With a hectic schedule it can be hard to find time for meditation. Even knowing how immensely valuable meditation can be, I often neglect my meditation practice. Usually my excuse is that I don’t have the time to meditate. While it is true that longer meditation sessions tend to be better, I want to collect some simple and quick meditation techniques here so that the excuse of no time does not hold any weight.

A Shop Window
We can start with the sparsest of meditations. One method I discovered may be especially apt for us would-be urban monks. “You Don’t Need A Cushion, A Shop Window Will Do!” was a reminder of the ease of embedding our meditation practice into every nook and cranny of our lives.

These mere seconds of awareness can be the seeds of deeper practice. Like a shadow lengthening as the sun lowers, what starts as a sliver can reach the horizon.

One Minute
An easy one minute meditation can consist of being mindful first of our breathing –perhaps deepening it– and then of our sensations, feelings and thoughts. This is unlikely to induce a meditative state, but it keys us into awareness. It also has the side effect of being relaxing and healthful.

A Chance to Sit
With a couple minutes to sit we can go a bit further. Inducing a rhythmic breathing and maintaining focus for a short period can be a good way to ease into meditation if we are new to the practice. Developing the discipline to not be distracted by thoughts or sensations can be done even in these short sessions.

Observation of Thoughts
Observing is the key to these basic meditations, and allowing ourselves to simply rest and witness what our minds are doing is foundational.

By not engaging our thoughts we can rest as awareness and not identify with them. A concise way of reminding ourselves of this is using a variant of, “I have thoughts, but I am not my thoughts.” Being fully aware of these thoughts but being free of them is a vital first step that can take less than ten minutes.

The Source and Omega Point
Let’s keep in mind the aim of meditation.

It is to remind us of our Original Face, that we are consciousness itself. Our bodies, our emotions, our minds and our thoughts are all objects that we witness. Everything that we can identify as an object is not our authentic Self. And beyond the witness we are joined with everything that arises. We are every passion, every slick body and sharp torture, free from it all we are saturated by it. Meditation trains us to be free of false stories of who we are, free of the suffering caused by identifying with narrow notions of self and ultimately liberates us to live a life fully engaged in beauty, goodness and truth. A lightness guides us even as we work to better a world filled with suffering.

A few minutes is a small price for moving closer to that, isn’t it?

Threadless, my favourite t-shirt maker, has another of their wonderful sales underway. $10 will get you one of the smart, hip and stylish designs that made it through the filter of hundreds of voters. Threadless takes a democratic approach to making shirts, allowing us to vote on numerous designs and shape the site’s offerings. Here are some choice designs I fancy of the current batch for sale:

In the running to be made, I’m a big fan of these designs, especially the TARDIS vs. DeLorean one:

Last night I bought a new silver exercise ball to sit on at my desk. My old one fell prey to the scrawny cat who also lives here, and I’d been several weeks in a normal chair. i feel far more enthusiastic about being at work here now that I have a better place to sit. Having allowed my focus to be disrupted this week, I’m happy to be back in the saddle and looking to stay here for a wild ride ahead.

I’m working on keeping my focus on the things I am passionate about and finding ways to be adaptable in an unpredictable schedule, using every shred of free time to dedicate myself to my practice, especially writing. This is a huge challenge for me, because I like to block off certain times and days to dedicate to tasks rather than jumping into them without preparation and being in a proper head space; I’d be more prone to create a morning writing ritual than to slide in a writing session between breakfast and doing laundry.

Alas, my current situation does not allow such a luxury, so I’m learning to be more and more reflexive to my life’s twists and turns. “20 Productive Ways to Use Your Free Time” has offered me some useful advice for using small blocks of time productively, a skill that is becoming increasingly vital to me. I’ve already been using small blocks for keeping up with reading feeds in Reader, but I’m now planning to create a reading file and will be making it a point to fine tune a set of short meditation techniques and physical exercises I can fit into 10 minute slivers of time. Cultivating focus is the key to making this work, and the payoff of increased productivity will be well worth it.

Procrastination is a big hurdle for me, and “Four Reasons Why We Procrastinate” has been a great help in identifying the causes of this.

My primary blocks are my perfectionist tendencies and the lure of pleasurable activities. I’m always working against my perfectionism, but I’m working with my desires by incorporating work and pleasure. How? Right now I’m enjoying a nice big glass of lychee bubble tea as I type.

Over at the Riran Project there’s a sharp article on increasing productivity under the title “33 Obvious, ‘No-Duh’ Ways to Increase Your Computer Productivity.” A large part of this deals with posture and setup of the physical work environment, which an exercise ball and a nice, simple desk takes care of for me. Using Ubuntu, Firefox and GMail takes care of the software problems I encountered with Microsoft and other similarly clunky bits. After these things I easily took care of, there are some nice simple tips on focus, streamlining, breaks, nutrition and general health. Taking these things into consideration is a must for those of us looking at doing our work well with computers.

Learning these techniques is very helpful, but maintaining a high level of energy is also essential for getting work done. I’ve neglected meditation and resistance training lately and have felt my energy flatline. I have been mindful of this but really made it the center of my thoughts today while reading “5 Back-to-Basics Strategies For Renewing Your Energy.”

I’m now also working on increasing the number of meals I eat daily beyond my normal three and ensuring I get at least 7 hours of sleep in a block each day.

Energy, focus and efficiency will go a long way in laying down patterns to create a life in which I can deliver my best. As the drive to be as fully expressive of the creative and evolutionary force becomes increasingly stronger, every tool has to come into play. I’ll happily employ these small ones.

I just received an e-mail from Integral Institute on politics that would have brought up aversion immediately for me a couple years ago but that now rings true. With a subject line of “If you are Left, or Right, you are partial. Here’s what to do about it….” I’m sure you can see why someone who has come out of a strong Left stance would be jarred.

What all this is pointing to is “Integral Politics—A Summary of Its Essential Ingredients,” a post in Ken Wilber‘s blog from April. His presentation of politics is elegant, practical and strong, giving us a way to clearly understand politics and then to solve many of the problems we face. When we understand interior and exterior, agency and communion, altitudes of development and the simple, clear AQAL map, we are in possession of a wonderful new set of abilities that allow us to carry all the positive aspects of Left and Right, leaving behind the smallness of both. We transcend and include the fractured pieces and become more whole, more loving and more capable. And our very future depends on embracing Integral Politics; the day for fragmentation has passed.

What qualities do you look for in a friend?
Kindness, understanding, energy, joyfulness, depth, creativity and soulfulness are gems when they can be found in friends. I prefer friends who are active in our relationship but also unfazed if demands in our lives keep us out of touch for a time. I love to be challenged by friends who seek wisdom and knowledge and are evolving. But what most thrills me in a friendship is the ease of understanding, the mutual passion and spark of mystery that collide in the best moments with friends.

Pause for a moment, and write a haiku about what’s around you.
Dim lit sanctity,
cathode glow and headphone hum,
simple connectivity.

If you could design a religion, what would it look like?
As a foundation, I would set the religion in a framework that could include as much of our knowledge as possible, especially embracing developmentalism so that the religion could be a home for every station of life, from the prerational to the transrational. Mysticism would be central, as would an embrace of technology and health in all dimensions of our being. Evolution and involution would be fully embraced and give flavour to the lives of the religion’s participants throughout their development.

What qualities do you seek in a partner?
Kindness, an embrace of the Beautiful, the Good and the True, intelligence, joyfulness and presence are all very important to me in a partner. But the most important trait in a partner is engagement in evolution. To be in mutual growth and mutual challenging is vital for a romantic relationship to flourish over time, I believe. I wouldn’t want a partner who wouldn’t be able to join me on any step of the path before me and I wouldn’t want a partner who wouldn’t push me beyond every limit I have as she expanded her own boundaries.

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Last.fm is one of my all time favourite sites. It’s the ultimate in online music listening and social networking, making Pandora pale in comparison. The site just launched widgets, so now we can embed radio players across the web. Below you’ll find my personal radio station, playing songs I enjoy.
I’ll be writing more about Last.fm in a coming entry on social networking sites.

Tuesday morning I returned home from work, slept for 3 hours and headed out walking. I’d been wanting to explore Long Lake for several months and a beautiful day off seemed a perfect opportunity to hike around the park.

Long Lake Park is a mostly undeveloped provincial park, but it has some nice established trails. I started into the park on one of these and began following the shore. Clear, fresh water, bolder-strewn rises and expanses of forest were so refreshing to be surrounded by. I miss environments like this when I have been away from them for weeks at a time.

Eventually I was walking off the trails and following the shore by sight and sound. This was at once frustrating –having my hair tangled in more trees than I could count– and exhilarating. There’s something invigorating in forging new paths and exploring seldom encountered areas, even if it means crawling on my hands and knees under a particularly large tree or stepping into a deep puddle because no other route would work.

I hiked around the entire lake, into the early evening. I was exhausted by the time I had walked home, and this felt wonderful. I enjoy pushing my body to its limits of endurance and to do so in such a beautiful setting made for a delicious contrast.

I was just reading about reading stacks being collected in a pool over at Flickr and decided to share mine (click on the smaller icon to see the full-sized shot). In the stack we have Sex, Ecology, Spirituality by Ken Wilber, which I’m in the midst of now, Lewis Carroll’s Jabberwocky and Other Poems, and Jo Clayton’s The Magic Wars. On top is my Clie Palm PDA. Why? Because all the remaining books I have but have not read are in ebook form, just how I like it. I’m a bookworm who has embraced technology and the joys of being able to have dozens of books in my pocket.

What’s in your stack?

I’m trying to clear out some clutter from my loft and one of the offenders is a collection of speakers. I now have some very nice floor speakers in use but 6 speakers and a subwoofer remain stored in my loft. They take up a lot more space than I would like, so I’m going to use them to create a spherical speaker array. The spherical setup is based on the Hemisphere concept, which usually sells for $600 USD.

The speaker array is intended to imitate the way sound comes from acoustic instruments. “Acoustic instruments radiate sound in a wonderfully complex, 360 degree fashion, while conventional loudspeakers radiate in a much more boring, spotlight of sound.” While this setup may not be ideal as a standalone speaker system, I’m thinking a hanging sphere will compliment the stereo layout I have now. At any rate, I need to get rid of the speaker housing I have now, as it takes up way more space than I’d like.

I’ve been bouncing ideas off a couple friends in regards to this project and it’s looking like I just need to pick up proper bowls, speaker terminals, a rotary tool, some miscellaneous hardware, and a soldering iron. In a week I should be rushing headlong into a junk-reducing project, and I can’t wait.

If only all my junk-related puzzles could be so elegantly solved.

I’m reading “Sense & Soul“, an essay by Ken Wilber, over at One Mind Village. I have a great admiration for his ability to condense his unparalleled knowledge and expansive theories into expressions that can be grasped quickly. His presentation of the core agreements of the great wisdom traditions, as also found in Integral Spirituality, is a telling example of this.

While the emergence of integral is new territory only a tiny portion of us are exploring, the truths we return with can help us ease the suffering and halt some of the blunders taking place in this world. We can apply our understanding when interacting with all others, bringing greater skillfulness to navigating the myriad of quirks we humans have. But to do this we have to have the humility to meet people where they are, using maps like this to inhabit common ground; Muslims, Buddhists, Christians, Baha’is, and people of other faiths can agree on these terms, and this is a valuable starting point.

Joe Perez has been doing commendable work in this area at his site Until. He has given us a look at Integral Christianity both as lived and as theory. His exploration of faith in his book Soulfully Gay (With a full title of Soulfully Gay: How Harvard, Sex, Drugs, and Integral Philosophy Drove Me Crazy and Brought Me Back to God, you know it’s gotta be plugged in.) is something I’ve been looking forward to reading for a while now, but I’ve been thrilled enough with his online writing. His look at “The Integral Christian and the 4 Quadrants” and “Salvation in 4 Quadrants” have allowed me to reflect on my early religious life in Christianity with greater clarity.

We each can help guide our faiths forward. Equipped with the tools to be competent leaders, loving fellows, humble students and evolving souls, we are given the opportunity to embody the highest ideals we have committed ourselves to in a way that has simply not been seen before. In light of the mystery before us, I’m moved to awe, action and surrender.