Further adventures with techno-meditation

I’m still using the emwave device while I meditate, in an experiment to see whether or not it’s helpful.

One hitch was that I thought the thing had died on me. The display would light up when I switched it on, and then the top LED would glow red and the rest of the display would fade out. I tried recharging it but that didn’t help. Maybe a dodgy battery, I thought, so I contacted HeartMath’s tech-support. At the end of the day I had a call from a really pleasant and helpful guy who figured out that I’d inadvertently set the device to “advanced mode” and “stealth mode.” Didn’t know it had a stealth mode. He guessed this straight away, and I got the impression he’d seen this a lot.

One problem with the emwave, as I mentioned in my last post on the topic, is that it tries to use one button and one display to control or show many different functions. Honestly, after two weeks I’ve had to have the manual with me every time I use it. It’s that complexity-to-the-point-of-unusability that made me think it was broken. Anyway, it’s “fixed” now.

I moved up from level two to level three. On level two I could keep the display in the green (“very coherent”) for at least 90% of the time. Okay, let’s move it on, I thought. On level three I found, first time around, that I was in the red (“low coherence”) for 90% of the time. The rest of the meditation I was in the blue (medium) zone. There was no hint of green to be seen. The shame!

A strong factor for pushing me into the blue was visualization. Another was metta (lovingkindness). The two of those together were able to get my coherence levels up. (Listen to me, I don’t even know if coherence is a real phenomenon!).

Anyway, this is an interesting challenge. I tend to think that since I’ve been meditating for years this should all be a skoosh, but apparently not. Of course I’m a new father, frequently sleep-deprived, and for much of last year my meditation practice was non-existent, so maybe I’m just not back in the groove yet. But if that was level three, what the heck would level four be like?

More later.

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