mooglesheadjournal

[mooglesheadjournal]

me, waiting at the bus stop with 15 minutes to spare, unable to use my phone bc it’s cold and hands gotta stay in pockets: might as well meditate a lil and Check in with My Body(tm), what’s up this eveni--

body: bitch fix your shit posture i’m dying here

me: okay fine jesus

[mooglesheadjournal]

finally sat down to do some proper meditatin' while not falling asleep, did a three-minute focus exercise and another one for refreshing, then i did the ten-minute for day 3 of basics 2. i actually focused on it this time, yay!

the really interesting part came after i was done and decided to do some chilling and visualizing of my own, and it a) made me feel a lot better in general and b) boy HOWDY had a lot of personal symbolism to unpack, god fucking damn; i still am not even sure whether to split the description up into different posts, unpacking different things for context, just because there's so much

i also think i might try to do some illustrations, even if they're really simple and undetailed bc my sketch app is pretty limited, because it's interesting and some of this stuff is hard to really describe without them

[mooglesheadjournal]

haven't updated this blog in a few days! some updates/observations, which are under the cut for length:

a) i noticed a sudden, massive drop in my mood, motivation, and ability to Deal with Shit as soon as i moved on from basics 1 in headspace to basics 2, including for even doing meditation itself.

i kept not being able to force myself to do it until right before bedtime, or after bedtime, and i had a hard time paying attention; staying on track; missing large chunks of the exercise because i got distracted, and having to jar myself out of it repeatedly to try and skip back to the last place i remembered; and even taying awake at all. i've also been fucking exhausted and had a harder time waking up, and my motivation for doing habitica/basic selfcare tasks has gone down the toilet too.

needless to say this has been hella discouraging. but!

b) i realized that i've been doing it wrong since i got out of basics 1! namely, that there's a difference between 'maintenance' meditation and 'learning new things and building muscles' meditation. basics 1 exercises were easy and short enough that they could pretty much serve the same purpose as maintenance, so i was treating them as such, but basics 2 takes real energy and focus, and putting work into.

so no wonder i've been having a hard time both in getting anything out of it and in general, i've been pretty much just not taking my medication. Whoops

the guy warned me about that at the beginning of the sleep course and i did not listen, fool that i am, but hey at least i'm learning what to do and not do!

c) i realized that i went from 'feeling actually refreshed in the morning and being able to focus on factors that were keeping me from getting effective sleep or keeping me in bed late, regardless of how i felt waking up,' to 'i feel like death every morning just like i always have,' because i..... stopped doing sleep exercises before bed. Whoops Again

d) i did a short maintenance-type exercise last night and immediately felt way better afterward, and have felt a lot better and more focused and motivated even before doing a maintenance exercise, and i feel way less depressed and like i'm going through the motions today, so hell yeah

e) i wrote some last night! which i think has helped a lot as well, but that'll get its own post in a few minutes here

f) found the subsection of short advice recordings, which was nice because it was about some stuff i've come across while meditatin' before like anxiety or boredom

g) i think doing maintenance/practice stuff earlier in the day will help a lot with actually staying in the habit and mindset enough to get something out of it. trying to meditate while your brain and body are specifically trying to follow thoughts into rabbit holes that let you drift off is incredibly difficult, and it's even harder if that's all you're doing, so you're actively atrophying your brain muscles in between ripping them to shreds. yeesh.

(more on the sleep thing and what i think is happening there based on what i've observed in another post.)

h) been getting more practice on body scans and how to do them thoroughly, which is actually really nice! i'm still working on how to do them at different speeds, but trying to do that kind of brain thing on..... pretty much anything has always been super stressful and anxiety-indicing for me. this way i'm slowly getting used to doing it without my brain skipping and jumping all over the place, feeling like i have to do something over and over because What if I Didn't Do It Thoroughly Enough, panicking about both not doing it fast enough and doing it too fast at the same time, etc.

feels good, man. and will doubtlessly come in handy in the future.

i) have been making more effort to absorb and get into good, creative things that recharge and inspire me and are just plain fun. for example i watched flatliners with rowan the other day (the original, apparently the remake is garbage), expecting it to be your average horror movie, and it was actually a beautiful, uplifting film that really resonated with me and comforted me about death and my anxiety over it. i also finally started getting into parks and rec, which has been a lot of fun and inspired me too.

i'll talk more about this stuff in another post too, but like... it's kind of an eye-opener.

it's just. incredibly encouraging that even supposedly falling off the wagon, even taking two steps forward and one step back, is just another opportunity to uncover and unpack the onion of factors that have been holding me back all my life. i just have to keep trying in whatever little ways i can manage, day to day.

(oh, and i bought a bunch of veggies when i went shopping yesterday too, instead of just relying on what i get from the cafe next door. be proud of me!)

[mooglesheadjournal]

also!! cool thing to note is that both of my major recent tics have almost entirely disappeared since i started meditating! one was a really, REALLY bad 24/7 blinking tic i developed recently after hitting my head, which was super embarrassing, legit blinding, extremely painful, and made it nearly impossible to socialize because talking to people made it much worse and one three-minute conversation could leave me pretty much incapacitated for the rest of the day.

normally i might just chalk it up mostly to healing from the head injury, but! it's also almost completely gotten rid of another embarrassing, uncontrollable 24/7 tic i've had for years. i almost never cough or clear my throat anymore unless it's at an understandable time, which is a fucking miracle, holy shit. i used to have to cough like literally every ten or fifteen seconds, always.

i think one of the major things that points to it being a meditating thing is that i'm pretty sure, based on a LOT of evidence, that i have tourette's, and a major way of managing tourette's is anxiety and sleep management. guess which two things have been massively improving since i started meditating!

granted, i still start blinking again sometimes when i'm talking to people face to face; but it's understandable considering it's an anxiety thing, and i can legit just start focusing on my breathing in the background during a conversation and it'll improve it a lot.

so yeah! that's really cool and i'm really happy about it :D

[mooglesheadjournal]

update: didn't really do much meditation-wise yesterday, since it was a workday and i got distracted toward the end of it, whoops

that's okay though! i did at least try to do some meditatin' before bed, although i think i'm gonna try to not do like Actual Learning Stuff exercises right before bed in future. the Wandering Thoughts i'd usually be corralling, redirecting, and trying not to follow during a session are... the ones that let my brain wander off into sleep when i'm dozing off. and i've actually started to get tired around 2am, which is the bedtime i set for myself for now, instead of having to go to a ton of effort to chill out and get ready to drift off.

which is good! but it means that a) it's a lot harder to focus and bring my attention back when it starts to wander off, so there's not a whole lot of point to it, b) this means i miss large chunks of the exercise and keep having to skip back several minutes, c) if i'm missing large chunks i'm probably not doing it in a helpful way anyway, and d) it seems like kind of a bad idea to start training myself out of letting my brain go through the process of........ actually falling asleep.

good and uplifting news is that i hit the last exercise in the first basics course yesterday!! bad news is that i'm gonna have to do it over again today for the aforementioned reasons, r i p. still jazzed about it though!

have got thoughts about some of the recent imagery stuff now that i'm not too exhausted to actually think about it, but that's for another post.

[mooglesheadjournal]

have a screenshot of me talking about tonight's stuff, since i'm a lazy bastard who doesn't wanna write it all out again

[mooglesheadjournal]

also! have been doing headspace for about two weeks and i'm almost done with the first basics course, i'm doing the last one tomorrow :DDD i'm proud of myself for managing to do it every day even when i didn't feel like it, feels good man

should work on the sleep one more since i keep putting it off but weh i wanna pick up the creativity one. weh. maybe i'll do em both

[mooglesheadjournal]

honestly if anything is motivation to start learning how to paint digitally when i'm able to, it's being able to properly render some of the imagery that's been sitting in my head for anywhere from a year to over a decade and a half

i've been meaning to for a long time but i will consider it a new years resolution

[mooglesheadjournal]

so i started meditating recently.

a lot of things have really started to turn around for me this year already, and meditating is definitely one of them. (not to be a shill or anything but god damn headspace is good, if nothing else i recommend checking out their free basics cause god damn they have been helpful so far.)

as i've done more of it some really interesting imagery has started turning up in my head, the kind that usually only shows up for me when i'm having a really vivid dream, and i've decided to go ahead and start keeping a journal of it. i've always been very much the type to process things via surreal intense dream imagery and Delving into the Subconscious for Symbolism to Unpack. but for me, a deeply mentally ill, homeschooled survivor of an abusive family and all kinds of trauma, who grew up depressed and isolated and desperate for an escape, it's always been a really unhealthy thing for me; a way to dive deep and pretend reality was far away and didn't matter.

i had to put that away for awhile when i got out of that situation and started the process of recovery. it was fucking me over, hiding in my own head like that, and i had to drag myself kicking and screaming out into the real world to start facing my shit. it was what i needed at the time, but i missed it. god, i missed it so much. it felt like i'd filled in the lake i spent all my time in with concrete, and the world felt cold and shallow for a long time. it made me explore and get to know the surface world over time, and actually set down roots and learn how to live there, but it felt like i'd cut off a limb.

i spent three and a half years like this. wishing i could go back to diving into myself again, sighing over the thought, and reminding myself that no, that wasn't good for me. it'd be painful to have to stay out of that lake forever, but it was the price i have to pay for having health and sanity and a life. that's just growing up, i told myself.

now i'm learning to meditate, and to my surprise i'm stepping back into that lake again after all. this time, though, i've got a lifeline anchoring me to reality, and an oxygen tank, and training to swim out and then back. it's not gone forever. i can go diving again.

needless to say i'm pretty fucking hype.

anyway, a heads up that this blog is part meditation journal and part dream blog, and therefore will contain all kinds of shit that may be unsettling--ranging from gore and body horror the general kinds of spooky shit my brain likes to go for, general weird stuff you would expect to see in dreams--as well as some ns/f/w text. it will also most likely contain discussion of my own abuse history and mental illness. i'll try to tag accordingly, but like, be warned.

[plinkett voice] let's dive right in, shall we?