You might be wondering, why doesn’t he just focus on one: meditation or the sleep schedule? Well, the problem is that they rely on one another. The sleep schedule makes the meditation possible and vice-versa. On top of all of this, I have a volunteer project that I’m abominably overdue on. That’s an energy sap, but I refuse to cave on that one.

A thought comes to mind of one of the greatest real-life examples of the “re-route power” analogy: The Apollo 13 mission. If you haven’t seen the movie Apollo 13, you really should. It’s a masterpiece and pretty accurate, as well.

Having cut power to everything, they barely survived until it was time to start-up everything for the last part of their journey. But there was a problem: If they started up everything, then they wouldn’t have enough juice. No matter how they arranged it, no matter what permutations they used, it just wasn’t enough.

I found myself in the same situation. I needed enough willpower to get my meditation and sleep schedules started, but I’m starting from a point of exhaustion. Today, after artfully letting an emotional gut-punch at work roll off me, I decided that I was going to deliberately relax. My focus is getting back on balance. For the rest, I’m going to be gentle with myself. Yes, I’m going to continue to eat healthy. Yes, I’m still going to a job wherein people scream demands for the impossible. And yet, having made the determination to be good to myself, I find the situation already changed. I’m meditating tonight, and I’ve cooked up a couple of ways to make sure that I’m up when I need to be. The rest will take care of itself.

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A failure of active planning made for an environment where stopping to meditate wouldn’t work. It’s not enough to have commitment to the process. I have to set structures in place to keep it going. This blog is one, and Habitforge is another, but I still need to make it happen. The counter goes to zero. Sigh.

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On the other hand, noticing the raw currents of my thoughts and feelings has its ups and downs.

Sir Terry Pratchett writes of a fantasy blend of coffee that makes one “knurd”. This messes with your reality just as much as alcohol does, but in the opposite direction: Your clarity, memory, and understanding of the world sharpens to uncomfortable and then unbearable levels. In a strike of pure genius, one of his characters, a recovering alcoholic, is described as being naturally knurd to a small degree. He kept intuitively trying to find balance, and missing horribly. But I digress.

I’m feeling a little knurd today. It’s normal and I’ll adapt, but still a little uncomfortable.

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In other news, I seem to be rapidly returning to the tonal I remember. Making those existential “bookmarks” seems to have helped.

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About a year ago, my back got fed up with me and walked off the job. Much to my chagrin, I have never yet to regain the physical and spiritual edge that I had. Maslow’s pyramid of needs may not be accurate, but dealing with pain and fatigue on a long-term basis gets old.

Very recently my back started acting up on me. A year later, almost to the week. Growl. At the same time, I’m pissed because I haven’t been meditating anywhere near what I really want to, I haven’t been writing like I want to. I just had a month without my delightfully distracting wife nearby, and I’d planned to go into a veritable Jedi mode and meditate and write my arse off. Instead? It was all I could do to keep the wheels of day-to-day life spinning.

I am here for more than minutia. I am here to do many things, some of them great, even. But how am I supposed to do anything with a body that seems to consipre against me and an energy level that precludes anything other than the basics?

Well, job one is an audit to find out what goes on. First thing’s first, stop blowing energy on fussing about the problem. Doesn’t help, and prolongs the problem. Now, clear out the email inbox. This is actually more stress-relieving than you might think. A couple of pointers if you’re using gmail: searching for the terms “in:inbox unsubscribe” and “in:inbox team” (without the quotes) will enable you to get rid of a lot of the stuff that you actually wanted to subscribe to but never actually read. For many of us, this is the majority of our inbox.

Finish that up, then move on to it’s mirror, my exocortex: I use a combination of Evernote to archive useful info, ideas, inspirations, observations and reference material and Nozbe to parse it into a series of tasks to complete.

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TV Tropes takes these works and looks “under the hood” to see the components that make them work  Some shows have a page devoted to the characters, where they show what tropes and traits the character has. I figured that if my life is a story as an analogy, then my story should have a character page. So, I went through the site and compiled my character sheet. It’s assembled just as it would be on the site itself, with links leading to the wiki entries detailing the meaning, and where else that trope shows up. Bear in mind: tropes are not clichés.

Here is enough to get to know me pretty well. Be warned, though: Some say that TV Tropes will ruin your life, as you can’t un-know what you know. On the other hand, greater appreciation for the intricacies of story and form means to some that TV Tropes will enhance your life. Proceed at your own discretion.

• Absent Minded Professor with no students
• Afraid Of Needles
• Apologizes a Lot
  
• The Apprentice, see “The Force” below
• Badass Creed – see Survival Mantra below
• Bald of Awesome (give it a few years)
• Beware the Honest Ones
• Beware the Nice Ones
• Big Boned, which is good, because they have to carry some extra pounds, too.
• Chronic Hero Syndrome
• Cloudcuckoolander due to the Force training below.
• The Conscience, not that he doesn’t have his own human foibles.
• Curious as a Monkey
• Deadpan Snarker
• Is in an Enlightenment Cycle
• Evil Laugh – odd, as there are no outright villainous urges. Still, well polished just the same.
• Fatal Flaw:
  
  • Brilliant but Lazy
    • Doesn’t come into play as long as there is in sight something significant to be learned and/or a challenge that can be won. Doesn’t need to be “easy”, just needs to be reasonably “winnable”. Also negated by Undying Loyalty below.
  • Fleeting Passionate Hobbies - mild case. The world is just too interesting.
    
  • Possesses a deep and abiding respect for the ladies, while finding them irresistible.
    • Now, focused on the Missus . See Happily Married.
      
  • Sweet Tooth
• The Fettered
• Practices the ways of The Force, which imparts an odd worldview. See Cloudcuckoolander above.
  
• Fourth Wall Observer – See Genre Savvy
• Friend To All Children - see Gentle Giant below
  
• Genre Savvy, with a tendency of talking to the Fourth Wall for fun.
• Gentle Giant
• Good Is Not Nice – See Knight in Sour Armor below
• Gut Feeling – See The Force above
• Happily Married, especially happy since Opposites Attract
• Sadly, a wielder of the Incredibly Lame Pun.
• Intelligence Equals Isolation
• Jumped At The Call
• Kids Are Cruel – was on the receiving end.
  
• Turns into a Knight in Sour Armor when life issues a beat-down.
• Literal Minded
• Malaproper for fun and profit
• Tends to give the Mathematician’s Answer (See Literal Minded above)
• Minored in Asskicking
• The Movie Buff which is the source of the Genre Savvy above
  
• Mr Imagination – extensively as a child, nowadays (mostly) harnessed for thought experiments.
• Nice To The Waiter – too much experience and awareness to do otherwise.
• Not A Morning Person unless a polyphasic sleep schedule is in use.
• Lives in The Other Rainforest
• Life’s goal is to become The Paragon
• Promoted to Parent due to a large family, made moreso when Dad went on the road/Mom and Dad split up.
• Religious background:
  • Mom and Dad both had LDS leanings and background, but:
  • Mom also has a strong background in Fundementalist Christianity
  • Dad also has/had a strong background in Neo-Paganism
  • So, Yeah.
• Sacrificed Basic Skill For Awesome Training – Soaks up knowledge like a dry sponge, but possessing only basic social skills. See Intelligence Equals Isolation above.
• Sophisticated as Hell, particularly fond of the Expo Speak Gag.
• Survival Mantra – Several, most notably the Desiderata and Invictus
• Technical Pacifist, not to be confused with an Actual Pacifist
• Holds that There Are No Coincidences
• Undying Loyalty to those deemed worthy.
• Unfunny
• Walking Techfix – Less so after the age where doubt sets in, but still strong.
• Why Did It Have To Be Snakes SPIDERS
• World Of Cardboard Speech – increasingly, it seems the only limitations are self-imposed, and there’s more there than previously imagined.
  

Since you’ve made it this far, you’ll probably know what this is all about. If you think that this is a case of nerd sniping, that was not the intention, although it would work fine for that, to paraphrase Tommy Lee Jones.

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A while back, one of our pets started to become severely ill. Roughly the same time, both my wife ind I caught a rather nasty variation on the flu. At the same time, we were thinking dark thoughts like how much can we afford to do to save our beloved family member. Between grief, sickness and fatigue, I went under fast. I lost both my spiritual balance, and my sleep schedule in one brief series of hits.

The loss of my awareness and all that entails can’t be described directly. Suffice it to say that since I’ve been gritting my teeth and re-focusing on the spiritual, I’ve been feeling my spiritual nature re-open, like the tip of the iceberg finding out how much more of it there is under the water.

The loss of the polyphasic schedule is much more obvious and easy to articulate.  This schedule gave me an extra 4 hours per day. This is absolutely huge.  On days where I work, I’m out of the house for 12-13 hours. Doesn’t leave a lot of time when you factor in the usual maintenance needed to keep life rolling along. With the sleep schedule, I could not only handle all of that (and keep house in a manner most awesome), but also have time for my spiritual pursuits, volunteering my time for transcription projects, and just plain recreation. Also, I was almost never tired.

Then boom, it all falls down. Imagine losing 2/3 of your non-sleep, non-work time.  Already not feeling well, now I couldn’t maintain my schedule.

Having fought the good fight for some time, I eventually decided to work with the flow. As much as it hurt, I put the polyphasic sleep on the shelf for now. I wasn’t going to have an opportunity to resume soon, anyway.

That having been settled, the rest started falling into place. Letting go of the polyphasic sleep allows me to take care of the ailing pet. All that remains is budgeting time for spirituality and happiness first. The rest can look to itself.

In site-related news, I’m no longer funneling my update feeds into the blog itself, I’ve instead set up a widget over to the side. Enjoy.

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• A fresh perspective on my back.

A while back, a teacher told me that healing after surgery is like mending a broken relationship. I thought I’d smoothed things over pretty well, but I was about to find out I’d gotten the flowers but still wasn’t listening

I’ve recently been teaching a loved one the value of surrender; releasing emotional hang-ups to better stay in the present. With that I’d like to share the following quote:

“Think you the relationship between Master and Padawan is only to help them? Oh, this is what we let them believe, yes! But when the day comes that even old Yoda does not learn something from his students-then truly, he shall be a teacher no more.” ―Yoda

I was meditating tonight, noticing the sensations produced by my unhappy back when it hit me. I still have emotional mending to do. I thought I’d just picked up and moved on, but instead I realized that I had basically pretended that (for the most part) it never happened. The other half was that even with that attitude, I was treating my back like it was permanently less than what it was. Putting all of this together, I gave my love to my innerverse, especially my poor back. For so long, it had toiled on, without the love and support of the guiding intelligence (me), yet it continued on and was only now crying for help and attention.

Having come to this realization, I was shocked to realize just how cruel one can be. Here I am trying to refine myself into a light upon the world, and I blithely ignore an entire universe entrusted to me and reliant upon my direction? No more.

I finished my meditation, and also realized that along with the ghost hunting that comes with this time of year, also comes the need to really focus on maintaining my spiritual tone. I spent a while collecting more energy and working on my tone (Water of Life, for those of you in-the-know). After that, and equipped with fresh perspective, I am once again back in the captain’s chair.

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Firstly, some physical updates:

I had been cruising along on my polyphasic sleep setup (Everyman 2-nap) and all was well, except that my midday nap spot was slowly doing Bad Things to my back (For those of you who read the newsletter at energy-healing-guide.com, please forgive if some of this is familiar. Not all of this will be the same). Eventually, the back gave up on my stupidity entirely and decided to Teach me a Lesson. Lucky me.

As such things go, it was a lesson well learned. Several, in fact.

* Reading the safety instructions isn’t enough. Safety protocols are there for a reason.
I was closing in on the end of the month-long adaptation period, and my back was starting to hurt at the end. I didn’t want to give up when I was so close to a complete adaptation, and that was long enough for my napping spot to finish it’s job.

* Pay closer input to the minutia of sensory input.
It’s all in the details. I didn’t even know what physical agents caused the back problems until I reclined in a car seat. Then suddenly, all became clear. My midday spot was in my car, and the absence of lumbar support, coupled with the awkwardly-positioned sit-up at the end meant that it wasn’t a matter of if, but when.

* I really, really, really miss my polyphasic sleep schedule.
PureDoxyK recently published a post (check it out at puredoxyk.com) about the horrors of having to sleep monophasically (“normal”, sleep-all-in-one-lump-type sleep) for about a week and a half. I let my body sleep as much as it wanted during recovery phase, and I made a promise to my wife and my body that I wouldn’t re-attempt polyphasic transition until New Year’s. This would give me time to fully recover and get geared up for the switch. . .

And yet, I find myself wanting to cheat. I find myself thinking things like “Well, I can still take my naps…” or “Well, I can pick up a Siesta schedule, that’s not REALLY polyphasic” or “I’m well enough to return to work, so that means I should be well enough to get back into a polyphasic schedule, right?!” Mark Twain divided lies into three categories, I’ll let you categorize these as an exercise.

*But for all of that, the real lessons and new understandings have been spiritual and emotional in nature.

To be physically helpless and dependent is not something I’ve had to deal with. I’ve always tried to be Mr. Big Strong Stoic Silent Helper Handy Man Person. Yeah. When you’re immobilized on the ground and it takes several strong rescue personnel to scrape you off the floor, and wheel you out of the house, it shocks you out of your mental patterns.

So often we imagine that the roles we play and the things that we do, and the personae we put on are ourselves. It’s no surprise; we get so used to them, that they take on a life of their own. Through patient work, I’ve made some progress distilling who I am by noting over and over and over that which I am not. This experience (the immediate and the recovery) was such a shock to the mental/emotional system that I had no real way out but to take a closer look at myself, my body, and the interactions between them.

I’ve been meditating regularly for well over a year now. It’s been of incalculable benefit to me. I used to post content on this blog which was basically self development from a technological perspective. But the meditation practice was such a quantum leap forward that I couldn’t write about what I had been writing about, and I didn’t have a handy frame-of-reference to describe what was happening. It really is too bad; that would have been some good stuff. But I digress.

My meditation practice went out the window after the injury. No good trying to meditate when you’re flat on your back and doped up on pain pills.

Oh, and an aside to anyone who reads energy-healing-guide.com and sneers at me for “selling out” and enlisting the aid of modern Western medicine; you didn’t read all the way down to the bottom. I’m very pragmatic: I use what works. I write from experience and personal study and I lay out what has worked and (occasionally) what hasn’t worked for me. Modern Western medicine is great for treating the physical stuff. I wouldn’t use it as a stand-alone, but I wouldn’t really use anything as a stand-alone, so there you go. Thankfully, I haven’t gotten any such flames in my inbox yet, and hopefully won’t any time soon. Again, I digress.

Not meditating for a month really messed me up. The world was darker. Heavier. The petty things of life became more important until it started to become hard to see anything else. I was aware of what was going on, but I was unsure how to handle the situation or what I could do about it.

During recovery after the surgery, I started watching some suggested spiritual movies. Most notable was “Ram Das Fierce Grace”. Yowza. Watch it. If you have Netflix, load it up on View Instantly (after you finish reading and share your thoughts, of course). The true story of a renowned spiritual teacher and how he coped with a much larger version of the same problem. The same kinds of reactions, and how he re-united with his spiritual core… it just gave me a great kick to the complacency.

For the one-two punch, when I shared my experience with the community at energy-healing-guide.com, I was greeted with warm wishes and (in one case) a gentle chiding for not including the community to begin with. The ensuing conversation was a real eye-opener. For those who have read of what Steve Pavlina calls “lightworker syndrome”, the story will be pretty familiar: I felt (and still do) that my place was to serve. I incorrectly extrapolated this to mean that I shouldn’t be asking for help, thinking that such would be presumptuous and selfish of me. Instead, I walked into selfishness and presumption by not sharing. Not only did I take an interesting dialog off the table, one with discussion of what the various events and situations were doing with mind and emotions, but I deprived a community of healers of the chance to do what their heart yearns to do: help heal others. The twin chance to help someone and sharpen the skills, and I didn’t even give them the chance.

But. I live, and I learned. I wound up missing what sounded like a great meditation retreat just last week, but I seem to be getting back into the swing of things, and I’m starting to feel more and more like my true self again.

Biggest lesson of all, perhaps: When life falls apart, take a quick look to see what lies behind and between the cracks!

Until next time,

Namaste

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