geoffreybeene

Focus, or shamatha, has you choose one object of focus and constantly return to it and examine it. For example, your breath is a common choice -- your task is to meditate on how breathing feels, bring yourself back from distraction when it happens, but keep your intent on experiencing the act of breathing as fully and clearly as possible.

Insight, or vipassana, may have you begin with a focal point to get centered, but eventually has you examining a number of things to see what arises. For example, you may focus on body sensations and learn that when your nose itches, you get mad and getting mad makes you think of that time in childhood, etc. Or you may meditate on an emotion - when an emotion arises in you, with practice, you'll have the clarity to see the causes and conditions that brought that emotion about. Even more, you'll see the kind of thoughts you have around that emotion -- sadness makes you feel self-critical or ashamed, for instance. It helps pull the fog of your own thinking back from your daily experience and helps see things as they are.

Both are highly valuable - it's often easier to get good at focus meditation so you can more easily participate in vipassana, but there aren't any barriers there.

Every day is leg day

No, I went around it the long way. The concept of NYC scares the shit out of me--that's too many people in one area.

I did bike through East St. Louis, though.

Au contraire, I've never been in such good shape! My legs are disproportionately friggin' jacked.

Actually from Chicago, but I'm going to take the California Zephyr Amtrak train back home. Bike shipping is cheap via train, plus a 51 hour train ride seems like better decompression time than a magical 4-hour flight. 5 months across the country and POOF you're home! seems a little jarring.

Scariest experience: First and foremost is traffic. Traffic is fuckin' terrifying, and you never get used to it. A buddy equated it to being shot at all the time, and some days it feels that dangerous. Twice I had a vehicle blow past me so fast I could feel the slipstream--one must've been 4 inches off my left elbow. I cut those days short.

Second scariest was this ride through a stretch of abandoned turnpike in Pennsylvania--it's just old highway thats been overgrown. They filmed the movie The Road there, and it seriously looks like the end of the world. I pulled onto the pathway, and the first dude I saw was this huge guy shuffling along by himself, and hanging off his hip was an enormous knife--and then I had to go ride through a mile-long, pitch black highway tunnel by myself.