Homework - Week 1
Homework
Think a little bit about the two questions that have a central role during this course:
What do I want to cultivate?
What have I been cultivating?
Find a moment in your schedule where you can start your meditation habit of 10-20 minutes:
Connect your habit to an existing habit.
It might be nice to find an accountability partner for the next six weeks. If you can't think of anyone, just ask one of the teacher.
Meditate
Sit down.
Set a timer for 10-20 minutes, we love Insight Timer.
Do the seven-point relaxation exercise. You can find it described here.
End with a moment of gratitude. Simply by remembering one think you're grateful for today or yesterday—however small it might be.
Stop the timer.
Total meditation time +/- 3 minutes.
Working definition of meditation
The word meditation can mean many different things depending on the person, religion, tradition, or meditation-app they have been using. There doesn’t exist a widespread consensus. Throughout the course, we use the following working definition.
Meditation is the act of intentionally cultivating certain mental traits using a set of exercises.
Recipe for cultivation
All the cultivation exercises follow the same recipe with three ingredients:
Intention
Attention
Repetition
It is an incredibly simple recipe:
Intention is nothing more than a determination to act in a certain way. You have made a choice about what you want to cultivate and how, and you dedicate yourself to doing it.
Attentiveness is the art of directing your attention to the exercise, or a particular part of the exercise, needed for the cultivation.
Repetition = doing stuff again and again.
Throughout the course we will go intro great detail about all three ingredients.
Forming a meditation habit
We discussed three tips for forming a meditation habit:
Keep it small and go from there
Connect your habit to an existing habit
Accountability
If you need a recap of the three tips, then you can find that here:
Starting a meditation habitLast updated