I've spent a lot of April online - reading around things for my blog, doing irritating online chores like cancelling flights, moving money about, and quite a lot of time tossing about on Hive, setting crypto limit orders, and playing Splinterlands.
The old multiple-windows flt-back-and-forth was out of control some days TBH, but this last week I managed to reign this back in a little by upping my physical meditations.
I have been much more disciplined about taking time to do the following physical in-the-body meditations.
What I mean by this is any of the following:
- Running
- Circuit training
- Walking
- Yoga
- Juggling
- Cooking/ baking
- Cleaning and easy tidying.
- DIY/ painting.
I've spent at least several hours a day doing a mixture of the above for the last week - mainly the later two - painting takes me ages because I'm not a professional and it's surprising how long just cleaning and tidying can take if you do it systematically, moving furniture and getting into corners for example.
I've also made sure I top and tail the day with something physical, rather than something online and intellectual.
This used to be pretty standard for me, but somehow since Coronavirus I've been spending more time online and in my head rather than being physical. This is kind of odd, as I've the time to get more disciplined, but I just haven't. Or maybe it isn't odd, maybe that was just me escaping from reality for a while, while I can.
The advantages of in-the-body-meditations
All it's taken is one week and I'm already back to a much slower pace of brain and a much calmer state of mind. My mind's no longer working at 100 miles and hour, it's clearer and more reflective, all as a result of just spending more time concentrating on doing things in the body.
And when I have been doing my intellectual and online chores I've been much more focused as a result of being grounded, and much less inclined to flit back and forwards between the oh so many windows, because now, once again, there are less of them!
Expanding the repertoire
Anything 'physical' can be a physical meditation. The above list is just my very non-creative self's list - but there are plenty of other things that come under this category such as martial arts, dancing, making/ crafting physical objects/ allotmenting or any kind of hard physical labour, and playing musical instruments I guess would count.
In fact writing out that later list kind of made me feel a bit dull, so I started on expanding my physicality repertoire by drawing the picture above, so maybe I'll just spend more time giving the
spoons a REALLY good scrub during the washing up tomorrow.