Meditation

Through my Weekly Experience Logs, I have learned that my success schema was pretty dominant in my life. When I take a look at the stressful situations that I had to list out in the Weekly Logs, it’s pretty obvious that some of those situations are things that I shouldn’t even be remotely upset about. For example, in my earlier logs that I have turned in, I wrote that I was stressed about getting a decent grade in a homework assignment, and was upset over a pick-up basketball game that I lost in. It really shows how I was bothered over failures in trivial things. I also learned that how such trivial things could lead me to do negative behaviors, which was something that I wasn’t consciously aware of until I actually wrote it down in the log. As I progressed through the quarter, I became more aware when negative thoughts were popping up, and I was able to counter in by thinking positive thoughts, which helped alleviate my stress a lot more.
The biggest challenges in meditations were staying focused and actually being motivated to do them. It was hard to stay focused because this was the first time for me doing mediations. For the first few weeks when I was doing meditations, I ended being distracted by falling asleep or thinking about other things. Also, I wasn’t really motivated on doing motivations when I wasn’t in the class, because it felt rather awkward for me to meditate in my room, especially when my roommates were there. In terms of my focus problem and the motivation, what I did to fix those problems was to use the visualization method as described in the article “Relaxation” by Bourne. This way, I could imagine myself being away from the hectic university environment, which cleared my mind of all the anxiety. This helped me tremendously, as I was able to calm down and be more focused and motivated during mediations.