Day 6 and 7: Growth

Day 6

This morning I was supposed to wake up at 5:30am but the phone with the alarm ran out of battery in the middle of the night. We woke up at 6:50 instead, which meant I wouldn't have enough time for yoga.

Today was hard for me. There are issues going on in my life that are testing my capabilities of being grounded and centered. Perhaps I should look at this as a fateful way to push me further into spirituality. This goal for inner peace is like climbing a mountain. At times I feel as if I've been more irritable than before this, but I think it has something to do with the fact I've been trying to monitor my emotions.

I got a book at the library today! It's about the medicinal benefits of herbs. It's really cool, and I want to use herbal medicine more often. It includes scientific studies done on certain herbs too. If I have extra time, I want to make a list of medically beneficial herbs everyone should have on hand, but there's probably a lot of Internet and scholarly resources available as well.

We did meditation for the second time today. This time there were a lot more people and none of them were the same as last week's session. It was interesting to see what a variety of people had been attracted to meditating, and I wondered what everyone's story was.

I had a good feeling about this session. When the monk talked about the 7 "stations", this time around it began to make much more sense. I touched the area two fingers' width above my navel, and it felt different there, as if that place had more meaning than just body parts. Things seemed to start making a lot more sense this time around, though I still had a lot of skepticism.

When it came to relaxing, I let go of my worries about if I was actually relaxing or not and just tried my best. When it came to clearing my mind, I would realize it worked for moments then get excited thinking "It worked!" and then resuming thought all over again. It was still really hard for me to focus on my center and I usually tuned out of what the monk was saying after a few minutes.

After a while, clearing my head and focusing on my center simply weren't achievable. I began to feel discouraged when the monk began to wrap up the session. I was seriously doubting whether or not we actually went as long as last time. It felt like I was there for 5 minutes. The time before felt like a miserable hour of sitting and occasionally falling asleep.

Other than the breakthrough with meditation, the day was generally uneventful at least regarding New Age. I got home too late to make any cool food.

Day 7

It took a lot of willpower to get up this morning. I just wanted to cuddle with Noah and sleep. I loooove sleeping! I would have to say that sleeping and eating are some of my favorite things to do, which is pretty unfortunate for the future me with a lower metabolism...

But anyway, I got up at 6:30 instead of 5:30 and did some yoga around 7. I like the VHS tapes we have, they're spiritually conscious and they seem to provide a good workout, though I want to push myself further and have some more variety.

Imagine how much harder that would have been to hold if I did it right?

Later that morning, Noah forced me to go outside and appreciate nature while drinking my Yerba Mate tea. It was really hard though cause it was so cold! Still, I am blessed to live in such a secluded, peaceful place, and I was glad to become so in touch with nature despite the pain of my bare feet on the cold deck.

Nature is something I really need to get in touch with better, right now it doesn't seem right that I'm so disconnected with nature while trying to connect with God. In many ways, nature and God are the same thing. But I have a better time thinking about connecting with nature than God, I think the word "God" has so many negative associations regarding Catholicism and Christianity. I realized that just thinking of connecting with "The Gods" feels better to me than using the word "God".

Connecting with "Nature"

I never realized I had such a fear of monotheism. There's something about it that reminds me of so many bad people I've come across. But I would like to push past these fears and prejudices and try to appreciate religions for what they try to achieve, and not what they have actually achieved.

I think overall I don't judge people personally for their religion but for their actual beliefs. When it comes to my beliefs though, God isn't what comes to mind. I think of reincarnation, spirits, energy, but not God. I don't know if I believe in a one God, and if he/she is really a tangible being, or just an energy force or a being that is completely out of our realm of understanding.

Anyway, this is what I wore for the day, and I actually got a lot of compliments (and stares). I remembered back when I was girly men would take time to look at me. I wouldn't go as far as to say I enjoyed the attention, but I liked being attractive enough that people wanted to look my way.

With this its completely different, I'm not exactly looked at for the same reasons as girly. People are looking at me, but much more out of judgment. I think people didn't judge me as harshly when I was girly, as many most likely though I took good care of myself and my appearance and they didn't have a problem with that. Now, people are judging me on what they think my beliefs are, and whether or not they decide to agree with those beliefs


I went to an event at a New Age bookstore called "Circle of Joy" It was a circle of women only and the woman holding the event talked about many aspects of spirituality. Ironically enough, she stressed that we commune with nature and learn to appreciate it better to gain spiritual confidence. If Noah hadn't forced me to appreciate nature that morning I would have been really skeptical of how nature would encourage "spiritual confidence".

I feel that a lot of spirituality is closely related to psychology. the women in this circle of joy were seeming to look for a form of solace for their problems. All of them seemed to have some sort of baggage and appeared to come here to have support.

The bookshop had a multitude of items very relevant to my experiment but unfortunately they were also incredibly expensive ($22 for a SCARF?!). I did end up buying some patchouli oil and a CD. It totaled to $26 though!

I got home at 11 tonight, which meant I couldn't make any awesome vegan food. :(