The Amiel Blog

Meditated 82 times in 6 days

Yes, the experiment continues! Since day two I've done 5 min at a time instead of 4. Continuing to appreciate the greater sense of inner calm plus three or four instances of catching the catastrophic thinking before the starter gun fires. This is good. I'm fixing to continue doing this for the rest of my FML and then go from there.

Hypothesis to test: amount of time saved by engaging in fewer nonproductive, anxiety-driven activities will exceed time spent meditating.

Related hypothesis: this new practice will lead to more writing output and progress toward rebranding my business toward coaching leaders in clean tech and sustainability.

Day two of the Meditation Experiment

Today, I learned once again how wonderful it is to meditate every hour. In fact, twice today I missed my hourly meditation. At these times, I found myself a little bit more anxious and a little bit less relaxed. To compensate, I doubled the length of the subsequent meditations from 5 minutes  to 10  minutes.

 I will be continuing the experiment  for a 3rd day tomorrow. 

Meditation update

After meditating for five minutes during 18 of the last 27 hours, I have these observations:
1. Each new hour comes quickly
2. Entering a meditative buzz state happens faster as the day goes on
3. The buzz appears a few times unexpectedly in the middle of the hour
4. I find myself eagerly looking forward to the next meditation and pleased it is so close at hand

Let's do this again tomorrow!

Hourly meditation

This evening I launched (big word!) a one-day experiment in meditating on the auditory sense for four minutes every hour. Will go through bedtime tomorrow. Stay tuned...

Eat less, lift more

A few weeks ago I blogged about my recent Bod Pod measure of body fat and promised to look into why the improvement was minimal and provide a summary of my findings. I did the research that first weekend. Now I share my findings:

1. Eat less. My breakfast snack was supposed to be 160 cal. Instead I found it was 250-300. Lunches and dinners likewise were about 25% too rich in calories. You simply cannot lose weight (fat) when you eat more than you burn, even if you're eating good stuff (lean protein, healthy fat, slow carbs).

2. Lift more--and correctly. I learned I had waited too long to increase the weights in my Happy Body regimen. The reason? I still found one part of the regime very challenging. (In Happy Body you increase the weight of all exercises proportionally and simultaneously). Well, guess what I found? For an unknown reason I had been lifting double the weight on that exercise--20lb in each hand instead of 20lb in both hands. Oops! This explained why all the other exercises were so easy...and why I wasn't building muscle as quickly as planned.

As I write this (with a tired left hand on my iPhone), I am not lifting at all but I am 100% free to follow the nutrition program, which my brother, Alex, reminds me is 80% of bodyfat % loss.

First flight out, last flight in

It's now after 11pm, and I'm about to walk to my car at Portland Airport. I've taken a few one-day round trips by plane in my life, but this may be the longest one.

Spent 13 hours in the Bay Area: half at SFO and the rest on the BART or in Berkeley. 2 1/2 hours with a client and 90 min with a close friend. Slept for 2 1/2 of the 3 hours of flying time and meditated for half of the 2 hours on the BART train. And I lifted weights before I left (4:30-5:15 am). A full day. And although it was a wacky way to do it, the day actually included a good ebb and flow of high intense performance/conversation and periods of renewal. A good experiment!

Meeting-free week #2

During my year-end review in December, I asked myself: how to create more time and space in life for the important-but-not urgent activities like writing, reflecting, extended spiritual practice, play, and reading? One answer: declare one meeting-free week per month, starting with a pilot period from January to March. No client calls or F2Fs, no business development, etc.

Last week was the second one of the year. Several observations:

1. Not all important-but-not urgent activities fit into the "retreat-like" categories listed above. I spent quite a bit of time on finances, bathroom planning (not how to go, or even how to help Jacob go, but what the new one in our house will look like) and processing my inbox like a good GTD (Getting Things Done) practitioner.

2. Once aware of this, I found myself feeling frustrated, even angry. "I'm not doing anything I want to do!"

3. What was evoked was a familiar pattern of interpreting an event in a way that seeds self distrust. Ah, that familiar friend! Is it possible to give the superego the week off, too.

4. A second such seed: I backed Julie's car into a telephone pole, the first one I've hit in twenty years. I was alone in the car, and the bump exerted less force on my body than dumbbells do when I lower them to the ground behind my head. To honor my commitment, I didn't schedule my "meeting" with the body shop until the next Monday (today).

5. Now here lies the genius of the meeting-free week. I had and created (more than the usual amount of) time to feel my emotions, listen to the body sensations, and use meditation to unglue myself from the bodymind's constrictions.

6. Notably, I delved into Wilber, which reminded me of the developmental benefits of meditations other than the kath (my standard practice as part of being a Diamond Approach student) and of the distinction between "pathological" neurotic fear and the fear that all bodyminds have of death, of losing their sense of self. The latter insight relaxed me instantly by suggesting - yet again - that some of my everyday anxiety isn't "bad" but simply human and a subtle sign of Rocketship Amiel preparing to blast off into or beyond what Wilber calls vision-logic (which is transverbal but not transpersonal).

7. The week concluded last night with Julie and I doing inquiry (into our respective moment-to-moment experiences--another Diamond Approach practice). While listening, I did a third-eye meditation and felt more present to her and myself than usual. Remarkably few thoughts cluttered the mind. My inquiry ("monologue") that followed involved mostly exploring the meditative buzz and the visual and auditory sensations through which I felt its expression. Beautiful!

8. Guess what was the first email in my inbox this morning? Yes, a request from a client to schedule something during my meeting-free week in late March. Time for a counter-offer!

Doubling down on spiritual practice

When you try something and it doesn't appear to be working, you have a few options: stop doing it, do it differently, or do more of it.

I've been at such a decision point with the Diamond Approach, a spiritual practice I've been doing for five of the past seven years. In short, it involves inquiring into my present experience to unfold different qualities of being a human being. Combines eastern spiritual traditions with western depth psychology.

After nearly leaving "the work," I decided to double-down, i.e. do more. In practice, this means:

• Increasing the kath meditation practice from a few times a month to daily. The kath is the point just below the belly half way in between the front and back of the body. The meditation involves focusing attention there.
• Reading more writings by A.H. Almaas (founder of the Diamond Approach)
• Listening to Hameed (A.H. is his pen name) on the ipod
• Doing more regular inquiry practice with Julie and others

I'm doing this for the spiritual practice. If you wondering about practical benefit, here is what I anticipate over a period of 6-12 months:

• Greater contact with my own power center and ability to act from it
• Greater capacity to feel an open heart
• Quieting of my overactive mind, in particular the repetitive "what could go wrong" or "how I screwed up" thoughts
• Asking my individual teacher to help me draw connections between what we discover in our work together and the brilliant array of distinctions that Hameed has made in his writing and teaching, a.k.a. connecting my experience with the theory

As I write these words, I feel excited about recommitting to this practice and a sense of inner guidance that it is a direction worth pursuing.

Singletasking with a dual purpose

My biggest fear in becoming a father (other than all the calamities that could befall our son) was not having time for the rest of life. What I continue to learn--through a mix of accident and conscious experiment--is that you can have your cake and eat it, too. In plain English, you can bring your own intentions and practices to the moments you are "parenting." No need to sacrifice yourself, and better for all if you don't. Let me give some examples:

• I can do my morning 40 minute mind/body/spirit practice (ITP Kata from The Life We Are Given) while in the same room with Jacob, while responsible for him (i.e. the primary parent "on duty"), and even while engaging with him. Sometimes while I'm doing stretches or yoga poses, he'll try to do them with me. 
• Reading books to Jacob is also an opportunity for me to practice enunciating words, placing emphasis, varying tone, expressing emotion, and pausing for effect--many of the same skills needed to speak with clients and talk to groups.
• Jacob will sit on my lower chest or belly while I'm doing pushups. 
• Inviting Jacob to participate in everyday activities like cooking, cleaning, buying groceries, putting things in the trash, and even (as Julie discovered last week) moving stuff from the small bathroom trashcan to the larger kitchen trashcan. All of these are obvious to many parents. To me, they have been a epiphany.

So the idea isn't to multitask. And when you watch real closely, it's actually impossible to multitask (what we do is microtask--shifting our attention quickly from one thing to the other). The idea is to singletask in a what that fulfills multiple purposes.

Anyone have other ideas of how to do this with parenting given what you know to be my interests and activities?

 

Now that's a heckuva lot of protein

As described in a previous post, to reach an ideal weight of 165 pounds and ideal bodyfat of 10%, I need to lose a lot of fat and gain a lot of muscle. What I learned today is that doing this requires more eating than one would think.

The Happy Body has a name for someone with too little weight, too much fat, and too little muscle: The Dieter. That name's interesting, but what really surprised me is what they recommend to Dieters and the other four body types that need to gain weight:

• Two meals per day, each with protein calories equal to 200% of your ideal body weight. For yours truly this is 330 calories, which translates to over 80 grams of protein (because 1 gram of protein = 4 calories). This is a lot of protein! And...160 grams of vegetables (please pass the broccoli).
• Three snacks per day, each with a total (for me) of 330 calories. 

These suggestions are just a small part of The Happy Body's comprehensive nutrition program, one that is consistent with Shawn Phillips's Strength for Life (my inspiration the past three years) and experts like Andrew Weil and Mehmet Oz. I mention these guidelines because they call for way more protein than the others.

So what do you get for consuming all this protein and the rest of their nutrition and exercise program? 

• Lost fat each week equal to 1% of your ideal body weight. In my case, that's 1.65 pounds per week. 
• Gained muscle each week equal to 0.2% of your ideal body weight. For me: about 1/3 pound a week.

These formulas provide an answer to the question posed in that earlier post: So how long will all this take?

The answer -- and I'll spare you the math -- is 84 weeks. That's not too far off my SWAG of 18 months, but it is a long time. And here's the intriguing part: losing fat can happen relatively quickly (only 13 weeks, less than the length of the fat loss contest with my two buddies). It's the new muscle that takes 84 weeks.

So this means eating a heckuva lot of protein for a heckuva long time.