Salon post : March 16

[jenett]

Welcome to this week's salon post!

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Topic of the week
I took Monday and Tuesday off this week, to play catchup on life. It got me thinking about how I use vacation time, and what makes my life easier.

What do you do that improves your life? (Especially if it's a somewhat new thing.)

What I've been up to:
I am now cheerfully into the Martha seasons of New Who. But today, I'd love to rec a podcast, This Is Love (from the same people who do Criminal, which I also like a lot).

I listened to episode 5, "A Private Life" on the way into work this morning, and it is both adorable and a fascinating view of legal history around same-sex marriage and changing attitudes.


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Comments

[rmc28]

Two new-ish things I do to improve my life:

* Morris dancing: last autumn I joined a womens side that rehearses weekly around the corner from home, at a convenient time of the evening. This is giving me regular exercise of a kind that also works my brain in a pleasing way, and a new social circle. I work in IT and live with husband, brother and sons, so I particularly appreciate a small window of the week which is women-dominated.

* Meditation. I am working through the beginner "packs" on the Headspace app, and it's essentially mindfulness / breathing-focused exercises, which is not new to me, but I've never been disciplined enough to do them daily before. It is more effective than I'd expected! I am managing stress better and feeling more settled and grounded. As I have a lot of stressful things going on at the moment, this is very helpful.

I've a lot of experience with using breathing exercises specifically to manage pain. I learned them originally in preparation for childbirth, but it comes in useful for a bunch of other routine-but-painful medical procedures - cancer treatment has meant I've had a lot of those. The breathing patterns I fall into are very similar but my focus when meditating is much more "be present, observe without judging" all my sensations in general, whereas for pain management it's more about getting my body to relax as much as possible, using breathing as a focus and channel for coping with that one sensation.

The app is very ... 'mechanical' isn't quite the word I want, nor is 'neutral'. It doesn't have any religious or spiritual content, it's just about the actions to take to do these mindfulness exercises. This secular/pragmatic approach suits me, but it might frustrate others.

[jazzyjj]

There's also a good meditation app for iOS and Android called Calm. I don't use it, but one of my neighbors does and really likes it. I've been in his apartment while it's going. It has soothing music along with breathing exercises. Another feature I like about it is bedtime stories. That feature reminds me of when I was a kid and my parents would read me bedtime stories.

[adafrog]

Bedtime stories? That is pretty neat.

[rmc28]

I like reading to my children at their bedtimes, and I've fallen into the habit of having Audible read me a bedtime story to fall asleep to, using the sleep timer feature.

[adafrog]

Okay, so do you then start it where you last remember the next time, or just let it keep going?

[rmc28]

I reset it to the last bit I remember hearing before I fell asleep, and I tend to stick to books I already know well and have read repeatedly to make that easier. At the moment I seem to be advancing in about 5-minute increments through All Systems Red by Martha Wells.

[adafrog]

Ah. That makes sense. I'd heard of other people doing that, and I was curious. :D