I think I blogged about my 15 portraits in 15 weeks challenge a few weeks ago here. As I come upon the last week of the challenge, I’m a little tired of doing portraits but I’m quite grateful to the project for helping me solve the retiree’s dilemma of too much free time. For the last week of the challenge, tired of doing mostly fairly standard portraits, I decided to paint my youngest granddaughter as Goldilocks. For the record, she is exactly the type who could sneak into someone’s house, wreak all kinds of havoc, then fall asleep looking like a little angel. Side note: when I went on the spirit journey with some grandkids, that I previously blogged about here, it turned out that my spirit animal was a bear, so I had been wanting to paint one of them too!
For many, many years I tried to meditate but was unable to be disciplined enough to be regular about it. Finally, the cell phone era arrived, and with the Insight Timer meditation app that I downloaded on it, I was able to develop a regular practice. Insight Timer is mostly a simple timer app that keeps track of your minutes and your consecutive days – and you get *stars* for your milestones. The dedicated Buddhists that use the app say you shouldn’t get too attached to your stars, but I have to think that is what helped me get to 29 consecutive days and 27,600 minutes (as recorded by the app right now). On the app, there are also thousands of guided meditations that I ignored for years but lately I have been appreciating more. Here are some favorites:
Yoga Nidra For Sleep by Jennifer Piercy – for when you can’t sleep. Its rare for me to even get to the end of this one without falling asleep.
Developing Loving-Kindness by Bodhipaksa – If you are mad at
someone this has an almost magical ability to dispel that conflict.
Morning Meditation by
Bethany Auriel-Hagan – a great six minute start to the day.
Meet your Animal Spirit Guide by Kristen Acciari – this is
the fun one I did with the grandkids. They had amazingly detailed experiences
and Granddaughter #3’s tale of meeting her spirt guide, the Arctic Fox,
inspired the painting below.
Modern science acknowledges the many benefits of meditation,
including reducing stress, sharpening focus and improving memory. For third
agers a special benefit accrues: “There was a study reported at the American Geriatric Association
convention in 1979 involving forty-seven participants whose average age was
52.5 years. It found that people who had been meditating more than seven years
were approximately twelve years younger
physiologically than those of the same chronological age who were not
meditating.” (Gabriel Cousens, M.D., Conscious Eating,
p. 281.) So, if you’ve ever wanted to establish a meditation
practice, there’s an app for that!
