Enlightenment Training

I've learnt from the last year that running 10 kms each week, has meant I can run a 10K race in a good time. When I started running last year, I couldn't run 10 km in one go. I could only run slowly. And it was hard. I felt like I had to stop so many times, and I did, and I took breaks. But making a 10 km run my minimum weekly cardio exercise and doing it each week, with different speeds, and intervals, and breaks, but doing it nonetheless, means that now, almost a year later, I can run a 10K race faster than I could 15 years ago. And running a 10K race is now my baseline fitness. My legs, heart and lungs have adapted. I now have greater cardiac output, oxygen delivery and strength. I didn't at the beginning, but now I do.

I've noticed my baseline brain setting is depressed and anxious. But what I want to be, is baseline enlightened. I want my brain to default to a sense of perspective, wonder, love, kindness, and capability. So, I will do what I did for my legs, heart and lungs. I will train. I will put myself through the same process. An hour a week, just an hour, of enlightenment. Pulling my brain out of its habits of thinking, and consciously putting in habits I want as default. In the same way that I think about the subtleties of carving grooves in my mind as being how I exert free will, I want to intensely, as I do for other organs, train the organ of my experience, my brain, to have a different baseline. My life is busy, so, I'll just do the minimum I can do: an hour a week, and in that hour, do it intensely.

An hour. On Sundays. 10minutes of HRV feedback meditation alternating with 10 minutes of writing, done three times.

Carving grooves in my mind.