repsatthegym

I woke up today at 4:30, raring to go. So I stayed in bed and slept until 7, for a total of 10 hours.

My tda wasn’t all that high but my dvar was and this is a flag that I need more rest. This means that your phasic dopamine is still plugging away to repair the micro-tears your training has made in your synapses.

I think that I have found a way to turbocharge meditation, through frontloading it with exercise. Zone 2 exercise; if you throw in ant HIIT or intervals or even Z3 work you will spike phasic and mess it up.

Solid-state Z2 exercise, especially with the meditative focus I use, increases your tda and lowers your dvar. This basically means that the 40 minute focused ride I did *immediately* before sitting yesterday will have set my brain into the state you would usually get from 1 hour of samatha (focus) meditation.

Do not overdo the exercise or work to the point of tiredness because your focus will drift. But Z2 training increases your tda faster than meditation does, so you can definitely turbocharge your sitting practice this way.

Think of dopamine as a chisel and your brain as some wood. Mine is softwood at the moment. Zone 2 exercise sharpens this chisel, so that the grooves you cut into your mind are deeper. This is why people start with samatha before moving onto vipassana… but I always found samatha difficult since I can’t (mentally) sit still.

Anyway all this means that I worked the brain pretty hard, despite the time on the clock not being all that high. I focused on the ‘reps at the gym’ approach of shifting my attention between contraction and expansion: focus on the legs and then the world. Then get home, sat immediately, in the same clothes, and focus on a point before expanding the mind to the entire sense realm. Rinse, repeat, almost like a breath of the mind.

This is how I will approach things. It is training. It’s that simple. Do not waste time at the gym. Optimise.

But also recognise that you will need equal recovery for the work put in, so if you wake up and your motivation is spiky, it means your phasic dopamine is still repairing the muscle of your mind and you need more sleep. I had to eat so much yesterday and I didn’t know why. It’s because my brain is repairing. Simple.

My cmem is empty to the point where I don’t have an idea of what to write in the mornings, and that is *good*. That means that I am better able to get into a flow state with the universe. My karma is dying down.

But the muscle needs recovery so today will be an easy day with nothing challenging. Tidy the house, maybe sit for a little or make some knives, go for a walk or two, write. Nothing major.

I am also drifting into the ‘was it all real’ phase which is well documented in both theravada and zen. Not quite a ‘dark night of the soul’ because I never expected to encounter nibbana. 

But I look at the evidence within myself. I look at the lack of urgency to get everything done. I look at the self-acceptance and ability to sit and observe insects with my kid. The fact I don’t feel like the sky is falling, but rather that the world is easy, buttery, joyful… and yeah… it happened.

I do wonder if my previous ‘personality resets’ have been micro-versions of this. A huge phasic spike due to dysregulated dopamine which shows you ‘what you are doing will not satisfy’.

And the more I think about it, the more obvious it becomes that sīla - morality and ethics - are utterly essential for this process. Loving kindness and aiming for long-term personal welfare through the welfare of others. 

For this is not a guaranteed path to heaven. If you are filled with greed and hate when you encounter nibbana then you will undoubtedly be reborn in one of the hells, or as a hungry ghost.

So I will go on translating the suttas. It should help others who follow, should any choose to. More than that it will help me ensure that my next encounter with the unconditioned takes me into an even better place than now.

For now: rest. Enjoy. There is no finish line.

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