Thanks Kat for writing this! I’ll give the finder’s course a go in the next iteration starting in April. I’ll follow your example, and I hereby precommit to write at least a few sentences of review about the course in the comments here, even if I end up quitting it.
dorothy
Karma: 10
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.