Sitting Still

A quick Friday hit this week, folks. It's been a long week here in Boston and I have spent at least 2 10+ hour days at work which is at least 2 more than I should. Most of that time is spent looking at a computer screen and, needless to say, my eyes are pretty much shot. And do you know how much I hate Excel? Lets talk about how much I hate Excel.

No, instead, lets talk briefly about meditation groups. I'm not what you might call a "joiner" by nature. Lets say that, along with Groucho Marx and various other better known celebrities, I'm suspicious of any group that will let me be a member. Not to mention I'm not really good with regular meetings, group or otherwise. I don't go to yoga classes regularly and the last meditation class I tried to attend conflicted with the start up of my most recent bout of depression and the whole thing just derailed, shall we say.

So the appropriate alternative for me for right now is an online meditation group. My teacher put me in touch with 28 Days of Practice when they were starting up last fall and since then I've been a regular. It's about the lowest maintenance group you'll ever be a part of: hook up with the Tumblr (you don't have to join Tumblr; you can follow it on the main site or put it through a news aggregator like BlogLines or Google Reader); ask Gibran for access to the new month's spreadsheet; and decide what your goal is. Really, that's it.

You don't have to "talk" if you don't want to; posting to the website isn't compulsory; and "no-one will call you or come to your house" as the ads used to say.

All you do is enter your time per day on the spreadsheet and that's it. If that's all you want to do -- just get the gentle nudge every day that says, 'Oh, yeah, I agreed to do this, didn't I?' -- then that's fine. Most of the time, that's all I do. I read the posts on the blog; sometimes I surf through the comments; sometimes I put something up.

If you're looking for a kindly reminder that, yeah, you have been intending to do this practice and maybe just need a quiet poke in the right direction, maybe this is it. We're just finishing up the March 28 days (Cillian Murphy isn't involved, worse luck) but go here if you're interested in joining us for April.