Any meditators here?

[Jon]

I've read a ton of stuff about the benefits of meditation. It's a case of East meets West, where scientists today are heavily investigating the benefits of this simple (but not easy) practice. I use an app on my phone called Insight Timer, where I do 10 minutes a day of silencing my mind. It keeps a log of your meditations and the current steak you are on. For me, it is the last 52 days in a row. That helps you stick to it, forming the habit along the way. The app also has guided meditations, which i may explore one day.

So, anyone else do this?

 

[The_Doc_Man]

When I take my morning exercise in the form of a neighborhood walk (approx. 3 miles round trip), I will sometimes meditate on my my next story that I want to write. As far as something like formal transcendental meditation, though? Nope. Never tried it.

 

[Jon]

When you say "next story", do you mean you write stories? Or are you referring to posting on discussions forums?

 

[The_Doc_Man]

I am an amateur writer with five complete novels, one in work, and one hung up because it took a wrong turn and I don't know if I can salvage it. No publications yet (but some nice rejection letters.)

I write in the fantasy/science fiction realm. I used to tell my U.S. Navy friends that I wrote government documentation by day and fantasy fiction by night, so no retraining was required. For some reason, not all of the government people in my office appreciated my sense of humor.

 

[Jon]

Wow, that is some serious writing going on there. Do you do it to relax or some other reason?

I am sure Bee here will want to chip in, as she recently had her novel "Liminal" published.

 

[Bee]

Doc, I'm laughing. I work in local govt and write reports and policy during the day - and fiction by night. The skills are interchangeable.

 

[The_Doc_Man]

I started my writing project as the result of a bad reading experience. My mother was dying slowly of Alzheimer's Disease. (Of course you never die of that; it is always contributory.) Anyway, I stayed home a lot and read a lot of fantasy/sci-fi for enjoyment. Until I came to a story that shall remain nameless by an author who shall also remain nameless. He wrote a quadralogy that, at that time, was a total of 10 US$ investment and about eight inches of shelf space. It was ponderously slow, had a gazillion plot switchbacks, and its characters were not THAT engaging. But I was sticking with it. And then I got to the last chapter and the blow-off of the whole frickin' book was "There is a little bit of good and a little bit of evil in all of us." It left me feeling terribly let down. I mean SERIOUSLY let down.

I fumed about it for several days and finally said to myself... "Self, you can write better than that." (Yeah, I talked to myself a lot back then.) It nagged me and bothered me until finally I had another one of those conversations. "Self, put up or shut up and move on." I had just bought a small computer called an Osborne 1, a predecessor of the PC by a few years. It had a limited O/S and only could run a few programs, but Wordstar was one of them. So I started writing. It turned out to be a great outlet for some seriously negative emotions I had to dump. My therapist thought it was a good idea so I kept it up.

Over a period of about five years I did a lot of writing. The result was a (currently) pentalogy in a sword-and-sorcery series (a.k.a. "hack & zap" genre). I started two other novels, and have one that I think to be 80-90% finished but I'm trying to figure out how to get the hero to finally open up to the young lady who would like to be his "special gal." He needs to learn how to love again, and has to let himself do it.

The other one started OK but got bogged down because I sensed a style change in the middle of what I was doing and realized I had lost focus. Not so much a mental block as a case of too many options and I lost sight of the end goal.

 

[Jon]

I just did 10 minutes of meditation, but I always feel really sleepy around 6pm having worked all day. When it comes to doing the meditation, I am out of puff. I am wondering how much good it is doing me, with a dozy bit of meditation. Perhaps I am forging a bad habit, rather than the habit of concentration.