meditation 2

I tried meditating again today, again for 5 minutes. I focussed on my breathing again. I had some thoughts near the beginning, though it's difficult to remember them now, which is perhaps a good sign, since one of the thoughts was about it not being a good idea to pay too much meta-attention to myself for this blog post, because that would distract from the meditation itself.

Still, I do remember some other thoughts: first, I remember sortof seeing my breathing in different ways.. I mean, I was focussing on the feeling that breathing produces, but even that manifests itself in my mind in something analogous to an 'image', and I experienced perhaps three different viewpoints of that image. The first was from the high-hand side looking down, as if my breathing was taking place in my chest -- which of course it is -- but the feeling of air coming in and out is more in my mouth, and yet those feelings 'appeared' to be in my chest. This is the view I had during my previous attempt as well. The other view was also from the right-hand side, but mentally placing my breath closer to my actual mouth, and the third view was sortof looking straight forward from the back of my brain to my mouth.

At some point into the meditation, my breathing slowed down again like before, and I was casting around for something to concentrate on during the pause before the next breath. I decided to focus on my heart. This worked fairly well, although it was a bit faint; that is, it was difficult to feel exactly when my heart was beating.

At some point during the experience I do recall thinking 'this is very peaceful', and I thought that perhaps there is some legitimacy to the idea of quieting the mind as an end in itself. I'm not totally convinced of this yet, since I'm not sure what the effects are on the rest of my life -- I guess I'm hoping that one possible benefit of meditation may be sortof pressing the 'reset' button on my brain, which I suppose sleep is supposed to do, but sleep doesn't always do a good job of it.

Anyway, we'll see where this goes.