Posts in the “personal” category

In case this might help anyone else, I thought I’d share this information. I was having a weird problem where some mornings when I woke up my blood pressure would be really high, so long story short, I did an at-home sleep study a few weeks ago, and went over the results with a doctor this morning. I’ll include the doctor’s notes with each image.

Image 1: The “A+H” metric

In the first image, “A+H” is the main metric they use. It measures the average number of apnea events that occur per hour while you’re sleeping.

In my case, a 19.4 overall average means, “Yes, you have apnea.” The 36.8 value means, “you have really bad apnea on your back, don't sleep there.” Interestingly, 0.7 means “you have no apnea when sleeping on your left side, so sleep there as much as possible.” I’ve known for years that I sleep better on the left side, so the doctor encouraged me to sleep on that side as much as possible.

If you are interested in connecting with me, here are a few places you can find me in late 2024:

• LinkedIn
• Bluesky (@alvinalexander.bsky.social)
• Threads.net
• Instagram.com

Please note that I have abandoned that toxic cesspool of racism, sexism, and hate speech formerly known as Twitter.

“You are what you do, not what you say you’ll do.”

~ Carl Jung

Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj has been one of the top-five meditation teachers for me in the last year, so I’ve been asking some A.I. tools about his teachings, generally focusing on two statements he made many times. In short, he said that we should constantly:

• Tell ourselves, “I am not the body,” and
• Ask ourselves, “What am I?”

The rest of this article is from the conversations I’ve had with those A.I. tools here in 2024.

This blog post is part of a new series of blog posts I call “Conversations With Robots.” I choose a topic and then begin talking to my robot/A.I. friends about it. Today’s discussion starts with, “What is Deity Yoga”?

This blog post is part of a new series of blog posts I call “Conversations With Robots.” I choose a topic and then begin talking to my robot/A.I. friends about it. Today’s discussion starts with, “Do you know what Shinzen Young did to get through his Shinto training? I just saw that he mentions Deity Yoga as part of his training.”

As a brief note today, I have said to my doctors multiple times, “My kidneys itch.” If you have experienced the same feeling, a solution I have found for this problem is to take these AZO Cranberry Urinary Tract Health tablets.

As I’ve written here several times before, I’ve been treated for kidney stones three times so far, and kidney stones keep coming back, and this is a simple product that gets rid of the “itchy kidney” feeling. (Sometimes it also helps to help with the “pain of stones in the kidneys” feeling.)

Personally, I have allergic reactions to the AZO Urinary Pain Relief Maximum Strength product, so I can’t take that much if at all, but I can take the cranberry product every day without an issues.

This is another in a series of articles I call “Conversations with robots.” In this article I did into the style of meditation taught by one of my favorite Zen, Zazen, and meditation teachers, Katsuki Sekida.

A nice thing about most hotels in Santa Fe, New Mexico is that they treat water like you’re living on the Space Station. They have signs like, “You may have noticed that there’s not a lot of water around here. Please don’t waste it!”

At restaurants they usually only give you water if you ask for it, and I remember one time a waitress asked if I was really going to drink it or just look at it. :)

One thing I learned from my dad: The harder you try to control other people, the more they resent it and pull away from you. You gotta let other people be who they are.

From this article at psypost.org:

“In a recent study published in Consciousness and Cognition, researchers at Northwestern University showed that a smartphone app using sensory cues can significantly increase the frequency of lucid dreams—dreams in which a person is aware they are dreaming while still asleep. This study marks the first attempt to apply a lucid-dreaming method called Targeted Lucidity Reactivation outside of a lab environment, demonstrating that even a simple at-home approach can help users experience more lucid dreams.”

I’m sitting here working this morning when I start to hear that familiar scratching, crawling sound outside. In a few moments, the squirrel’s head appears from the right side of the window. He’s hanging sideways, three stories off the ground, and looking in, about twelve inches from my face. It’s cold outside so I had the window closed, but I slide it open.

“Dude, Cheerios,” he says.

“Oh shoot, I forgot,” I say.

By the time I walk to the kitchen, get the box of Cheerios, and open the door to the deck, he’s already there, waiting.

(October 12, 2014 #99PercentTrueStory)

This photo looks like a sunset to me, but it’s from a sunrise in Virginia Beach, Virginia.

I found this “roadrunner in hightops” in the SouthwestIndian.com catalog.

I just heard about the book Live to Forgive this morning. The introduction on Amazon says it all: “In Live to Forgive, former ESPN producer Jason Romano walks readers through his personal journey of forgiving his alcoholic father. Through sharing his own story, Romano invites readers to enter into their own messy journeys of forgiveness-to fully feel their pain, evaluate their pain, transform their pain, and ultimately forgive those who caused their pain. The only route to freedom and peace is forgiveness.”

I’ve written a lot about meditation before, and in this post I’d like to talk about something different that I do from time to time. You see, where many people like to go to a movie or watch the television, I use my meditating power to create my own “holodeck in my mind” to do anything I want to do.

I call this a “The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe” meditation, because I start by closing my eyes, start meditating in something like a savasana style, and then mentally go out through the back of a closet in a house I used to live in.

A cavern with a recliner

Once I come out the other side of the closet, I come to a path, where I take an elevator ten stories down into my mind, and that brings me to a Star Trek-like holodeck, as shown in this image:

As shown, the holodeck has a virtual recliner where I can sit, relax, and start doing anything I want.

While many people know the famous Ram Dass book, Be Here Now — which is currently the #1 All-Time Best-Selling book in Spiritualism on Amazon — I’d argue that it’s not necessarily his best book.

For example, I have met a few people in my travels who were struggling to read and understand it it because of all the art and 1960s “hippie style” stuff — which I personally like — and it was at that time I realized that while Be Here Now is his most famous book, it may not be his best book. (The problem with the “hippie stuff” is that it’s also distracting.)

Ram Dass’s best books

IMHO, I think the following books are his best, where I believe best will also depend on (a) a person’s experience with his writings and teachings, and also (b) their own progress on the spiritual path. And in this case, I think it’s also about book’s that are more straight to the point.

“Courage doesn’t always roar.” I just found this image in a folder on one of my computers. I don’t remember where I took this photo, but I think I took it at a small restaurant in Boulder or Louisville, Colorado. The text comes from Mary Anne Radmacher.

“I am everywhere. All are my expression. For me, there is no coming and no going.”

~ Sri Krishna, as quoted in I Am Not The Body, by Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

This page is a collection of over 65 quotes from mindfulness and meditation masters/teachers, and it’s specifically about the need for intensity of concentration in your meditation practice.

The quotes generally aren’t in any specific order, they’re just in the order in which I found them. The later quotes in this article are ones that I had to google for and then confirm, but that’s about the extent of the ordering.