Meditation: 200 Hours Later

I finally did it!

Oddly enough, it took me much longer to get to 200 hours than it took me to get to 100 hours. Oh well. Regardless, meditation makes you feel great. You know that relaxed feeling you get after you orgasm during sex? A solid meditation session feels the same way. 

You’re welcome. I didn’t even come up with that on my own. A sports psychologist from one of my favorite podcasts mentioned that.

Regardless of whether or not you believe me, here are a few observations from hour 100 to hour 200.

I Prefer 20 Minute Sessions Now

The 20 minute sessions feel better and seem to have a stronger effect than the 10 minute daily sessions. This could also be that my life has become hectic and uncertain, but the 20 minutes are nice. The effect of each meditation session seems to last longer, so I no longer feel the need to meditate every day.

Morning and Evening Meditation Sessions

Choosing to meditate in the morning or evening (sometimes both) feels somewhat different, but have still been useful. In the morning, the helps give you a clarity of mind so that you can face the day with less moments of distraction in the mind. In the evening, my goal has been to unwind so that I can fall asleep better (I’ve found that I have a particularly difficult time turning my mind off in the evening to go to sleep).

These Updated Theme Packs are Nice

Since my 100 hour milestone, the Headspace app has added several themes included a number of Sports packs such as recovery, focus, training, motivation, and competition. Awesome. Each individual session has a profound lesson that is great insight into the mind. 

“Focus is the Absence of Distraction”

This was possibly the biggest insight for me to maintain long term focus. Before this thought, I channeled active and sharp focus but couldn’t sustain it for very long. While extremely sharp focus has its uses, I’ve found that calm focus has been more useful throughout the day. 

This insight also led me to try various things to enter focus. A few examples:

• Setting my phone on airplane mode and not touching it in moments that needed long term focus.
• Limiting my high-focus study/work sessions to one song on repeat. The song goes into the background and doesn’t distract me. I still get to enjoy the song this way, too. In fact, based on how many times the song repeats itself, you could say I enjoy the crap out of one song this way.
• Downloading the Facebook “News Feed Eradicator” Google Chrome extension so that I can still message people as needed but not get distracted by the news feed.
• Deliberately distracting myself every now and then so my mind doesn’t go crazy. Sometimes it craves distraction! What can I say?

Meditation has done fantastic things for my mind and body ever since I started, and I have every intention of continuing. If you get nothing else from this article, continue to take deep breaths every now and then.

P.S. I still don’t have Daredevil-level senses. Maybe someday.