only do about 48 books a year (about 70% of those books in audio). So why do I say that I read “too much”? It is because I can barely remember anything I have read in the past. To…
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100 days of meditation
At 6am this morning I quietly rose out of bed, padded into the bathroom to wash the sleep out my eyes, and then sat down on a cushion in front of the fireplace in my living room, surrounded by shadow and silence. Crossing my legs into a half-lotus position, I took a couple of deep…
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6 months meat-free
On December 28th 2015 — about to consume yet another holiday family dinner of turkey and ham with all the trimmings — I decided to stop eating meat. It has been six months and I have kept to that promise. It has not been very difficult actually, but I should be sure to give full…
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The Interest Stack and Attention Debt
Levels of analysis is a way of studying a political problem from (generally) three different perspectives: individual, state, and the international system. Using this framework I started examining my interests — all of the things I keep tabs on and projects I am involved in outside of my day job. There are a lot, and…