For the New Year

I don't usually make New Year's resolutions, but I thought I'll make a bit of an exception this year. I've been thinking about this for quite some time, and I've come up with three resolutions. I already do not smoke nor drink and I'm not overweight, so my resolutions are a bit different from the most common ones. Also, I see them more like slogans, akin to the slogans of the Lojong practice.

Water fasting experiment, day 3

Some things I've noticed during the water fast so far:

1. Time is different. I can sit for an hour watching the birds eat from the bird feeders in the garden.
   
   
2. I'm finding it hard to keep my hands and feet warm. This might be related to the next point.
   
   
3. I'm drinking more water than I thought I would, around 1.5 litres every 3rd hour for the 14-16 hours of the day that I am awake, i.e. between 7 and 8 litres a day. I think this is a bit too much so I will try to decrease it to the 4 litres a day that I had planned. I don't want to poison myself with too much water.
   
   How much should I drink?
   
   The British Dietetic Association recommends between 1.5 and 2.5 litres a day (6 to 8 glasses). Elsewhere, it is recommended to drink as many litres as your weight in kilograms divided by 30 (2.7 litres if I'm 80 kg), or as many US fluid ounces as half your weight in pounds (88 fl oz if I'm 176 lbs).
   
   Looking for the above information provided me with lots of interesting reading, and as soon as I've finished my fasting I'll try to be a bit more observant with the amount of water I'm drinking (I think I'm usually not drinking enough).
   
   
4. When craving food, I sometimes get a phantom sensation of tastes in my mouth, like that of bread or peanuts.
   
   
5. My mouth tastes horrid in the evenings. It probably doesn't smell too good either.
   
   
6. I definitely use food as a source of comfort. It's so easy to pick up an apple or a sandwich even though I'm not really hungry. Another thing to keep in mind once the fast is over...

Apart from all that, I'm sleeping fine and although I'm very slow to get up in the morning I feel fine once I've meditated. I have revised my times a bit and I now do my meditation at 7 am, which means that the dawn is well underway when I get up from my seat, which is nice. I haven't taken the walks I said I would, but I'm ok with that.

Be well.

Water fasting, a seven-day experiment

Water fasting is a type of fasting where nothing but water is consumed over a specific time. The reasons why people might go through a period of fasting are many, but they usually span the health/spiritual spectra.

I'm planning a seven-day water fast between the morning of the 27th of December and the morning of the 3rd of January. It's an experiment.

All is real

All is real, or rather, everything is as real as anything else.

Nothing is just a fantasy.

The magician, and the siddhi, knows this. For them, there is no difference between the dream, the imagined, and the conventional reality.

Therein lies their power.

Refuge verses

This is the short refuge verse I end my meditation practice with:

From now onwards,
Until the attainment of Enlightenment,
With great reverence of body, speech, and mind,
I go for refuge to the Buddha Śākyamuni.

These lines are taken from the Tiratna Vandana, the Salutation to the Three Jewels:

Buddham jīvita-pariyantam saranaṁ gacchāmi.
Dhammaṅ jīvita-pariyantam saranaṁ gacchāmi.
Sanghaṁ jīvita-pariyantam saranaṁ gacchāmi.

[Photo by me]

Toki Pona

On Facebook this evening, a friend joined the group "kulupu toki pi toki pona", a common interest Facebook group dedicated to the discussion of the language Toki Pona. I had never heard of this language before and it looked strange indeed, so I decided to investigate further (which is why I'm still up and about at this time of the night).

According to Wikipedia, Toki Pona is a conlang, a constructed language, that

[...] is designed to shape the thought processes of its users, in the style of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis in Zen-like fashion.

Again, according to Wikipedia, the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis

[...] is the idea that the varying cultural concepts and categories inherent in different languages affect the cognitive classification of the experienced world in such a way that speakers of different languages think and behave differently because of it.

As someone who enjoys exploring mind and looking at experience and how I relate to it, I find this quite exciting and fascinating. I will try to put some time aside to study Toki Pona, or at least read more about it. My friend sent me a link to some Toki Pona lessons, that should be a start at least...

The idea that language shapes the way we experience the world is very interesting indeed, so I need to follow that hypothesis up as well.

But at this moment, I'm far too tired to do much more thinking at all.

Be well.