Meditation (2024-02-05)
In this blog post, I would like to write about meditation.
I have been trying meditation on and off since ca. 2011, when I first read a book by Thich Nhat Than. However, despite having a few meditation experiences, I never stuck with it – also because I had trouble with headaches, which were due to bad technique.
Only last year, in 2023, I finally made the effort to start meditating daily on a consistent basis. It was not easy finding time for it, because I can practice only when my girlfriend is asleep or away. I started with 5 minutes per day and increased the duration up to about 20 minutes.
When I reached that timeframe, suddenly some old repressed memories surfaced, causing a very strong emotional response. It was not even something very traumatic, just a situation where I misbeheaved as a teenager in front of the parents of one of my youth female friends, and felt sorry and ashamed after that. Somehow, during meditation this memory came back and caused an emotional experience as if I were there back then, right at this moment.
The incident is so minor that I am sure everyone else has already forgotton about it, but then so did I until now. This experience caused me to stop meditating entirely, fearing of what else might turn up.
However, I now had time to read about this and it seems that this is a more-or-less normal phenomenon; apparently (to my amateurish understanding) meditation tends to bring up memories of old situations that we did not have dealt with properly; things we forgot or repressed. According to online information, the best way to deal with this is to “go through with it”, i.e. be prepared that this might happen, let the memories arise and then try to accept it and distance oneself from it, like one is doing anyway during meditation.
On a sidenote: This is one thing that I feel is conveyed incorrectly about meditating. Many people seem to be under the impression that you should “think about nothing”, but this is not the case. The point is to “distance yourself from your own thoughts”, that is, observe what random thoughts come into your head, and then, instead of following them (like we all usually do), just acknowledge them and go back to your focus point, which is usually your breath.
So after thinking about this for several months, I decided to go back to meditation, again starting at 5 minutes per day. This time I will be prepared for old memories resurfacing and I will try to acknowledges my mistakes from the past, learning from the experiences and move on.
tags: mediation, self-improvement, example
Not enjoying programming anymore
I have been programming for more than 25 years now, and it used to be great fun.
In this time, I have written lots of programs that I don’t even remember; Games, various utilities, web applications, my own word processor, etc.
Personal Rants (2024-01-30)
I decided to use this blog for a kind of self-therapy, because
- No one I know will ever read it – they don’t have a clue about gopher/gemini/etc.
- I don’t have anyone to talk to
- Sometimes I feel better when I write about this.
First, let me make one thing clear: I am aware that I am in a privileged situation. Nevertheless, it makes me unhappy.
For about 4 years I have been in an unhappy relationship – moving in with this woman was one of the biggest mistakes I have ever made; she does nothing when it comes to cleaning, cooking, shopping for groceries etc. which means that I need to do all of that, while working for 45 hours/week.
In one part she is lazy, but she is also severly depressed, so I can blame her only partly. She currently goes to therapy, but to me it seems that her therapist does not really help her, but instead frames everything in her life in such a way that it is never her fault and that she did everything perfectly; I base this on my impressions on what she told me.
I moved in with her because I was stupid, love-blinded and never had lived with a woman before, even though I am 35 now. So on the one hand I think it is good that I finally head this experience, but on the other hand I think the worst part was that I did not insist on us getting a cheap apartment that anyone could pay on their own, when the other one moves out – instead we now have an expensive one that she never could pay for with her job.
All this struck me particularly when one of our friends, a nice woman, told us that she “finally” found a boyfriend – I have known her before I got to know my current girlfriend, and I would much rather be with her. So that makes me very sad and I don’t know how to better describe it.
I just hope that I can get out of this relationship in time without putting to much stress on my girlfriend, given that she already goes to therapy to treat her depression; but I don’t know how.
tags: personal-rants
bb on tilde is very useful
It took me 9 months to discover the existence of bashblog (bb) on tilde.
It publishes the posts onto the WWW, gemini and gopher – very useful.
What I know would just love to see is a combined browser for gemini, gopher and the oldschool websites; and even better if it includes RSS-like support for monitoring pages for new content.
Maybe I have to build it myself.
First post
This is a first post, to see how it works and what it does.
tags: keep-this-tag-format, tags-are-optional, beware-with-underscores-in-markdown, example