Highway 101

[sinanju]

So I signed up to test drive (beta test) Steve Barnes' 101 Program. About which you can learn more from his blog if you're really interested. The important part is that I never really felt like I got a clear understanding of how it was supposed to work. I thought I'd get all the details up front and then just...do it. Instead, it's being doled out a bit at a time. Which is fine, but not what I was expecting.

So I never felt like I was quite ready to start it. I always felt like I wasn't quite sure what and how much to do. Maybe that's just me. I dunno.

End result--I'm starting my experiment with the program today (February 1st). That puts me 17 days behind everyone else, but screw it. This is abount my experience with it. A hundred and one days will take me to about mid-May of this year. It's the same program that kzmiller on my friends list is posting about periodically.

So today I've done my three reps each of the five tibetans. I've selected a basic goal to work toward--I want to reduce this spare tire around my middle. Having read the daily emails as they've arrived, I know I'll have to focus on some more specific goals in three areas (finances, health and relationships), but that one will do for a start. I've been doing the Intermittent Fasting all along--been doing it off and on for a long time now, actually. More than a year, I suspect.

Meditation may be difficult. I've never done it. Okay, I've toyed with it a few times in my life, but never accomplished anything with it. We'll see how it works with the guidance from this program.

Further announcements, as the saying goes, as events warrant.

Comments

[kzmiller.livejournal.com]

Let me know if you have any trouble with meditation. It's very easy, and I suspect you *have* meditated, and just never realized it.

You'll be 17 days behind the folks who started the program when he first posted and opened it, but it's designed to be started at any time and then you personally get the daily emails on *your* schedule, is my understanding. I'll be interested to learn about your experience and see if it differs when you're not running with the pack, so to speak. I know with Nanowrimo, folks who aren't in sync with the big group don't get as much community support, which is vital for the effort. In other words, is Steve's and Mushtaq's program more effective as a group race with everyone egging each other on or can it be just as effective with individuals starting whenever?

One thing that cleared me up on the idea of meditation was a nun that came to our high school to support the English department when a couple of instructors had to leave the school. She was an amazing teacher, and no rulers across the knuckles were involved. One day I, tentatively, presented as part of a paper my thoughts on an animistic world, thinking she'd recoil. (This was one of my early forays into paganism.) She said it would be a good subject for meditation.

That's when the light came on in my head. I'd always meditated. Meditations are simply sitting your ass down and addressing a thought process, without interruption, until your mind is satisfied with the results. That spans everything from sitting with the goal to just shut the mental voices up (for five blessed minutes will you all just f**king shut up!!!!) to working out how to build a bridge across a river that can be put up and disassembled again in a few hours. (For such a bridge, see and build one at OMSI!)

Once you figure out what meditation is (focusing your mind toward a single purpose) and what it's not (a bunch of guys in saffron robes going OM and getting into a sublime state that allows them to speak to the Universe--although I guess it could be done) you're set.

[fikgirl.livejournal.com]

Ok, so I read the guy's blog.

Now, I have to ask: What the heck is it? I still don't have a clue, or maybe I didn't read the right places. . .

[sinanju.livejournal.com]

Well, the ideas are scattered all through his blog, really, so that probably wasn't my best suggestion. The 101 program is an attempt to try to pull them all together into a coherent program. (Parts of it have been described in the "Five Minute Miracle" (or 5MM) and "Lifewriting" programs he's also worked with.

But basically, it's a program in which you focus on gaining self-awareness and working on self-improvement in three areas: financial, physical (health and fitness) and intellectual/spiritual (relationships).* The idea is that everyone has "demons"--emotional baggage, self-doubts, et cetera--that hold us back. Furthermore, these self-destructive tendencies will hide from us in the dark spaces in our psyche. You can be a paragon of physical attractiveness, but unable to hold a job; or a successful financially, but unattractive and unhappy, and so forth--because you've been unable or unwilling to examine some facet of your self that is leading you to continue your bad habits in the areas where you obviously aren't doing well.

By shining a light into all three major areas of your life simultaneously the idea is that you will leave these bad habits or self-destructive tendencies no place to hide. And once you've identified them, you can work on correcting them. So the program begins with five very basic yoga postures (the five tibetans), and the selection of a single, basic goal for the 101 day program. It eventually adds in more specific goals (long, medium and short term, right down to "what can I do _today_ to move toward this goal") in each of the three areas, as well as breathing and meditation practices to help you learn to focus. There are options to do more (adding exercise, yoga, longer meditation periods, and so forth, but the things I mention are the bare minimums).

There's a lot more to it, but that's the bare bones of the scheme. Does that answer your question?

*Why these three areas? Because according to this theory, a truly adult human being is financially stable (able to support him/herself, and ideally another person), physically fit, healthy and attractive, and capable of maintaining healthy, happy relationships.