Ysiad

Reflection:: Figured I’d start posting my journal notes in a more public venue so that it’s easier for me to access them and so that anyone who’s curious about what I’m up to or was up to, they’d have an easy time figuring it out. For the past few years I’ve been keeping notes in the Notes app on my iPhone. Pretty good as a place for me to keep notes, but I’d like it to be easier for me to search through them and share them with people – including future me and people I haven’t even met yet. By putting them on my blog, I get them indexed by Google for free. As I’m writing this, I’m thinking about ways I could make it easier for me to index and catalog my thoughts later.

HabitTracking::
*Meditation Day 658
*Workout routine Day 81

Reflection:: I’m currently reflecting on what parts I’d like to keep vs modify with regards to my daily routine. Here are a list of questions for me to choose from:
* What questions do I want to ask myself? And how often?
* What activities do I want to make sure happen? And on what timeframe? How often?
* How can I ensure I live the best year of my life? How about the best week? The best day? The best decade? How does the timeframe I plan on impact the actions and thoughts I have? How does it impact my feelings?
* Which areas of my life will I pay attention to?
* Which life milestones I will achieve this year?

Doing some free-association writing to explore some of these questions, I’m choosing to follow an OODA loop here without too much concern to where I am at the moment. It can feel like journaling is an action, so I’ll treat it as such, with the next step being observing. Thinking of a life hierarchy, foundational is my physical and mental health. I’m proud that I’ve turned meditation into a daily habit. I want to iterate on the morning routine though and condense it to an hour. This will help it stay in service of keeping it in service of achieving things outside of my mind. For the past couple of years, I’ve oriented my life in service of building and sticking with a daily meditation habit. Now I feel it’s pretty locked in and resilient. I’ll continue tracking it, but tweak it. One of the largest opportunities for efficiency here is combining meditation with physical activity. The past few days with the in-person yoga classes at my gym being cancelled due to covid, I’ve continued my daily yoga routine at home, and found it to be way more meditative and helpful than at the gym. The challenge is that it’s harder to make sure you keep up the habit when you don’t have a class you’re signed up for, but fortunately for me – before the past month of yoga – I have stayed accountable for working out without signing for classes. I’ve fallen short on staying consistent with mobility and flexibility work. However, by doing over a month of daily yoga classes I’m in a groove and feeling ready to give daily yoga a shot.

I wrote the above and saved as a draft at 12:15pm ET while sitting at a coffee shop. It is now 2:09pm ET and I’m sitting at that same coffee shop, but spent the past couple of hours researching yoga, downloading a pdf and then reading it. I also followed some of the breathing exercises from my chair while reading and enjoyed seeing the bpm on my watch’s hedrtrate monitor bounce around from 47 – 54 with occasional peaks as high as the low 60’s. Meanwhile, I saw my heartrate go as high as 161 while doing 108 sun salutations on December 22nd. The book I’ll be following is A Systematic Course in the Ancient Tantric Techniques of Yoga and Kriya by Swami Satyananda Saraswati. Feels like resolving unfinished business for me as a former partner had this book. I started going through it, but stopped when we separated. Was glad to find the book and a pdf for it as well, as it is published in India. So my goal now is to incorporate what it says into my AM routine. Which means I need to realistically set aside 90 minutes or so for my daily routine, which is less than what I spend currently, so in exchange for discipline I’ll get back a lot of time.

I want to keep exploring the topics above, but I’m losing interest in journaling, so it’s time to go home.

As of right now, it’s 2:17pm and what I’ve had to eat is a whole-milk cortado at this coffee shop. My resting heartrate is 47, and my heartrate this very moment as I’m typing is 58 according to my Apple Watch.