Keep Going: a guide to continuing meditation in good times and bad (OMB session)

• Preamble
• Introduction
• Ways to keep going
  • Take one day at a time
  • “Creative” “Meditator” is not a noun.
  • Creativity Meditation has seasons
  • To change is to be alive
  • Airplane mode can be a way of life
• Meditation
• Closing
• Blurb for event

Preamble

• Last session of the year. Back on 15th January.
• Retreat on Saturday 15th February. Reminder again at the end, and closer to the time.
• What’s on top? Your name, what’s top of mind for you.

Introduction

• Inspired by the book Keep Going by Austin Kleon. “10 ways to stay creative in good times and bad”.
  • We’re going to be cheeky and use it for “A few ways to keep meditating in good times and bad.” Specifically, over the break.
  • Austin Kleon calls himself “a writer who draws.” He makes art with words and books with pictures.
• One of the first things in the book is “I wrote this book because I needed to read it.”
  • That’s how I feel about this session.
  • I’m facilitating it because I need to attend it.
• This’ll be mostly discussion rather than me talking.

Ways to keep going

How can we keep going with meditation? In good times and bad. Over the break.

Take one day at a time

The creative meditative life is not linear. It’s not a straight line from point A to B. It’s more like a loop, or a spiral, in which you keep coming back to a new starting point after every project meditation. No matter how successful you get well you do your meditation goes, no matter what level of achievement you reach, you will never really ‘arrive’.

Keep going.

• Realise that on some days meditation will be easy, on some days it’ll be difficult.
• Hold our ideas of progress lightly.
• Treat our meditation practice as an ongoing, lifelong, activity. Not something we’ll one day finish.

“Creative” “Meditator” is not a noun.

Let go of the thing that you’re trying to be (the noun), and focus on the actual work thing you need to be doing (the verb). Doing the verb will take you someplace further and far more interesting.

“I don’t know what I am. I know that I am not a category. I am not a thing–a noun. I seem to be a verb, an evolutionary process.”

— R. Buckminster Fuller, architect, systems theorist, 1895–1983.

Keep going.

• Don’t worry about being a meditator. Or being a good meditator. Or being a bad meditator.
• Just focus on meditating, on meditation.
• Remember that you, your self, is a verb, a process of change.

Creativity Meditation has seasons

Part of the work is to know what season you’re in, and act accordingly.
…
You have to pay attention to the rhythms and cycles of your creative output meditation practice and learn to be patient in the off-seasons. You have to give yourself time to change and observe your own patterns.

Seconds	Heartbeats
Days	Sunrises
Weeks or months	Moon phases
Quarters	Seasons
Years	The return of Spring

Keep going.

• Be and patient with yourself if your meditation isn’t going so well.
• Sometimes the right thing to do is take a break.
• Try measuring time by nature-based measures instead of human measures.

To change is to be alive

You start each work meditation not knowing exactly where you’re going how it will go or where you’ll end up. … Hope is about moving forward in the face of uncertainty. It’s a way of dealing with uncertainty.

To have hope, you must acknowledge that you don’t know everything and you don’t know what’s going to happen. That’s the only way to keep going and the only way to keep making art meditating: to be open to possibility and allow yourself to be changed.

“Hope is an embrace of the unknown and the unknowable.”

— Rebecca Solnit, writer.

Keep going.

• Acknowledge and accept that you don’t know how the rest of a meditation will go. We can’t know.
• Be open to whatever happens.
• Let your meditation change you. More compassionate, more careful, towards yourself and others.

Airplane mode can be a way of life

(Talking about airplane mode in the air) But why not replicate the experience on the ground? You don’t need to be on a plane to practice airplane mode: pop in some cheap earplugs and switch your phone or tablet to airplane mode, and you can transform any mundane commute or stretch of captive time into an opportunity to reconnect with yourself and your work.

“Almost everything will work again if you unplug it for a few minutes–including you.”

— Anne Lamott, novelist and nonfiction writer.

Keep going.

• Hold loosely our ideas of where, when, and how we meditate.
• Any time we’re waiting for something or someone can be a chance to be mindful.
• Take a pause from doing, even for just a minute or two. Airplane mode, and just observe.

Meditation

• You might like to take your theme for this meditation as “keep going.”
• No need for this meditation to better than your last one.
• No need to have a good meditation or some kind of peak experience.
• No need to judge your meditation, or your self.
• Just meditate.
• Just keep going, and make it all the way to the end. That’s enough.

Closing

• Endnote from book: “Go easy on yourself and take your time. Worry less about getting things done. Worry more about things worth doing. Keep going.”
• That’s all, folks. Back on 15th January.
• Retreat on Saturday 15th February. Reminder closer to the time.
• Dana / donation
• Tea and biscuits.

Blurb for event

Title: “Keep Going: a guide to continuing meditation in good times and bad”

📘 Topic: keeping our practice going over the break. In this session we’ll be using a… non-traditional source to help us with our meditation. We’ll discuss a few ideas from Austin Kleon’s book Keep Going (https://austinkleon.com/keepgoing/). We’ll cover: focusing on the process over the prize; forgetting the noun and doing the verb; how the extraordinary is just the ordinary with extra attention applied to it.

🤓 Session notes in a Google doc.

🧘‍♀️ Meditation: as usual, we’ll end the session with a meditation of about 20 minutes.

Added 2024-12-05, last updated 2024-12-08.