Meeting Aesclipius

In this week’s meditation, we completed the exercise Meeting Aesclepius.  In this exercise, we visualized an individual that we found to be a wise, kind, and compassionate person.  Personally, I immediately thought of my favorite teacher, Mr. Baskin.  He was always someone that I went to for advice throughout high school.  He was someone that I looked up to and that I feel really made a change in my life by helping me cultivate my own self-esteem.  In the exercise, you visual a beam of light coming from your mentor’s head, throat, and heart.  These beams of light are to transfer kindness in these areas to you.  From the head you receive kind thoughts, from the throat you receive kind words, and from the heart you receive kindness itself.  I feel like meditation has helped to provide me with an outlet.  Although I do still feel like some of the meditations are too long for me, I do enjoy having time that isn’t focused on the tasks that need to be accomplished or what everyone else wants.  It is nice to have time to focus on myself alone and my own developments.

The saying “one cannot lead another where one has not gone himself,” is synonymous with the saying “practice what you preach.”  You have to have walked the same or similar path as the person you are trying to lead.  This is especially important in the health care field.  Would you really want an obese doctor telling you that you need to lose weight?  I believe that health care professionals have an obligation to their patients to either be in a great state of health or to be working toward that state.  I think that in order to be the best health care professional that I can be, I need to work on my physical, mental, and spiritual health.  To do this, I need to find better time management and make time for physical exercise and meditation.  Without this time and attention to my own health, there is no way that I will be able to help another individual to achieve their own integral health.      

Integral Assessment

For this blog post, we practiced the loving kindness meditation.  For this meditation, a mantra was repeated that was meant to help an individual evolve from personal love to a universal loving kindness.  The mantra was meant to be repeated in a quiet environment for 10 minutes.  The previous meditations that we performed were guided, while this one provided a description of what to do, but it was performed solely by the individual.  I had a hard time at first trying to concentrate on the mantra, so I decided to put on some background noise to help me focus.  I’ve found from previous meditations that the sound of running water helps me to relax.  There is a great soundtrack on youtube that I use to relax and focus and it includes running water and very slow light piano music.  It really helped me to be able to complete the meditation; especially since the water and music helped to drown out the background noise of having 2 young boys running around the house.  The mantra for the meditation wasn’t really something that felt a connection for me.  However, after reading the paragraph following the meditation, I think I started to understand the purpose of the exercise more clearly.  I think that if I go back through and practice the meditation further that I might be able to find more meaning in the mantra.

The second part of this assignment involved completing an integral assessment.  The assessment had two questions with multiple parts.  The first question focused on what aspect of my life was the source of difficulty and suffering, what my current level of development is in this area, and what I can aim for.  The second question focused on growth and development opportunities and whether or not these were the same as the area that requires healing.  I’m actually still working on the assessment, and I’m not sure if I’m overthinking it too much.  I probably am, but they are both such big questions.  First off, my current source of difficulty and suffering is that I’ve spread myself too thin by taking on school, work, and my kids.  As to how to aim for this, I have no idea.  I think I really need to sit down and reprioritize my life.  All three things are important to me, most especially my kids.  However, at this time I really need to find a way to do it all and find some better time management.  I think this is something that I will need to spend more time than a couple of days figuring out.  As for the second question, I feel stumped.  Looking for growth and development opportunities is very difficult.  There are a lot of areas that I feel like I need growth and development in, but I don’t really know if I am ready for it.  One example is my health.  Currently I’m at an age where if I don’t start taking better care of myself, I will wind up with a lot of health problems later on in life.  However, I’m so over stretched time wise that I don’t have the time or energy to fully devote to making a healthy lifestyle a priority.  One thing that I can do that may help is to start scheduling in time for exercise and become more organized with my scheduling.  Another activity might be to start making out a meal plan once a week to ensure that I have good and healthy foods in the house to eat.  I think that my assessment definitely needs some more work, but this class is really forcing me to reevaluate my personal definition of health and start to take it more seriously than I have in the past.

~ Sandra   

Subtle Mind

In this week’s meditation exercise, we listened to the subtle mind meditation.  Again, I had to do the meditation more than once in order to make it all the way through.  I kept falling asleep during the quiet parts with the waves crashing.  Like the loving kindness exercise last week, this seemed to me to be a bit too long.  However, I did prefer the ideas behind this meditation.  Calming the mind seemed to be much easier than opening to loving kindness.  It also felt more peaceful to me because instead of focusing on the problems of the people I love, I was able to just push problems and thoughts out of my head.  I think that this practice would become more of my everyday meditation.

I have certainly noticed a connection between spiritual wellness and my mental and physical wellness.  For me, I have gone through a time of tremendous spiritual growth in the past year.  Through this, I learned that I was experiencing control and trust issues.  It was only through growing spiritually that I’ve been able to really tackle this problem.  It was actually one of the most difficult things that I have ever done, to let go of my control over myself, my family, and especially my children.  I prayed very hard about this and placed the people that I love in the hands of God.  Since then I have noticed tremendous amounts of peace.  I certainly have moments of fear and panic, but I am continuously working on laying these problems at God’s feet and trusting that he will care for us.  Before my spiritual growth, I was constantly depressed and experiencing panic attacks.  I have found that my spiritual wellness has made my depression much more manageable and I have barely experienced a panic attack in the last 6 months.  There is certainly a correlation between our spiritual, mental, and physical health.    

Loving Kindness

This week we completed the Loving Kindness activity.  Throughout the activity, we worked on self-love and the expansion of that emotion from ourselves into the people that are closest to us and then further into the rest of the world.  I personally had to do this exercise three times.  The first time it was difficult for me to really concentrate and expand my feelings outside of myself.  After that, it was much easier to really understand and be present.  However, I think that in order to really benefit from this exercise, I would need to complete it a few more times.

Mentally working out is a concept where an individual trains their mind much the same way they would their bodies.  Some of the benefits of this would be the increased ability to understand and retain information.  Also, mentally working out can aid in mental alertness.  This allows the individual to be present in the situation regardless of anything else on their minds.  I think that mental workouts would help me to be more focused and in turn foster my psychological health.  It’s important that we follow the advice of use it or lose it!