Meditation: Give It a Rest
Guest Post by Margaret Fletcher

(Bill's note: Margaret is a long-time friend of mine who is an ace at getting massive amounts of work done in the most efficient and effective ways I've ever seen. She is a true expert in her field and you would be well-served to spend some time at her site studying her methods.)

My friend Bill asked me to put some ideas together for all of you in his community, from the perspective of my way of life. I’m a meditation teacher. Nice to meet you!

Knowing very little about you all, I’ve spent some time contemplating what I might be able to offer that would be of use to you. I imagine a population of people who have high discipline and focus on a specific goal, that of optimizing the physical body.

My own exploration intercepts quite well with that, but I come at things from a different angle. What I’m interested in is optimizing life. That may sound like a ridiculously general goal, and I sense that it is unusually general. Nevertheless, it’s my highest value, it covers everything I do, and I spend the same amount of attention and effort to achieve this goal that I imagine some of you do. And part of this effort, it is very clear to me, must be to engage intimately with the physical body in order to determine how to live optimally in this vehicle we travel around in. So with that said, I think I actually could say a few useful things.

To start, meditation practice is about getting very clear about what’s happening. When you can do this well, you can then take the wisest action available in a given situation. Really knowing what’s happening can include knowing better the conditions around you, and also knowing your own reactions to those conditions, knowing how your body and gut and mind respond and react to various stimuli. Knowing these things, and recognizing what works and what really doesn’t, this is the key to a meditation practice that’s helping you be the person you want to be.

You are surely an expert at this kind of knowing in some places in your life. For example, you may know exactly what happens to a particular muscle when you perform a particular exercise X times per day, and also know what happens when you drop that exercise.  You have perhaps been through the cycle of waxing and waning discipline, and seen what that does to achieving what you’re looking for in your body-building practice. What you may not know about are the subtle and not-so-subtle things that are interfering or supporting your practice. If you could sort out all the bits that interfere and avoid those, and identify all the bits that support and do more of those, can you consider the places you could take your practice and yourself?

Meditation practice can open the field of your disciplined effort to include all aspects of your being. Bill tells me that the three pillars of practice for body optimization are diet, exercise and recovery. The practices of meditation can play an important role in each of these areas. Let’s look at recovery this time. Recovery happens when you give everything a well-deserved rest, yes?

Americans are chronically under-rested. I say this as an expert from the field of meditation. Whenever I am with people who are undertaking a prolonged period of meditation, one of the phenomena people most often report about is falling asleep during meditation. And it doesn’t matter whether “prolonged” is 20 minutes for a beginning meditator, or 5 days for someone first undertaking a silent retreat. People are tired. This comes as a big surprise to such people, but it comes as no surprise to me. Our culture does not value high quality rest time. Ask yourself the following questions, and see how many you can honestly say yes to:

• Do you know to take regular breaks from focused work, and do you actually take them?
• Do you awaken in the morning spontaneously, rather than by an alarm dragging you from sleep?
• Do you avoid multi-tasking and distracting yourself during traditionally restful activities, such as enjoying a meal or conversation with friends?
• When you relax your mind and body, can you fully let go of mental activity and physical tension?

I’m betting you had at least a couple of “no’s” in there.

Most people don’t actually know how to rest properly and often. Instead, we generally go full-tilt all day, cramming in too many activities, over-working, eating at our desks, even efforting hard to “have fun” during off-time. Then at the end of all that we fall into bed, and continue to sleep in the same break-neck way we’ve spent the rest of our day.

This may feel like it’s well known to you. Sure, I know, I should rest more, and get better quality rest. Everybody knows that. What’s that got to do with meditation?

Remember, meditation is to get really clear about what’s happening, so clear in fact that to do anything other than take the best possible care of yourself becomes impossible. So, for the rest element, when you start to meditate, you become aware and then more aware and eventually deeply aware of whether you’re rested or not, when you’re rested and when not, what feels restful and what feels harmful to restfulness. You become an expert at your own states of restfulness, or not, and you subsequently and naturally become an expert at resting.

This does not mean you become lazy, by the way. If you become expert at resting, you become an equal expert at effective, high-energy action when that’s called for. See how this works?

There’s lots more I could say about this topic. I could give you a list of things I do for myself now that I am attuned to my own energy levels throughout the day, and from day to day. But I don’t want to turn this into a to-do list of actions from my own particular circumstances. Each of us has different things that feel restful versus energy-draining. You need to find out what yours are, and then act on them. This is not exactly news to you. But if you haven’t found the means to actually act on this knowledge, maybe it’s only speculation or assumption rather than knowledge that you’re working from.

Or I could tell you about the studies that have shown a marked increase in meditators’ versus non-meditators’ REM sleep. That’s the kind of sleep that cultivates the best kind of healing and restoration, the kind that bodybuilders need for that all-important recovery pillar. Again, interesting facts, but without direct experience of this it’s meaningless.

In my book, the only way to get the truth about all of this is to look deeply into your own experience. And the way to do that properly is to take up a highly disciplined, focused study. I call that meditation.

Margaret is a business owner, mother, mindfulness teacher and meditation floozy. Her interest is in awakening to the truth of what you are, whether that be through profoundest stillness or in the middle of peeling potatoes. You can find her writings about awakening to the all-out, full-blast, top-to-bottom richness of life at her blog, Stumbling Awake.

Yeah, I have no idea what to call this post, so I called it what I've heard it called on late night TV

It's such a nebulous term…but I guess we all "get" what it means by now.

This is, of course, a sensitive matter. Men are obsessed by size. Whether it's breast size, muscle size, engine size, or penis size, the male half of the species seems preoccupied by it. The word is that women don't care ("Size does not matter"), but I find that to be particularly untrustworthy.

I've been around the block a time or two and I've never heard a woman say penis size didn't matter.

Seriously.

It matters.

A penis can certainly be frighteningly large or it can be small. Of course, it can be "average." Most are.

From what I've read, penis size can be plotted on a graph and what you'll find is the typical bell curve shape. Most penises fall within an average range and the outliers (the giants and shrimps) fall within both tails of the bell curve.

That is to say, a large majority of erect penises fall within a rather broad range (5-7 inches, with 6" being the "average") while just a small percentage are either bigger than 7" or smaller than 5".

You may be asking, "What the hell? Why is Bill writing about this? This is a muscle-building site and I know the penis is not a muscle! Damn him!"

Well, today, I'm here to ask two questions:

1. Does size matter?
2. Can one increase penis size?

I would guess that size does matter to you. I know there might be one guy in a million who thinks he's too big. I'd also guess that the other 999,999 guys want to be bigger (women, you can weigh in here – penis size affects you, too).

If size does matter, then can you increase the size of your penis? If so, how? If you could increase your size, would you? How much would it be worth to you?

I realize that commenting on this post might be embarrassing. Who wants to say that they think they're small? Would you be willing to fill out an anonymous survey?

I'm actually trying to gauge demand for a product. It's not my product and no, I haven't tried it (though maybe I should!)! After all, who couldn't stand to gain some penis size? (Except for the 1 in a million guy, of course.)

I'll see how many people visit this page and gauge whether I should put together a quick survey. It will be totally anonymous and done through SurveyMonkey, a survey service I've used in the past.

In POP Goes the Elbow, I told you how I injured my elbow. This is the update. It's been a week since the elbow popped and searing pain shot up and down my arm, and I'm a LOT better already. I have to say that this is the fastest I've ever recovered from a serious injury and I want to explore possible reasons for the rapid recovery.

First, if you recall, I kept on working even after the pop, and that was stupid. But that night, I did to the RICE thing (Rest – Ice – Compression – Elevation).

Second, I have been using my joint complex supplements pretty regularly. I've written about that here.

Third, and I believe most importantly, I visited the family chiropractor, who happens to specialize in sports medicine and trains quite a few local athletes as well as some pros. He is awesome. He's done a LOT of stuff with my elbow, and every day I feel much better than the day before.

Turns out that I had multiple injured soft tissue. Each is healing on its own, with specific therapies for each. I think by this time next week, I'll be working out my upper arms again.

This is awesome news!

My chiropractor's name is Dr LeCara and he's based in Pleasanton and San Ramon. I highly recommend him.

In the recent past, I've been lax on being consistent with my supplementation. I could make excuses: Work, vacation, kids, etc. Those all come into play, but it's really just laziness. And my back paid for it. I have been experiencing some pretty severe discomfort in my lower back (from numerous injuries, poor posture at work, sitting at the computer for 12-15 hours per day sometimes).

So I got consistent for a week. And my back pain vanished. The back pain resurfaced (because that's just what my back does — it's a real bitch sometimes), but it never got to the point of bothering me. That discomfort comes and goes, and I'm okay with that. I've lived with pain for many years; hours or even minutes without pain are incredible.

In all honesty, my back feels better now at 43 than it has for the last 30 years. My first memory of really bad back pain was at the age of 12. Then it got worse at 14. So, I've dealt with it for over 30 years. Trust me when I say that any amount of time that passes without pain or even discomfort is simply AWESOME. So you might be wondering what I am taking.

Zero medication. All supplements. Here's the list, all bought at GNC and/or Costco. Each dose is per MAJOR meal (breakfast, lunch, and dinner)

• Men's Multi-vitamin/mineral – 1 tablet
• Calcium complex – 2 tablets
• Fish Oil capsules – 2 capsules
• Ginko Biloba – 1 capsule
• TripleFlex (glucosamin, condroitin, MSM) – 2 capsules
• Vitamin C – 1 tablet

NOTE: These are 2-3 times the recommended dosages per the manufacturer's recommendations, and about 50x the RDA. Please don't construe this as medical advice and certainly don't try this without your doctor's approval. I am not a doctor, just a guy who's experimented a LOT with supplements over the past 20-25 years and knows what works for him. I could die tomorrow, too, so what the heck do I know?

It's that time again. Every month, beginning on the 1st, GNC has a special deal for its Gold Card members, where they save 20 percent on every order.

This month, they've upped the ante a bit, allowing you to save 30 percent on orders over $150.

Receive 30% Off Orders of $150 or more at GNC.com until 04.30.10.