I realise one common factor among the effective (and innefective) methods is this emphasis on feeling good.
Tranquil Wisdom Insight meditation (TWIM) has a major focus on feeling that metta. Their big shtick is that the Budda mentions mindfulness breathing in his original works a handful of times, but says the metta bhavana word around 140 times (or so I remember).
Metta could have similar outcomes, but is a richer word than harmless.
Metta includes that warm hearted benevolence towards others.
By stopping engaging in thought trains of annoyance, I realise that there’s space for only one overlying emotion, and that’s probably related to thought, and that’s related to what I focus on.
It’s an enlightening journey to see what a large percentage of my thought content is negative. Some judgement and resistance about the world around me.
And there’s either space for that junk food kinda thinking, or appreciating the physical world around me.
I wrote about how exquisite my life felt at this point in time, but that’s all just a fantasy.
The the practical real world that’s a tiny bit more real.
The greenery comes alive, the sky and the sun through the clouds, feelings as I interact with people, and time just slows down. Or I seem to have developed a lot more patience. Waiting always used to make me uncomfortable. But now its just the now moving inexorably onward.
Panta rei.
So once I change my focus when I have draining thoughts, or avoid dealing with draining people, that empty space rapidly gets filled up with a higher percentage of ‘positive’ thoughts.
Though best still is not to get lost in thoughts and feelings, but come back to the real physical world. But hey, where’s the fun in that?!
In other news, I’m telling my housemate that it’s too expensive to pay him, but happy to take care of rent, food and some expenses. And he says that’s more than enough. He’s happy that no matter what I got his back. That there’ll be a roof over his head, and food in his tummy.
In return, we’re working out a system where he helps me sort out the shit I have to sort out. It’s simple stuff like chase a parking ticket fine (that I had paid the parking fee for), a couple of small claims court applications (I don’t like getting fucked over, but have rarely had a habit of standing up for myself).
I’d really like to clear up the RAM in my headspace, and see what (hopefully good stuff) comes in.
Everything else in my life is on autopilot. But my journals keep wanting me to build a daily routine, or and that’s made me (or at least one thought that decides its me) decide let’s give this body-mind organism what he’s begging for through all those journals. It’s not too much. 20 minutes of meditation a day, 10-20 minutes of exercise, and 25 minutes of admin a couple of times a week.
I’d like to add in us learning IT so courses like web development (udemy has a great Angela Yu full stack web dev course), and Charles Severance’s free Python4Everybody course - alternating both an hour a da y in the evenings, with maybe weekends, or sunday’s off.
I’d really like to cash in on the AI wave. The world as we know it is soon going to end. The technological singularity is here. Some might say it’s already happened. But now change is going to be unpredictable over a period of months, weeks, days and maybe hours. Once we get AI that’s more intelligent than any human who’s ever lived. Looks like ChatGPT5 or 6 latest. Then AGI (general) after that, and then ASI (super) intelligence after that. Who can predict what the heck the next few years are going to be like, forget decades down the line.