8 Minutes to.. well, Something

I stopped by the library this weekend and checked out the 8 Minute Meditation
book that my many (har) readers may recall me mentioning in an earlier entry. While I was at the library I took about 5 minutes to skim about 80% of the book, and it seemed promising. Last night before bed I read the whole thing. I didn't get much more out of it than I got skimming it. The content is pretty spread out, lots of repetition. It advocates an 8 week program of daily 8 minute meditation sessions. Each week introduces a new technique.

I've been working on my meditation on and off for about 8 years, so I've pretty much mastered all the techniques in the book, but it does have some interesting ideas about active meditation. One suggestion is to wash a dish. Basicly each step of the process is done slowly and deliberately, while keeping a quite mind and just enjoying the here-and-now. I've done this in the past with many activities, often with vacuuming or when driving home from work. I didn't realize it was a well-known technique :)

Sometimes I'm not sure what I'm accomplishing when I meditate. Over the years my ADD-like mental behaviour has caused me to develop this idea that if I'm not actively thinking about something useful then I'm wasting time. I have a very hard time not doing anything. So if I just happen to veg on the couch for a while I sometimes feel like I'm wasting time that I could be using to doing something productive. It is for thise reason that I don't often get in long meditation practice. I generally use meditation as an aid for getting to sleep. When I lay down I clear my mind and 'just be'. Since I've been practicing this for many years I can generally fall asleep in less than a couple of minutes. Curiously, this hasn't affected my waking meditation, when I meditate I don't feel like its nap-time (as part of the structure I've set for myself, I treat the bed as the only place that I sleep, and I don't get in it unless I intend to sleep, which probably helps). I suppose I ought to start trying to set a time to do it properly every day to see if I can get some more out of it.