Ian Sidden

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Meditation Is and Isn’t Relaxing

When Your Mind Makes Space for the Scary Stuff

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When I meditate, I tend to focus on the easy inflow and outflow of breath as well as the relaxation of muscles unnecessary to the pose. If I’m sitting, then what’s required? If I’m lying down, then what’s really required? Let go of everything unnecessary, and a kind of clarity enters the picture. Thoughts come and go, often feeling like passing clouds obscuring present awareness. With practice, they are easier to let pass, and that is genuinely relaxing.

And then what? At least for me lately, I’ve begun hitting bedrock fears. The mundane thoughts having been let go of, my mind makes space for what feel like deathbed fears. The fear of my own mortality. The mortality of the people I love. The awareness that everything will end and is in the process of ending right now.

This is not relaxing, and I have ended several of my meditation sessions in the past few months in tears. And I don’t exactly know how to move beyond this other than by staring at it and using the same meditation techniques that got me to this point. Observe. Let go. Observe. Let go.

Even if letting go feels wrong, even if it feels like failure, I have to trust that there is something on the other side beyond these fears that’s worth it.

If there was anything I learned from The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying, it’s that we are going to face these fears at some point by choice or by circumstance. Best to try and work through them ahead of time as best we can. Even if it’s not relaxing at first.

Premiere: Frau Luna

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Heute Abend findet im Opernhaus Dortmund die Premiere Frau Luna – vom Komponist Paul Lincke – statt. Ich freue mich sehr darauf. Es gibt so viel in unserer Produktion, das schön und spannend ist.

Tonight is the premiere of Frau Luna – from composer Paul Lincke – in Opernhaus Dortmund. I’m really looking forward to it. There’s so much in our production that’s beautiful and exciting.

Mehr Infos/More Information:

https://www.theaterdo.de/detail/event/frau-luna/

Rules-Based Singing

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Since we can’t fully hear ourselves, and since we might decide we can take excessive vocal risk based on transitory feelings, we have to have a process that includes certain rules. We then rely on these rules to guide us through challenging situations where our present emotions might encourage us to behave differently:

  • “I breathe here. No matter what.”
  • “I round my lips here. No matter what.”
  • “I wear my ear plugs for this piece. No matter what.”
  • “I only give 85% of my max volume here even though it says ff. No matter what.”
  • “I maintain some squillo here, even though it says ppp. No matter what.”
  • “I modify the vowel here. No matter what.”
  • “I check in with the conductor here. No matter what.”

You’ll develop these rules on your own given your own strengths and weaknesses and the challenges of your given circumstances. When should you make such rules? Here are a few over arching times:

  • When you keep forgetting something that you know will help you.
  • When you have shifting circumstances such as room acoustics.
  • When you have very difficult music, especially music that presents a risk of early vocal fatigue.

Behind all this is the idea that your practice is mindful, so that you can develop rules in advance in order to fully integrate them. But late-developed rules are better than none at all.

Ray Dalio on Opinions

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In a wide-ranging interview on Masters in Business, Ray Dalio – the super successful investor – said this about opinions while discussing his process question, “How do I know I’m right?”:

BARRY: When should you not have an opinion?

RAY: Well, a lot of times, right? I mean, opinions – particularly in any – is a zero sum game. So many people have opinions that they’re attached to, and they don’t know whether they’re right, and that bias is killing them. I think one of the greatest tragedies of mankind is people stupidly holding on to opinions that could be wrong, that they could be so easily put out there and stress test, and that emotional attachment to these opinions is one of those things, where instead you could just say, let me get the best thinking I can have, it doesn’t even have to come from me. Why does it have to come from you?

Although it’s an investing/money podcast, the interview should be valuable for just about anyone since it’s primarily process-oriented, with concepts that apply to just about everywhere else.

You can hear that moment here:

https://overcast.fm/+CDUUxgbD4/29:00