Meditation week 0 log (week of 2026-08-03)

Sit 01 - 30 mins, day 1

Date: Thursday 6th August
Time: 11am (calendar slot w/ gf)
Length: 30 mins
Technique: Eyes-open open awareness (~Charlie Awbery “Opening Awareness” style)
What happened:
- Really good interesting sit. Doing the eyes open thing, having my visual field deconstruct somewhat. With the thing of watching where I can somewhat appreciate ~Emptiness (e.g., my visual field), vs things that feel more real/solid to me (e.g., the feeling of my torso, or thoughts that I take seriously and start to worry about/clench around). Noticed that my torso felt “real” and non-empty, then stayed with it for a while and investigated the sensations, noticed how e.g. the sensation of breath comes and goes, is impermanent
Where it stuck:
1. Concentration not great
2. I can deconstruct my visual field somewhat, but it typically plateaus. I used to be able to deconstruct it quite a bit more than I can now. (see Visual deconstruction via eye gazing and verbal debugging)
3. Not great at keeping my eyes super still, feels like if I could keep my eyes totally immobile, I’d be able to deconstruct more
  - 2 and 3 imply that visual deconstruction is the goal which I doubt is correct. Charlie’s goal is to “remain unengaged with all that appears” (paraphrasing). And it felt like “live spotting when I’m contracting/taking something seriously, and work to take it less seriously” was going well

Date: Fri 7th August
Time: 11am (calendar slot w/ gf)
Length: 30 mins (but got pretty sleepy for last 10)
Technique: anapanasati
Why this technique?
- I was reading Burbea’s “Seeing That Frees” and got to the chapter on shamatha, and he talks about how great shamatha is, nourishing etc, and I was thinking about how as I haven’t meditated regularly for ~2 years, my shamatha suckssss
- So, it was a very wandering-mind sit, but still good, and you’ve gotta start somewhere
What happened?
- I brought my attention back to the breath multiple times (but was definitely lost in thought for large chunks of time)
- I tried using counting as an aid - I didn’t successfully get up to 10 breaths counted mindfully, but that feels a bit more advanced, I guess the goal right now is just to bring my attention back to the breath when my attention wanders
Where it stuck
- Not very good concentration! But that’s ok, I’m very out of practice
Learned since last entry
Assume I’m making a mistake — what is it?
What I want to try next
Questions for Roger
Doubt / churn (if you’re keeping it public)

Thanks to our intro call:
- I now have a 30 min daily slot in calendar to meditate daily w/ gf
- Doubt named as main hindrance, which totally resonates
- Saying my reasons for not meditating out loud to an expert helped see just how silly they are. When they’re semi-unconsciously just running the show (like, being blended with a part), they feel very valid and lead to aversion to meditating, but when you shine a light on them with another person present, it’s clear how silly they are
  - E.g. fear of wasting time → but look at all the time I’ve wasted watching e.g. parasocial kpop videos recently

W/r/t my time neuroticism, I noticed this morning feeling a lot of constriction at the idea of needing to trim my beard
This also happens when I think about stretching
There’s a genuine ~catastrophising feeling of “oh god oh god oh god no time waste of time”, it feels doomy/panicky
Have been this way for years but I think being low on money & stability makes it worse

Me and gf went to a float tank spa in Lisbon 😎
This kinda vibe
It was cool! My mistaken impression from hearing second hand about how Joe Rogan explained it like 10 years ago (lol) was that you end up just like, astral projecting b/c it’s total sensory deprivation… this seems dumb in retrospect b/c I was ofc still aware that I had a body etc
I’d love to return once I have better shamatha (samadhi? never know the difference)
I did some open awareness practice, and I managed like 10 seconds of quite nice “I’m so lucky!” practice before getting distracted (RIP)

Date: Sunday 9th August
Time: 09:00
Length: 30 mins
Technique: Anapanasati
Why this technique?
- Working on my concentration (which is dreadful)
What happened?
- Brought attention back to nostrils a few times, but was mind-wandering a lot