I have posted about my experiences using the MUSE system for meditation several times now. If you want to check out the previous posts, you can find them HERE and HERE. You may recall, I was not really all that excited about the idea of meditation and its relationship to performance improvement until I tried it– much like my experience with eating raw oysters!
Once I tried them, I learned I really liked them!
From time to time, MUSE will send out an email blast to their users inviting them to participate in a challenge. Typically, they will provide a group of no-cost guided mediations (ones that involve a narration directing the user through the meditation practice) that are normally only available through a subscription. These are provided free for a period of a week or so with the challenge to use a certain number of them during the challenge period. I always enjoy these challenges as I get free exposure to a variety of guided meditations I would probably otherwise not use. Of course, MUSE does this with the hope that more users will subscribe to some of their paid content, so it is a win-win as I am sure they do hook a few new users on the paid content!
A few weeks ago, they did a “Zen Challenge” consisting of 14 guided meditations. I signed up! I did not have the opportunity to do all 14 of the meditations, but I did sample several of them. One that I particularly liked, focused on the breath as an anchor and was called “I Am Here” by Koshin Paley Ellison. Perhaps what drew me too it was it was only about 5 and a half minutes long – which fits well into my attention span (although I have done some that were as long as 40 minutes!). The “I Am Here” meditation really spoke to me in that it encouraged me to think about really being in the present moment – not in the past moment or future moment. As soon as I finished it, I could not help but think how I would implement this into my pre-shot routine.
The next time out at the range, I made the change. As I loaded the shotshells into my gun, I said to myself, “I am” as I loaded the first shell, and “here” as I loaded the second shotshell.
I did this along with my normal controlled breathing that I always do while loading the gun and preparing to shoot. The intention of this routine was to remember that the only thing that mattered from that moment on was the next pair of targets I was going to shoot. I was not to worry about what happened on the last pair, or what might happen on the next station. I was grounding myself in the current moment. I really felt like this helped me to stay a little more focused!
Feel free to try “I Am Here” in your pre-shot routine. If you have other ways of maintaining focus, please feel free to share them!