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