Holy cow I actually got back to blogging!/ "Sitting" :)

The past couple of weeks have been busy!
Spring break just ended so I had to catch up on some assignments that were due this week and then with work we we've been getting for many bids for jobs that the three of us employee's (The Boss, the Brawn and the Brain) have been working close to 10 hour days for the past week to make sure everything gets done!

But thankfully, today was a day off so I could take this opportunity to crack open my new journal (moleskine, the graph paper kind... very interesting to write in...) and get back to doing the things that I love, writing thoughts and drawing objects!

So without further ado, here is "Sitting"... well, maybe a little ado first; "Sitting" is about taking ten minutes and just being still, attempting to take your thoughts that would gladly wonder about and pick at all sorts of little things and "anchor" them to your breathing; breath in, breath out, "something shiny?", breath in, chest rise out, breath out, chest fall, "what else do I have to do today?", and this continues on...
So, I took ten minutes to be still and try to focus my attention just on the act of breathing and being in that moment (very hard to do) and then immediately following, wrote another ten minutes about what came out of that experience.

Enjoy!

"Sitting/Silence"

I just spent ten minutes "mediating" (at least that is what I think you call it), allowing space for silence in my life and allowing my thought to be 'anchored' by the pace and focus on my breathing.
I must say, even when I try to focus my thoughts, they go everywhere.

I remember going from thinking of a book that I was reading aobut a man embracing the pain that he began to feel at hour three of a four hour sitting exercise, to thinking about what my focus should be when I go to the prayer room, to my friends Sarah and Kara who both live on the east coast, to one time when a man taught me how to breath, especially when doing tai-chi (hint: you breath from your stomach, not up in your chest), to the rise and fall of my own chest and the sound that I could hear as the breath went throught me, and then my thoughts went back to a list of things that I have accomplished today and have not accomplished today, to two drawings that I did right before I started this exercise, one where I got complicated with trying to reproduce the shadows on a coffee cup and the other where I tried to caputere the basic lines and simple shadows that I felt helped give it its form.

Then my ten minutes were up and I realized, that I haven't felt this relaxed for a week of two... and thinking back how my entire body began to rise and fall with each breath that I took; the rising of my head and shoulders as I breathed in and almost as my entire body was sitting straight, to the fall of my posture as I breathed out and allowed the fall to bring my head down and my shoulders to slump and my body to bend upon itself as it exhaled...

Time's Up!

That's all for today, tomorrow I have classes till about 9pm, so I am hoping to get up another one up after that but we shall see. Until then, here are the two drawings that I talked about in above writing.
Take care everyone!

-Eric Alan