Loving-Kindness

1. Describe your experience. (Did you find it beneficial? Difficult?) Why or Why not? Would you recommend this to others? Why or Why not?

I found this experience to be beneficial.  I found it easy to focus my love on those close to me and especially those family members that were suffering or dealing with a painful situation.  I even found it was not to hard to focus on myself and give all the love in my heart to me.  To be able to completely focus on my body and feel what it was feeling without judgement, which is usually what I do when I think of different areas of my body.  For instance, my stomach, that I feel is too big, but I am the only one that feels this way.  I tend to be very critical of myself both physically and emotionally.  So to be able to just love ,me for who I am both physically and emotionally was quite pleasant.  And I would recommend this to others so that they to can begin to love themselves for who and what they are as well as the world at large.

2.  What is the concept of “Mental Workout? What does the research indicate are the proven benefits of a Mental Work Out? How can you implement mental workouts to foster your psychological health?

Mental workout is a way of training the mind to become efficient at the contemplative exercises that will help us to evolve our psychospiritual life.  It will take a consistant mental workout to reach the 'progressive development of an expanded consciousness and its healing capacities'.  Implementing mental workouts are difficult because discipline is needed just like when implementing physical workouts.  One way to implement a mental workout is to make it the very first thing you do when you wake up in the morning.  The quietness of your home and with your mind clear of day to day activities at that time of day is a great way to start your day.  I am going to try and make this a part of my morning routine by first importing the cd onto my ipod and closing up in the bathroom and complete this exercise before I do anything else to begin my day.

Unit 3 Blog

1.      Based on your reflections, and on a scale of 1 to 10 (ten being optimal wellbeing), where do you rate your A-physical wellbeing, B-spiritual well-being, C-psychological well-being? Why?

I would rate my physical wellbeing at 7.  I chose this rating because I am a smoker but I am taking chantix and hope to soon be counted among the nonsmokers very soon. I would rate my spiritual wellbeing an 8 because I pray and study my bible daily.  I would rate my psychological wellbeing a 7 or 8 because I am still dealing with the death of my brother and learning how to deal effectively with my mother who has Alzheimer’s disease.

2.       Develop a goal for yourself in each area (physical, spiritual, psychological).

My goal physically is obvious, quit smoking.  My spiritual goal would be to incorporate more of what I am learning into action, because the bible tells me that faith is a great activator.  My psychological goal would be to completely come to terms with the losses in my life.

3.      What activities or exercise can you implement in your life to assist in moving toward each goal?

I can count the days I have gone without smoking so that I can see my achievement.  An exercise I can implement for my spiritual goal could be to meditate on a specific scripture that will help me to achieve my goals.  As far as my goal for my psychological wellbeing, I can acknowledge the different stages of grief, find someone to talk to that could be helpful to me, maybe a counselor or therapist, if necessary.

4.  My experience with the relaxation exercise 'Crime of the Century' was not as pleasant as the previous one.  I don't know why it was so different, but it could have been all of the extra activity and noise going on in my home.  The kids interrupting me during the exercise, the tv, my husband in and out of the room.  So I think I will listen to it again when no one is in the house to see if my first experience was authentic. 

Gigi

Journey on relaxatiom

Hi all,
I thought this exercise was wonderful.  The voice of the narrator was soothing and the technique was great.  I felt totally relaxed.  I have saved it to my itunes library so that I can do this exercise whenever I want to totally relax.

Gigi

First time blogger

This is my first experience with blogging.  I am looking forward to this and to working with my classmates and expanding my horizons thru this class