July Flying By

This will be the first post with my new monthly format. I spent much of this month preparing and getting inspiration to complete my 90 day transformation. This will involve following through with an idea I had at the beginning of 2020 but never committed to and completed. I have picked 11 values / ideals that I believe represent the person I want to be and believe I truly am underneath the dust covering the mirror of my life. The values are as follows and are an acronym for AMUSING MONK:

• A – Acceptance
• M – Moderation
• U – Unity
• S – Service
• I – Integrity
• N – Nature
• G – Gratitude
• M – Modesty
• O – Optimism
• N – Nurture
• K – Knowledge

My plan is to spend 8 days on each of these values and do a variety of general as well as specific activities to best embody and instill each one into my life. The tentative plan is as follows:

(All days will include at least 15 minutes of meditation on the value as well as more specified activities that will discussed later)

Day 1: Learn the definition and research the origin

Day 2: Research its appearance in other cultures/teachings

Day 3: Create own definition of the value

Day 4: Write a short poem about the value

Day 5: Create a painting as a visual representation of the word

Day 6: Answer a list of questions I created to delve deeper into the value

Day 7: Create a symbol to represent the value

Day 8: Find song/quote for each value

Interesting Thought:

One of the more interesting thoughts I had during one of my longer meditation sessions was involving a metaphor about how thoughts come into our awareness and how we interact with them. I compared our busy minds with that of a fisherman in the middle of the ocean with a barrage of fish jumping out into the water some flying in front of him and others straight into his boat. I equated our thoughts to the fish which are out of our control and how often time it seems like there is no other choice but to follow each thought. In fact, when we pull back out of ourselves and simply observe the thoughts we can let them come in and out of our awareness without giving them any power over us. This is similar to just allowing the fish to jump into the boat and thrash about violently but not to interact with it and let it eventually thrash itself back into the abyss of the open ocean out of both sight and also metaphoric mind.

Future posts will contain more depth of thoughts and activities as well as more pictures. I look forward to slowly improving and adding with each subsequent post.

“Life is a series of fresh starts, the frequency of use is up to the individual.”

– Zak Keller