Day 4
Day 4 5/16/13 Got to bed later then I wanted because of a combination of work and surfing the web so it took a while to get going this morning but by 5:20 I was doing my short Yoga routine and got down to meditation. As I said before, the more you meditate the quicker it is to get ‘in the groove’ of centering on yuor breath and bringing your mind into the mode. My right tricep is still pretty painful, this (I’m guessing) is probably because I’m right handed and used htat arm a lot more in the last few days then the left. I stretched it out and while it was painful during Yoga it wasn’t stopping me but I only did 5 Sun Salutations, 2 sets of 20 pushups and only 3 sets of 6 pullups. Not a great workout but I did work out and that’s more then I’ve done in a long time. I hasn’t been as hard getting up at 5:00 am as I thought it would be and I am grateful for that but I think it’s from a sense of getting things done that I’ve wanted to get back into my life for a long time: Meditation, working out and writing. These last four days I haven’t gotten any writing done in the morning but I am getting it done in the afternoon or early evening. The when is not important at all to me, it’s getting it done. Many years ago a friend tried to teach me the concepts of “little victories” or “little successes” that it doesn’t take much but if you string together a series of little successes you can keep yourself on track, excited and focused. When you have a failure in something you are trying to do it’s a setback so breaking things down to simple tasks or events that you know you can acomplish will set you up for a victory and everyone loves to be victorious or a success at anything. For me just getting up at 5:00 am and getting ANYTHING done is a success. Just sitting down to meditate, no matter how “successful” that session is will always be a victory to me. Working out even short workouts that I really try at are a success. It’s one of the reasons that (for now) I”m not putting time limits or more then general goals for my activities in the morning. I’m getting done and once I get a little stronger, a little more flexable and a little more in mode to meditate I will start planning out things like reps, time spent and have more specific goals for my mornings. For now I’m pretty damn proud of myself just for what I’m getting done and that I can keep it going. KB Share...
Read MoreDay 3
Day 3: 5/15/13 Wednesday. Slept right through my wife getting up and leaving for her class. Luckily I have my alarm set. I blame Star Trek. Damn you JJ Abrams! The ‘reboot’ film of STAR TREK was on cable last night and I can’t resist it even with commercials. Granted during commercials I was working but still before I realized it and before Kirk and Spock had defeated Nero it was past 10:00 and I knew I needed to get to bed but still held in there through FX Channel’s endless commercial interruptions… Yeah, I own it on DVD and could have watched the entire film in the time that it took to watch half of it with commercials. Oh well. Upon getting up I checked into the newsfeeds and my Google+ notifications. I realize this is a time waste for my precious time in the mornings. I don’t wake up fast. I need time and usually scrolling through news and notifications while drinking a glass or two of water is part of my waking up process but I need to reconsider this. I need to wait till later to check in on the digital world I think. Tomorrow my goal will be to not check my digital world till after meditation and workout. I realize that I didn’t talk about the order of things in the morning I”m planning: I want to do brief Yoga routine first thing to stretch out the kinks, loosen up and that meditate. When you sit down to meditate it can take the first minutes of stretching out your neck and muscles before you can get comfortable enough to bring your mind to your breath and focus just on that. So the plan of the moment (day 3) is: Wake. Water Brief Yoga Meditation Yoga Workout Pushups Pullups Coffee & Breakfast My triceps of my right arm were still still hurting this morning so I took the conservative approach and after I meditated did two series of the Sun Salutation, two short sets of pushups of 20 each and only did 2 sets of pullups of 10 each. I haven’t had a regular workout in probably more then a year so even though it wasn’t much of a work out these past mornings I still feel like I’m accomplishing something and more importantly building a routine to stick with. I feel good that I”m at least doing what I am doing that’s good. Coffee and for breakfast a shake of protein powder, strawberries and a banana. That’s another thing I haven’t done in a while: make shakes. I’ve got some very high quality meal replacement / protein shakes and used to have them on regular basis but got away from it. Now I need to remember my recipes and make sure I’ve got enough bananas and fruit in the house. I also realize I haven’t talked about this blog either. Doing something creative every day is an easy thing to get away from. You don’t do it one day… and it makes it easier not to do it the next day and so on and so on and soon you are away from it and it’s just a wish. I miss having creative outlets. I think often how I need to . This blog is part of my process to get back to it. Many writers tell you the number one thing you can do to become a better writer or become more prolific is to write. Write every day. Doesn’t matter how much but you need to get it done. That’s the purpose of this blog. Well, it’s also to hold myself accountable publicly for keeping with my project but also to get myself back into the practice of every single day doing something creative… although I’m sure some people will not see this as creative just putting random crap down on digital paper and shooting it off into the internets. Either way, it’s a start and every day I write ANYTHING is a success. I’m keeping a list of topics I need to expound on with larger posts: Yoga Meditation Pushups Pullups Coffee Shakes Fasting I promise I’ll get to them all. KB Share...
Read MoreDay 2
Day 2: 5/14/13 Woke up and after checking news and Google+ had two big glasses of water. This is one of the important things I’ve learned about in the last few years: hydration. I have gotten to the point where I can tell when I haven’t drunk enough water in a day. I can change my energy levels and feel better sometimes when I haven’t just by drinking a few glasses of water. Many nutritionists and gurus say to start your day on an empty stomach with a glass or two of water. My arms are still hurting from sunday’s workout so again I do an abbreviated Yoga workout and then about ten minutes of meditation. My Yoga workout is from a book I read many years ago called POWER YOGA by Beryl Bender Birch (Find it on Amazon http://amzn.to/11lC5hm ). It was a good building from basics kind of book like I’d always been told Yoga should be. I was told many years ago that Yoga starts of with a series of poses and after you get good with them you build on them and add some more and so on. The primary start point is the “Sun Salutation”. It’s a series of 10 positions that you do, you breath with each movement/pose and then you do it again. Then you do it again… and again. It ends up being a great all over exercise for stretching but also strengthening your body and mind. Usually I try and do between ten and twelve of them and that’s my goal for this morning project for the first month. Ten to twelve and then build on that. Next up for exercise is push ups. I am going to try and do the 100 Pushups program. It’s basic and there’s a plan to it so I don’t have to do much other then follow it. Pushups are a great exercise not only because you can do them anywhere but you don’t need equipment and it’s good for not only your arms and back but it works out your whole body. The other part of my workout will be the pull up bar. (picture) Pull ups are like pushups: you use your own body weight to work out with. Don’t need special equipment for either. Once I get myself up to a decent number of pullups (I’m doing sets of twelve till exhaustion) I’m going incorporate leg lift ab work into it. That’ll come later I think. The one issue I see for all of this is that I basically have a little over an hour to an hour and fifteen minutes for all this and the most important aspect of all this is my meditation time which I’ll want to increase as I go along. This is something I’ll have to give more consideration to later but for now I don’t want to overthink this project and over plan or over analyze it either. I’m just happy I’m doing it, I’m getting some meditation time, getting back to exercise and getting back to writing… oh, crap, I hadn’t planned in the time to write this daily blog. Hmmmm—- Again, I’m not going to overthink this for now. Just going to do what I can and accomplish that THEN i’ll work out the schedule in more detail and plan it better. KB Share...
Read MoreDay 1
DAY 1: Monday 5/13/13 Getting up at 5:00am isn’t as hard as I thought it would be. Maybe it’s because my wife is up at 4:30 and I hear her alarm, her in the shower and all that so it’s waking me up slowly but by 4:45 I’m awake and if not I’ve got the alarm on my iphone set to go off at 4:56 am. As I expected the getting to bed on time is going to be the issue but I don’t have a choice. Forced into a corner of knowing how bad you will feel the next day is a great motivator. I check my news feeds and Google+ notifications on my phone as I wake up further and have a large glass of water. I’m ready for Yoga now… but my body isn’t. Yesterday I started working out again, I overdid it. I did a Yoga workout (I’ll do a post about it later) and then fired up an app for my iPad for the “100 Pushups” program. (The idea for it is that you build up your strength and body to be able to do 100 push ups) and did the 5 minute routine. By the end of it I was able to only do a few push ups after a rest and no more. I also did pull ups on the bar that fits over the door frame that I bought two years ago and have used maybe 10 times. I overdid it and my arms and lats are killing me. I do an abbreviated Yoga series more to stretch then work out and then settle down for meditation. Meditation is the most important thing you can do for yourself. I honestly believe that even though I don’t have a very regular practice. I take a moment a day to stop and breath and focus on my breath but not a regular sitting practice that I know I need. ANYONE can meditate. EVERYONE can benefit from it. Even if it’s only 5 minutes doing it regularly will change your life. (I’ll do a post exclusively about meditation shortly) Meditation is, in the simplest explanation, giving your brain a rest. When you meditate you focus on something that is automatic like your breath. You focus on it to the exclusion of all else and clear you mind. You let your mind take a break. You let your brain relax. Even when you are asleep your brain doesn’t relax. It’s like your muscles, it needs to relax and go limp for a little while. After you’re meditating for some time you will be able to bring that calm, relaxed brain state into other points of your day sometimes without even realizing it. The one thing you’ll quickly realize about meditation is that while it sounds simple (sit, focus on your breath, don’t think) it’s not easy. That “don’t think” part is the hardest thing you might do all day but that’s okay. You can’t help but have thoughts enter your mind. You just need to acknowledge you are thinking and go back to your breath. In meditation I usually don’t feel like I’m “getting there” till the very end of my time. At that point I have cleared my mind and am only focused on my breath. For these mornings I’m not setting a time limit or a timer for myself but it usually ends up being around 10 minutes. Eventually I’d like to get up to at least 20 minutes but to do that I might have to get up even earlier. We’ll see how this project goes. As I said, even five minutes in the morning five at night will change your life. Have no doubt about that. After that I fed the dog and cat and by then my wife was home and it was 6:00am. For some reason I felt hungry so I had a bowl of cereal and made coffee. Next thing you know it’s 6:45 and time to start the process of waking the five year old to start the day and get ready for school. I feel like I’ve accomplished something this morning. I feel good about the project and that this will be a good thing for me. KB Share...
Read MoreAND SO IT BEGINS…
The idea is pretty simple: get up an hour earlier and get the things done you want to get done. For me, that means getting up at 5am instead of 6:30 and meditate, exercise and not be as rushed in the mornings. Oh, and maybe get some writing done. I had read about this idea that getting up at 5 am made a huge difference in people’s lives (I’m assuming this is people like me that didn’t get up till later normally. I know there’s a lot of people who do get up at 5am to get to work and get their kids going… for them I guess it would get getting up at 4 am) by letting them have a little extra time in the morning to get their day going and get things done. For me what I plan to do with that extra hour is get some exercise, meditate and get some writing done. The biggest hurdle is the getting up at 5 am part which means I need to get go bed earlier then I usually do. That’s a hard one for me because I’m one of these people who will get involved in something in the evening and then next thing I know it’s midnight. The goal is to get to bed by 10:00 pm. That means I’ll hopefully be in bed ready to sleep by 10:30. Maybe 11:00. Oh, before I forget all this is being facilitated by my wife. She signed up for a new exercise class near our home and the only class she knew she could get to because of her and our family schedule was the 5:00 am one. Yeah, I don’t think I’d be able to do it if she wasn’t getting up at 4:30. If she wasn’t doing this I am honest enough to say that I probably wouldn’t be doing this—- This is something I’ve spoken about and dreamed of being able to do but never got around to. I owe this chance to her. Back to sleep: with 10-10:30 I’ll get around 6-7 hours of sleep. Not optimal but for the moment it’ll have to do. I just can’t see myself going to bed at 9:00 but I have hopes that someday I’ll get there on occasion. The issue with 9:00 is that I have a life, a job (self-employed) and a 5 year old child. Oh, and a wife who I’d like to spend more than a few minutes with talking about something other then “how was your day?”. One thing about this blog which you might have noticed already: it’ll very likely be stream of conscious type posts—- collections of thoughts on this project and what it’s doing for me and how I’m figuring out how to make it work better and get more done with it. Having said that I’ve also got some ideas about longer more involved postings and will have those as well. KB Share...
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