The Blind Leading the Blind

In this week’s experience I could feel an overwhelming feeling of calm and love brought to me during meditation.  It is an amazing feeling to think and feel that one person that I respect and find full of wisdom. In past weeks I have started to become more in touch with myself and my emotions. More aware of the things that I do and or say. I have a long way to go but I think that the more I take the time to think about things and the more I try to relax the more I may become less of a hot head. The saying “one cannot lead another where one has not gone himself” means that if we too do not feel happiness or positive than we cannot help people to feel those feelings either. The same goes for a health and wellness professional, someone who is obese not physically fit and unknowledgeable on health and wellness techniques cannot help another achieve any of these goals. You most yourself be versed in the areas in which you are helping others.  

-Jess

Discovery

Whenever I take on a guided meditation for this class, I expect one thing; to find a piece of me that I have long forgotten.  During this exercise, I chose to focus on my emotions.  I had long thought that I was an unemotional girl, who blocked out other peoples emotions and was 'strong' or 'hard' and of course crying was for the weak.  The more I look inside myself, the more I realize I'm even more emotional than my wife, who may cry and show her emotion, I may get angry and throw a tantrum, but even anger, no matter how subtle, is an emotion and a strong one at that.  I wanted to use this session to open my own heart to the idea of forgiveness...  My wife and I are planning to have a child in the next year; both of us are from the horrible lower-class families where violence and neglect were a thing of our everyday life.  We did not have the chance to see what a real family was like, or a loving and caring mother/father during our most important childhood years.  For that, she has mostly forgiven her family, but I have not.  I'm the one who holds grudges for years, but for this session, I wanted to forgive my mother for the life she gave me, and all the mistakes she made.  I wanted nothing more than to feel that hate, and anger subside from my mind..  Only once the anger is gone, can I truly move forward and free up that clouded space for happiness to enter.  I envisioned this dark cloud of negative emotions slowly drifting away as the beauty of the bright sun replaced it.  I became warm, and suddenly filled with joy, a joy that only I could fill.  If it's one thing that I've learned over my short 25 years of life and sessions with meditation, it's that what people do aren't the cause for our actions.  If someone dumps a cup of milk on my computer and I punch them in the face, it's not their fault for dumping milk, it's my fault for my reaction.  What we do, is give others power over us, over our emotions and over our actions.  Only through meditation have I been able to accept this fact, and start taking responsibility for my actions.  I hope one day I can use meditation to enhance my positive feelings instead of running away the negative.

Jess

Just Forget It All

Hey Guys,

So this week I'm going to take a minute to discuss my the Subtle Mind Exercise.  This one started off a little different than Loving Kindness, where a male narrator explains the process of the mind before going into the exercise.  The main female narrator is the same from Loving Kindness and the sound of the ocean is again played on the frequent gaps of silence where the mind is supposed to focus on one particular thing.  Just like studies can show, it's obvious in daily practices that when I'm happy, I'm healthy, and when I'm sick, I'm unhappy, quite the vice versa role of physical and mental well being.  If I bog my mind down with negative thoughts, stress, and anger, I tend to get sick more often, feel tired and exhausted all the time, and leave no willpower or strength to eat right or exercise, which in turn makes my body unhealthy just like my mind.  I'm currently two weeks in a caffeine, nicotine, alcohol free lifestyle (that won't completely take caffeine/alcohol out but will significantly decrease the consumption) and I haven't felt better in years.  My basement gym is almost complete, so even if I get home at 8pm, I can still make 30 minutes to jump on the rower or throw a few weights around.  Even when I'm in a crap mood, I find that my super emotional state can be highly productive in a physically exerting environment.  Hope everyone had a great Thanksgiving, and is preparing (without going broke) for the upcoming Yule, Christmas, New Years and others holidays.

-Jess

Love and Kindness

Hello to everyone, hope you all had a happy and joyful Thanksgiving!

I wanted to start off by saying I’ve been free of my own negative toxins this past week, that being tobacco, alcohol and caffeine.  This choice really came from being pretty sick on Sunday and parts of Monday, but more from my wife being offered a contingent position with the local Police Department (as long as she passes background check and psych).  She’s a bit older than me, so we had planned on her becoming pregnant in the next few months to start our family, with the new job on the horizon, we decided to switch gears and have me prepare, so here I am preparing mentally and physically for this change I will be accepting.  This is why the exercise for this week was so meaningful to me, because my worst enemy is stress, anger and negative emotions.  I’m quite the hot head, and the smallest of things make me angry.  I find it almost impossible to forgive someone without them hurting worse than I did, or letting a wrong word go.  I snap quickly, and loving and kindness are something I struggle to show, even though I feel them immensely.  I never thought I was much of an emotional person because I tended to see the glass as half empty, but when you think about it, I’m extremely emotional because anger, fear, hate; they are all emotions.  I’m learning to be more open to love, affection, and not only accept it from others but show it so others around me feel as special as they make me feel.  One part of the exercise said “loving yourself is essential in order to love others”, which couldn’t be more true.  If you don’t find yourself worth loving, or attractive, or good enough, then you’ll never be able to believe someone who does. 

 

Even though this exercise was easier to listen to because a woman’s voice is just more soothing to the hear, I wouldn’t recommend this others because it’s primarily water sound and requites a bit more mental fitness than most of my friends have.  Since there is no science that yet proves physiological changes from mental workouts, there are, however, numerous studies that prove the effects, like those of Lutz (Dacher, 2006) which compare the ability to concentrate on a specific emotion between scholars and a control group.  A mental workout is basically the same as a physical workout, only instead of reaching a limit to your physical abilities; you never reach an end to the amount of potential the mind can reach.  Working it out is training it to concentrate, to feed off positive emotions and to deflect the negative ones.  I can use mental workouts to alter my state of mind, make peace with a past decision or quell negative emotions.  This is why I meditate, to be away from myself, and become nothing. 

One of the greatest things I ever learned in a guided meditation session was this; take a clear glass jar, fill it with sand on the bottom and water in the rest.  This is our minds, at perfect peace, all the negativity that never goes away is happily suppressed at the bottom, until we think, and boom!  Shake up that jar and everything is jumbled, this is our minds every minute of the day.  Even when we stop shaking that jar, and put it down to rest, it’s clouded.  Try to look through it, you can’t see clearly, our mind is just like that, jumbled and distorted, and only through true NOTHINGNESS, can we achieve that sense of peace.

-Jess

My Score

Hey everyone,

This week I’ll be taking a look into my own life and trying to figure out where I need work in order to become a healthier, happier woman.  Below I am going to rate my wellbeing on a scale from 1-10 with 10 being optimal wellbeing.

Physical Wellbeing: 6

Spiritual Wellbeing: 5

Psychological Wellbeing: 6

Physically I give myself a 6 since I have not been working out since I tore my ACL.  I am not sick, nor do I have any conditions, I just feel that I am gaining weight and need to get back into the gym after I recover from surgery so I do not make my health worse.  Spiritually I have been falling behind on my prayer or rituals, and I really don’t meditate or talk to God/Goddess like I used to.  I definitely need to find my way back, but it seems I don’t make the time.  This is where my psychological wellbeing is affected, because I’m stressing myself out with work, school, and home life.  I need to take a look at what is a priority and make time for everything so my scores can rise.  If I were to make a goal, I would want at least 8’s in each but preferably 9’s as I do not feel 10’s is possible to maintain for a long period of time.  My wife and I are currently in the process of acquiring equipment to build our own basement gym.  This will alleviate the excuse that I just don’t want to go to the gym or leave the house.  I also need to start meditating in order to find my way back to my faith, as I feel it has become one of the last things on my list of priorities.  In turn I hold onto a lot of negativity and have nowhere to release it except through working out.  If I increase my physical health, and make time to meditate and focus on my internal health, then the psychological aspect will heal itself. 

The Crime of the Century was nothing like I thought it would be.  It was another meditation exercise which asked us to focus on specific colors that were associated with certain parts of the body.  Throughout this exercise I was calmed one piece of my body at a time, until my entire being was relaxed.  This is something I can see myself using whenever I need to just get away, or as a start to getting back into meditation.  

Until Nextime!

Jess

My personal experience with relaxation.

Hello and welcome to my blog!  Today I will reflect on my most recent relaxation session.  My first thought when I listened to the Journey on relaxation was a meditation session.  As part of my religious practices I tend to use guided meditation recordings to help me deal with the negativity that plagues my mind.  I honestly almost fell asleep listening to this recording because it was so relaxing and I've been so worn out lately.  That was the point of this exercise though, to feel complete relaxation, which is precisely what I felt.  My body felt at peace and the mellow voice of the narrator was soothing along with the delicate music in the background.  I felt at complete peace, like a full sponge that needed to release all its energy and settle down until the next day.

-Jess