The Growth Project: Day 7

3 min readSep 12, 2020

Today was Day 7 of the Growth Project, and this is how it turned out:

1. Mindfulness

As soon as I woke up, I felt mentally foggy and drowsy as hell, so I immediately did a metta meditation for 10 minutes on the Waking Up app, and it really helped with clarity of mind.

I decided to sit down and solo meditate for an undetermined amount of time and see how long I could sit. I focused on mindful breathing, my dark visual field with a blindfold on, and the concept of non-reactivity. For the first ~40% of my session, my mind was absolutely racing and bouncing off of the walls, it felt like my ability to stay non-reactive was being tested because every few moments, I would experience an intense auditory hallucination percolate on the boundary of my mind, then, disappear. At ~60% through the session, I felt very much more calm and present and I started sifting through childhood memories, I tried to remember random events from the furthest back I could possibly remember. The seemingly oldest one was when I was VERY little and I was with my mom at a picnic table with a few of her friends and some other children, there was a dog there too. Another memory I revisited was when I was very young, I was in an elevator, one moment with my whole family, I was distracted, and the next moment everyone was gone and I immediately broke down sobbing and sat in the corner of the elevator. I also revisited my old house in Battleground, before we remodeled the upstairs, there was a wall separating the kitchen/dining room area, and my step-dad’s bedroom. I also remembered one experience of my cat having a litter of kittens in my room and I was laying down next too the mama on her side with ~6 kittens competing for milk.

2. Health/ Exploration

For brain health, I took my daily supplements, which consists of fish oil, Matter, Turmeric, and vitamin D.

There is a thick layer of smoke in the ground-level atmosphere because of the fires in the western region of the US, so I am not able to go outside and run, I just did some push-ups in my room and stretched.

3. Computer Science/ Software Engineering

I wasn’t able to get to this today ):

4. Writing

I wrote today’s post!

5. Reading

I listened to a beginning portion of James Clear’s Atomic Habits and learned about what habits are on a fundamental level and how to set up your good habits to be easier and more fulfilling and how to make bad habits cost more and more difficult.

6. Music

I wasn’t able to find time to play any music today. ):

7. Juggling

I juggled for about 15 minutes today, felt a little rusty but still got some grinding in.

8. Cooking/Diet

This morning I made some tea, my brain smoothie, and an omelette with cheese and spinach. I had a little breakfast burrito thing that my roommate's made for lunch.