Inviting annoying teaboys

There is a story about a monk who was traveling to India.  He was concerned that it would be hard for him to stay present in India because of how pleasant people had told him it would be.  So, he invited his most annoying teaboy to come to India with him.

I've been finding more opportunities to meditate these days.  I often meditate with a friend using Skype.  While I was meditating with her one day, there was something that was causing a funny periodic sound with a very small period.  I was able to use this annoying sound as a teaboy to help me with dropping storylines and coming back to the present moment.

I have a hard time with dropping storylines when I meditate.  Some storylines are quite persistent, such that if I do manage to drop them I soon find that I've picked them up again.  I've often gone quite far down a path with a storyline before finally realizing that I've mindlessly done so, and using things that are bugging me as annoying teaboys has been especially helpful for this.  As a result, I don't go as far down these paths before coming back to the present.

my love of sentence fragments as a medium

After I was introduced to the idea of freewriting, it helped my not get stuck staring at a blank page. But, I felt like it just shifted the difficulties to new places.  One place was needing to work with the sentence fragments that I had generated and to figure out how to write the same ideas using complete sentences. Too bad sentence fragments aren't a valid medium was what I would bemoan.  That would make my life so much easier.  I've recently discovered that using "..." in my emails makes things much easier for me.  I get myself in lots of trouble with emails, so this was a great discovery for me.  "..." helps me in many ways with my emails...one of which is that emailing is now a place where my love of sentence fragments makes things easier for me to do what I want to do...which is to get me to hit the Send button more often...  I suspect that this will be true of blogging as well as emailing...and that I'll get to hit the Publish button more often as a result.

Meditating on movement

Meditating on the breath isn't something I do very well yet.  My mind wanders off a lot.  Perhaps practicing meditating in different modes will make it easier to wander off less when I meditate on the breath.

Meditating on movement is something I've had better luck with.  The practice of Authentic Movement has helped me make meditation a regular part of my life.  I meditate while I'm moving, and I also meditate while I witness the movement of others during Authentic Movement sessions.

Meditating on the physical sensations of pen on paper is something I discovered while freewriting one day.  Instead of writing, I found myself making a pattern, which I did over and over until I filled the page with it.  I've tried this "keeping my pen moving" meditation a few times, and I find that I'm able to stay with the sensations quite easily.  So, this is another version of meditating on movement that I've also had better luck with.  I'm going to see if I also have better luck with making it a regular part of my life (without the benefit of it being a scheduled activity that I do with others) and if it makes it any easier to wander off less when I meditate on the breath.

Supporting myself with disclaimers

What can help me hold myself back less because I think I want things to be just so?

I've tried putting disclaimers in the signature for my emails.  Here's an example:

Disclaimer:  I am no longer taking into account as many things as I am usually compelled to think about when writing emails. I'm also experimenting with just saying whatever comes off the top of my head, instead of struggling to convey all the things that I would like to express.

What ought to work is finding a way to demonstrate to myself that I don't need to do all the holding back that I do.  It's not surprising that I wasn't able to do this with emails.  Emails are such a quagmire for me!  So, no wonder I haven't been able to get enough small wins to make real progress with this with emailing.

With blogging, I might just be able to do it.  Blogging feels much safer.  I'm hoping it'll feel safer with this particular blog.  I've named it "Useful enough" to provide myself with a disclaimer that will hopefully do the trick:

Some of the posts in this blog are not what I imagine I'd like them to be.  If I had all the time in the world to work on them, they'd be different.  But, I've posted them here just as they are.  

What I post here will be things that were useful enough to me for me to write about them.  Perhaps there'll be things here that are useful enough to others just as they are.

I'm interested to see if I'll be able to share thoughts sooner and more often with this blog. Who knows?  Perhaps it might just work.