Today’s sessions went very well! The ten minute sessions are going by in no time, so I’m thinking about increasing each session to 15 minutes. It’s funny to think back to the first few days and remember how torturous each session felt. Now, sitting for ten minutes is a piece of cake, and I even sometimes find myself craving meditation and thinking about adding a third session to each day. I am so much calmer now, when I meditate, and don’t get distracted as easily. This morning I meditated to the sound of dogs barking, pigeons squaking and the washing machine running, and I managed to keep up my concentration. Something strange happened this morning. A few minutes into the meditation  I no longer felt like I was in my entire body, but rather my entire being felt like it was located in my head. My head felt much lighter and brighter, and I almost felt as if my consciousness wanted to expand past my head. I experienced the same sensation during the evening meditation.

Meditation no longer feels like torture, and I no longer have the desire to get up and run out of the room. For the past few days my meditations have been much easier, and keep getting easier. I find that my mind still wanders and I occasionally daydream, but I am able to bring myself back to the moment more quickly and easily. For the first since I started this challenge, I am feeling my body vibrating very slightly. I have notived this in the past, when I would meditate regularly for more than a few days, and it is definitely a strange, but interesting feeling.

Mentally, I am still feeling happier. That familiar anxiety that tends to plague me more often that not has not reared its ugly head in over a week.

Today’s sessions may have been the best ones yet. I was calm, still and had almost no back pain. I tried a different breathing technique today, and I think it helped to keep me focused. I inhaled for 3 seconds, held my breath for 3 seconds, exhaled for 3 seconds, then held my breath again for 3 seconds. I repeated this for the enire 10 minutes, for both sessions. I don’t know if it was due to the breathing, but I feel slightly dazed right after each session.

Morning:

I found the first few minutes of today’s meditation extremely difficult. As much as I wanted to sit, my mind just wasn’t in it and tried to convince me to skip the morning meditation. I almost gave in. During the meditation I felt very restless and couldn’t sit still. My back was very sore and I had to hunch over a few times to relieve the pain. Eventually, my mind settled down a bit and I was able to complete the full 10 minutes, but it wasn’t easy.

Evening:

My back was still very sore and I had quite a difficult time sitting up straight due to the pain. I only sat for 5 minutes tonight, and I have to admit that I was quite relieved to not have to sit for the full 10.

Morning:

I didn’t meditate until almost noon. I kept coming up with excuses as to why I couldn’t do it. I told myself that I had to eat first because my stomach was rumbling and it would probably distract me, but I didn’t get a chance to eat until after 10am because I was busy with laundry and chores. My excuse after I ate was that my stomach was full, and I wanted to wait for the food to settle first. I ran out of excuses at about 11:55am, and dragged myself and my ipod itouch (I use the countdown timer on it) to the bedroom. This session was surprisingly a lot easier than my last two. I knew that I didn’t have anything pressing to accomplish and that all my chores had been completed, so I was free to just sit.

I am happy to report that during this session I only opened my eyes once, at the third minute mark. I wanted to open them so badly and had to fight with myself to keep them closed. I daydreamed a little bit, but it was fairly easy to bring myself back to the breathing. At one point I told my mind to shut up because as much as it did not want to do this, I wasn’t getting up and was going to sit for 10 minutes, no matter what. Amazingly my mind listened and the last bit of my meditation went by quickly, and easily.

I don’t know if it is simply because I am returning to Canada soon, but I am feeling more optimistic than usual right now and my to-do list doesn’t appear as daunting as it did yesterday.

I will add the evening’s session to this entry after I have completed it.

Evening:

This evening’s session was uneventful, until the last 12 seconds when Steve walked into the bedroom after his shower and tried to distract me by sticking his naked butt in my face. Since there were only 12 seconds left on my timer, I forgave him.

Morning:

I was originally going to sit for 5 minutes because I didn’t think I could sit still for longer than that, but after the first five minutes were up, I added another 5 minutes for a total of 10 minutes. By about minute 7, I started to feel a bit restless. My left ankle and back began to hurt, and I started to have conversations with myself in my head. I was a bit distracted as the washing machine was running and there were pigeons squaking right outside my bedroom window. By minute 9, the back pain got worse, and I wanted to stop. However, I pushed through, and successfully completed the morning session. Next time I will need to try harder to keep my eyes closed and not peek at the time every few minutes.

Evening:

My mind was pretty restless during this meditation. I was busy and had things to do, so I kept opening my eyes and checking the time to see if the 10 minutes were up. I kind of feel like I rushed through the evening meditation, even though I sat for the full 10 minutes.

I have meditated on and off for the past few years, but never long enough to notice any considerable changes in my attitude or mental well being. I’ve decided to do the 30 day meditation challenge because by posting about it online, and knowing that I have a goal to meet, I will be more inclined to complete it. I have suffered from depressoin and anxiety for over fifteen years, and after trying nearly everything, I want to give meditation a sincere effort. Everyone talks about how great it makes them feel – how much calmer and more productive it has helped them to become. I would like to see what all the fuss is about.

To start, I will be meditating for ten minutes twice a day, once in the morning and a second time in the evening. I will be sitting cross-legged, with my eyes closed and focusing on the “So Hum” mantra and on my breathing.

I will try to post an update every day.

You can read all the 30 Day Meditation Challenge entries by clicking on the “Meditation” heading in the left column under Categories.

In the Land of Believers: An Outsider’s Extraordinary Journey into the Heart of the Evangelical Church
by Gina Welch

“Ever since evangelical Christians rose to national prominence, mainstream America has tracked their every move with a nervous eye. But in spite of this vigilance, our understanding hasn’t gone beyond the caricatures. Who are evangelicals, really? What are they like in private, and what do they want? Is it possible that beneath the differences in culture and language, church and party, we might share with them some common purpose?

To find out, Gina Welch, a young secular Jew from Berkeley, joined Jerry Falwell’s Thomas Road Baptist Church. Over the course of nearly two years, Welch immersed herself in the life and language of the devout: she learned to interpret the world like an evangelical, weathered the death of Falwell, and embarked on a mission trip to Alaska intended to save one hundred souls. Alive to the meaning behind the music and the mind behind the slogans, Welch recognized the allure of evangelicalism, even for the godless, realizing that the congregation met needs and answered questions she didn’t know she had.

What emerges is a riveting account of a skeptic’s transformation from uninformed cynicism to compassionate understanding, and a rare view of how evangelicals see themselves. Revealing their generosity and hopefulness, as well as their prejudice and exceptionalism, In the Land of Believers is a call for comprehending, rather than dismissing, the impassioned believers who have become so central a force in American life.”

House Rules
by Jodi Picoult

“Jacob Hunt is a teenage boy with Asperger’s syndrome. He’s hopeless at reading social cues or expressing himself well to others, and like many kids with AS, Jacob has a special focus on one subject — in his case, forensic analysis. He’s always showing up at crime scenes, thanks to the police scanner he keeps in his room, and telling the cops what they need to do…and he’s usually right. But then his town is rocked by a terrible murder and, for a change, the police come to Jacob with questions. All of the hallmark behaviors of Asperger’s — not looking someone in the eye, stimulatory tics and twitches, flat affect — can look a lot like guilt to law enforcement personnel. Suddenly, Jacob and his family, who only want to fit in, feel the spotlight shining directly on them. For his mother, Emma, it’s a brutal reminder of the intolerance and misunderstanding that always threaten her family. For his brother, Theo, it’s another indication of why nothing is normal because of Jacob. And over this small family the soul-searing question looms: Did Jacob commit murder?

Emotionally powerful from beginning to end, House Rules looks at what it means to be different in our society, how autism affects a family, and how our legal system works well for people who communicate a certain way — and fails those who don’t.”

The Ask
by Sam Lipsyte

The Husbands and Wives Club: A Year in the Life of a Couples Therapy Group
by Laurie Abraham

"For more than a year, journalist Laurie Abraham sat in with five troubled couples as they underwent the searing process of group marriage therapy. Published as The New York Times Magazine's cover story "Can This Marriage Be Saved?" the resulting article generated intense reader response and received the Award for Excellence in Journalism from the American Psychoanalytic Association. Though the article allowed Abraham to focus on only one couple, this book, which grew out of it and the reaction it inspired, tells the moving, fascinating story of all five.

The couples: Can Leigh and Aaron find the intimacy their marriage lacks; will Bella and Joe resolve the imbalance of power that threatens to topple their marriage; are Sue Ellen and Mark as ideal as they seem; what happened to Rachael that Michael cannot acknowledge; and do Marie and Clem, with the help of therapist Judith Coch - , come back from the brink of divorce?

With the dexterity of a novelist, Abraham recounts the travails, triumphs, and reversals that beset the five couples. They work with their therapist—and each other—to find out whether they can rediscover the satisfaction in marriage that they once had. At times wrenching, at times inspiring, the sessions bring out the long-hidden resentments, misunderstandings, unmet desires, and unspoken needs that bedevil any imperiled couple. At the same time, these encounters provide road maps to reconciliation and revival that can be used by anyone in a relationship. Along the way, the author draws on her explorations of literature and

Freudian theory, modern science, and today's cutting-edge research to decode the patterns and habits that suggest whether a troubled marriage will survive or die. Both an important look at the state of marital dysfunction and a reaffirmation of the enduring bonds of love, The Husbands and Wives Club is an extraordinary year in the life of the American marriage."

Angelology
by Danielle Trussoni

“Sister Evangeline was just a girl when her father entrusted her to the Franciscan Sisters of Perpetual Adoration in upstate New York. Now, at twenty-three, her discovery of a 1943 letter from the famous philanthropist Abigail Rockefeller to the late mother superior of Saint Rose Convent plunges Evangeline into a secret history that stretches back a thousand years: an ancient conflict between the Society of Angelologists and the monstrously beautiful descendants of angels and humans, the Nephilim.

For the secrets these letters guard are desperately coveted by the once-powerful Nephilim, who aim to perpetuate war, subvert the good in humanity, and dominate mankind. Generations of angelologists have devoted their lives to stopping them, and their shared mission, which Evangeline has long been destined to join, reaches from her bucolic abbey on the Hudson to the apex of insular wealth in New York, to the Montparnasse cemetery in Paris and the mountains of Bulgaria.

Rich in history, full of mesmerizing characters, and wondrously conceived, Angelology blends biblical lore, the myth of Orpheus and the Miltonic visions of Paradise Lost into a riveting tale of ordinary people engaged in a battle that will determine the fate of the world.”

Another Life Altogether
by Elaine Beale

“Jesse Bennett, the 13-year-old heroine of Beale’s charming debut, longs to escape the humdrum life of Britain’s East Yorkshire. Stuck in a small town with her unstable mother and ineffectual father, Jesse wants to see the world, but her hopes of breaking free are dashed when her mother attempts suicide and her father, reasoning that a change of scene will help his wife recover, moves the family farther into the country. But the people of rural Midham are less than welcoming to the strange new arrivals. Eventually, Jesse falls in with Tracey and Amanda, the toughest and most feared girls in town, though with this security comes increased scrutiny: Jesse must pretend to be just like her mates, and even though she cares nothing for clothes or boys and despises the meanness, she develops a crush on Amanda that threatens to end unfavorably. Beale’s lively narrative captures, with touching accuracy, the plights of adolescence; if the novel sometimes veers toward the saccharine and relies on less than surprising plot twists, Jesse’s affirming arc offers hope in a place where it’s in very short supply.”

Hush
by Kate White

“Bestseller White, Cosmo’s editor-in-chief, takes a break from her Bailey Weggins series (Lethally Blond, etc.) with this stand-alone thriller that generates a real sense of jeopardy while avoiding clichés. Newly divorced 44-year-old marketing consultant Lake Warren finds her latest job devising a marketing plan for a Manhattan fertility clinic rewarding until her ex-husband, Jack, sues for full custody of their two young children. While her lawyer warns her not even to date so Jack won’t have leverage against her, Lake gives in to a one-night stand with the clinic’s flirtatious Dr. Keaton. After falling asleep on his penthouse terrace, Lake wakes to find Keaton murdered. Worried that the police will accuse her of the murder, Lake begins her own investigation until she learns that someone is stalking her. A subplot about the clinic’s questionable practices adds to the tension, but doesn’t detract from the main plot with its myriad twists.”

The Story of Stuff: How Our Obsession with Stuff Is Trashing the Planet, Our Communities, and Our Health-and a Vision for Change
by Annie Leonard

“This alarming fact drove Annie Leonard to create the Internet film sensation The Story of Stuff, which has been viewed over 10 million times by people around the world. In her sweeping, groundbreaking book of the same name, Leonard tracks the life of the Stuff we use every day—where our cotton T-shirts, laptop computers, and aluminum cans come from, how they are produced, distributed, and consumed, and where they go when we throw them out. Like Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, The Story of Stuff is a landmark book that will change the way people think—and the way they live.

Leonard’s message is startlingly clear: we have too much Stuff, and too much of it is toxic. Outlining the five stages of our consumption-driven economy—from extraction through production, distribution, consumption, and disposal—she vividly illuminates its frightening repercussions. Visiting garbage dumps and factories around the world, Leonard reveals the true story behind our possessions—why it’s cheaper to replace a broken TV than to fix it; how the promotion of “perceived obsolescence” encourages us to toss out everything from shoes to cell phones while they’re still in perfect shape; and how factory workers in Haiti, mine workers in Congo, and everyone who lives and works within this system pay for our cheap goods with their health, safety, and quality of life. Meanwhile we, as consumers, are compromising our health and well-being, whether it’s through neurotoxins in our pillows or lead leaching into our kids’ food from their lunchboxes—and all this Stuff isn’t even making us happier! We work hard so we can buy Stuff that we quickly throw out, and then

we want new Stuff so we work harder and have no time to enjoy all our Stuff. . . . With staggering revelations about the economy, the environment, and cultures around the world, alongside stories from her own life and work, Leonard demonstrates that the drive for a “growth at all costs” economy fuels a cycle of production, consumption, and disposal that is killing us.

It is a system in crisis, but Annie Leonard shows us that this is not the way things have to be. It’s within our power to stop the environmental damage, social injustice, and health hazards caused by polluting production and excessive consumption, and Leonard shows us how. Expansive, galvanizing, and sobering yet optimistic, The Story of Stuff transforms how we think about our lives and our relationship to the planet.”

Lift
by Kelly Corrigan

The Autobiography of an Execution
by David R. Dow

“In an argument against capital punishment, Dow’s capable memoir partially gathers its steam from the emotional toll on all parties involved, especially the overworked legal aid lawyers and their desperate clients. The author, the litigation director of the Texas Defender Service and a professor at the University of Houston Law Center, respects the notion of attorney-client privilege in this handful of real-life legal outcomes, some of them quite tragic, while acknowledging executions are not about the attorneys, but about the victims of murder and sometimes their killers. While trying to maintain a proper balance in his marriage to Katya, a fellow attorney and ballroom dancer, he spells out the maze of legal mumbo-jumbo to get his clients stays or released from confinement in the cases of a hapless Vietnam vet who shot a child, another man who beat his pregnant wife to death and another who killed his wife and children. In the end, Dow’s book is a sobering, gripping and candid look into the death penalty.”

This recipe is slightly different from the version I found online. I added a few extra ingredients (celery, white mushrooms, red pepper) and substituted the beef strips for tofu to make it 100% vegan.

• Rice vermicelli noodles — 1/2 pound
• Sesame oil — 2 tablespoons
• Tofu, thinly sliced — 1/4 pound
• Red pepper, thinly sliced — 1
• Onion, thinly sliced — 1
• Carrot, peeled and grated — 1
• Shiitakes, stems removed and thinly sliced — 3
• White mushrooms, sliced — 4-5
• Garlic, minced — 2-3 cloves
• Spinach — 8 ounces, or about 1/2 bunch
• Celery — 1 stalk
• Scallions, cut into 1-inch pieces or thinly sliced — 2-3
• Soy sauce — 2-3 tablespoons
• Sugar — 2 teaspoons
• Salt and pepper — to taste
• Sesame seeds, toasted — 1 tablespoon

1. Bring a large saucepan of water to a boil over medium-high heat. Stir in the noodles and cook for 5 minutes. Remove from heat, drain, rinse with cold water and set aside.
2. Heat the sesame oil in a wok or large sauté pan over medium flame. Add the tofu and sauté about 3-4 minutes. Remove to a plate and set aside.
3. Add a little more oil to the wok or pan if necessary and toss in the onion, carrot, celery and red pepper. Sauté until the onion is just translucent. Add the mushrooms and garlic and sauté 2-3 minutes more. Finally add the spinach and scallions and sauté until the spinach is just wilted.
4. Add the drained noodles, soy sauce, sugar, salt and pepper to the sauté pan and cook, stirring, to heat through. Adjust seasoning.
5. Transfer to a serving dish and garnish with the toasted sesame seeds.

Makes 4 servings

This recipe makes 4-6 servings. I halved everything and only used white flour as I didn’t have any whole wheat flour. I didn’t have canola or safflower oil and used regular sunflower oil. I also didn’t have any frozen blueberries and used fresh ones instead.

Halving everything makes about 3 large pancakes or 4 average ones.

1 cup whole wheat flour
1 cup white flour
3 Tbsp. sugar
3 Tbsp. baking powder (I didn’t use any because I used self rising flour)
1 tsp. sea salt
2 cups vanilla soy milk
3 Tbsp. canola or safflower oil (I used regular sunflower oil)
1/2 cup frozen blueberries
1/2 cup fresh blueberries

Combine dry ingredients in a bowl and sift together. Add vanilla soy milk and oil and mix until smooth.

Ladle onto hot pancake griddle or pan. Add frozen blueberries. Cook for about 2-3 minutes on each side.

Serve with fresh blueberries and maple syrup (optional).

I poured the mix onto a fying pan and added the blueberries. I used my finger to push them into the mixture.