Tl;dr: I don’t think I’m in fundamental well-being, but I do feel my life is significantly better than before the course. However, I find it hard to say whether this is because of the course, or just a coincidence.
The main differences in my life
I’m more present when spending time with other people
and just feel like I’m “a better person” somehow, like more present, patient, caring, grounded, attentive, stable.
Confounding factor: I’ve spent a lot of time in the last 3 months talking with my partner and taking special care that I’m being as present as possible.
I attribute most of the positive changes to that. I’m very unsure how much of a difference the course made.
Some observations from the course:
Being allowed to scratch itches, stretch, move a bit, and sometimes lie down was helpful to make meditation a lot more feasible for me.
I think without that I would have found it really hard to get through an hour of meditation each day.
The breath focus exercise started out relatively “neutral”
I didn’t feel like I got better at paying attention to my nose etc, which I’d hoped would be the case.
But it got harder over time.
At some point it felt like I just couldn’t bring myself to care enough about feeling something on my skin/the breath, and got a bit miserable
The morning and evening positive psychology exercises started out easy, but didn’t feel effective
But at some point they became negative. They felt like a chore and really effortful/annoying
I found beauty in many situations/sensory experiences in which I wouldn’t have expected it. (e.g. things like street noise and dirty walls). That feels pretty nice, like looking at a nice flower and smelling it, just that I can now do it with dirty walls and not only with flowers.
Overall I think it was probably worth taking the course, but I’m not completely sure.
Cool that you feel like it helped you. Totally get how many confounding factors there can be.
Btw, might want to check out my article on getting rid of impostor syndrome. Just got the study results back from the class and it had a huge effect (d=1.3 on confidence scores!). Will write up some more on it soon.
Bring it up because it could be good for you to try it when you’re still in the habit of doing an hour a day.
So, here is the promised review!
Tl;dr: I don’t think I’m in fundamental well-being, but I do feel my life is significantly better than before the course. However, I find it hard to say whether this is because of the course, or just a coincidence.
The main differences in my life
I’m more present when spending time with other people
and just feel like I’m “a better person” somehow, like more present, patient, caring, grounded, attentive, stable.
Confounding factor: I’ve spent a lot of time in the last 3 months talking with my partner and taking special care that I’m being as present as possible.
I attribute most of the positive changes to that. I’m very unsure how much of a difference the course made.
Some observations from the course:
Being allowed to scratch itches, stretch, move a bit, and sometimes lie down was helpful to make meditation a lot more feasible for me.
I think without that I would have found it really hard to get through an hour of meditation each day.
The breath focus exercise started out relatively “neutral”
I didn’t feel like I got better at paying attention to my nose etc, which I’d hoped would be the case.
But it got harder over time.
At some point it felt like I just couldn’t bring myself to care enough about feeling something on my skin/the breath, and got a bit miserable
The morning and evening positive psychology exercises started out easy, but didn’t feel effective
But at some point they became negative. They felt like a chore and really effortful/annoying
I found beauty in many situations/sensory experiences in which I wouldn’t have expected it. (e.g. things like street noise and dirty walls). That feels pretty nice, like looking at a nice flower and smelling it, just that I can now do it with dirty walls and not only with flowers.
Overall I think it was probably worth taking the course, but I’m not completely sure.
Love that you followed up!
Cool that you feel like it helped you. Totally get how many confounding factors there can be.
Btw, might want to check out my article on getting rid of impostor syndrome. Just got the study results back from the class and it had a huge effect (d=1.3 on confidence scores!). Will write up some more on it soon.
Bring it up because it could be good for you to try it when you’re still in the habit of doing an hour a day.