I think I met Aesclepius

In Wellness class this week, we were asked to listen to the Meeting Aesclepius mp3.  I kinda appreciated it but admittedly I struggled to conjure the image of a person who personified all the qualities listed, and the faces kept changing to different people I knew who I admire for various individual qualities.  It's hard to think of someone in my life who is the whole package, so i tried to create someone who embodied all those different qualities the way the people I know did, only jam-packed into a single person.

Overall the experience was calming, and I feel a bit freer.  What I love about this class is that the practices, when successfully completed, leave me feeling like a blank page.  I am finally able to free myself of the many worries that wander into my mind, even if I am only free for a couple minutes, hours, seconds.  It's like being able to vacation from my life without the stress of packing or going somewhere.  In me, mindfulness has fostered improved psychological and spiritual wellness because I have learned to control what I let into my mind, and I have learned to control how long I let the negativity linger.  Spiritually, I know that I can connect with my greater self, connect with the Universe, and tap into resources I never knew I had and resources I've taken for granted for a very long time. I can continue to foster my wellness in each of these areas by remaining mindful of the negativity that comes into my life and making the choice to not let myself become fixated on it.  I have learned to let things pass and 'keep on keepin' on' towards my goal of a better me.

"One cannot lead another where one has not gone himself."  This phrase basically means that you cannot guide others to a place of wellness when you have not reached that place yourself.  You can't help others effectively find solutions to their problems when you have not faced similar problems and sought out solutions to them yourself.  This applies to health and wellness professionals in a big way because sometimes professionals act as though they are unable to relate to their clients, unable to relate to their dispositions and all that has affected them throughout their lives, all that continues to affect them.  If, as professionals, we are unable to relate to our clients, we are not properly equipped to provide solutions to problems we do not understand.  We want to see our clients getting the most they can out of our services, and we must be able and/or willing to try and understand every single one of our clients, empathize with them, in order to truly help them deal and heal.

I want to have a sharper mind and be able to articulate anything I want to say in the most effective and basic manner possible, instead of 'half-murdering' my thoughts through my murky and wishy-washy speech.  There are a lot of things i want from myself, and up until being in this class, I never thought I could take control and meet my own goals because I settled and did not want to seek much more beyond my comfort zone.  I have realized what an error I have made in accepting comfort and achieving only the status quo.  I want a beautiful and meaningful and joyful life - something simple but not stagnant.  I continue working hard and cultivating this life, cultivating my spiritual, psychological, and physical strength.  I have a very long way to go but the fact that I have come as far as I have by stepping out of the cave that was my mundanely redundant life is a huge personal achievement, and I look forward to pursuing more with an Open mind and an Open soul and immersing myself in the concept of what it means to really Live a Life.

Integral Assessment & Universal Loving Kindness

"May all individuals gain freedom from suffering.

May all individuals find sustained health, happiness, and wholeness.

May I assist all individuals in gaining freedom from suffering.

May I assist all individuals in finding health, happiness, and wholeness."


After completing the exercise for a short while I began to feel my inner self open up, like an overall feeling of welcome was gradually filling me.  I feel like it transitioned from my mind, and then my spirit started to feel warmer and more open, and then my body felt graceful and and warm.

I really liked the integral assessment that we were told to reference.  It got me to realize that 95% of the problems I imagine myself to have are due to feeling as though I lack strong interpersonal relationships with other people, and that my worldly presence is lacking because I feel so disconnected from them.  I have chosen to focus on the interpersonal aspect of my life, and also realized that self-regulation is the line of development upon which I need to build.  This line of self-regulation affects me the most because I hide from social situations, avoid them, and don't challenge myself to them - thus my skills "worsen" because I haven't made it a point to practice them until recently once i began to realize how segregated I am from the rest of the world, aside from my boyfriend, my gram, and my boyfriend's mother.  What I have to do is practice making conversation more, starting with at work.  When it comes to making conversation, i tend to draw a blank - I don't know how to begin, and I don't know how to continue.  But with practice I will become more socially savvy.

The art of the Subtle Mind

I struggled with the Subtle Mind practice, but i would like to try it again later on.  At the moment, it is asking too much for my awareness to slip into the natural state of my mind, as I struggle with anxiety and although I've overcome a lot of it, these past 2 days it has been completely unrelenting.  During these 2 days I have been constantly having to remind myself not to cling to negative thoughts, feelings, impulses, but the struggle has been a mixture of ins and losses as I give in just a little extra to the negativity that I'm faced with.  A lot of it is self-inflicted, certainly, and i think that what i must do is revisit the Loving-kindness practice again and again.  I know I'm making progress but sometimes I just feel as though I want to jump out of my skin..  I don't really know how to bring myself back to that centeredness that is self-assured and stable, and I'm afraid that talking about it to anyone besides myself and this blog will only aggravate things, as i want to let this pass.  I need a new frame of mind, and a renewed sense of self based on something personal and uniquely Me.

The Loving-kindness exercise is a necessary precursor to the Subtle mind exercise because it opens the mind-body, and spirit to meaningful connections with other people.  Although these connections may not always foster positive results, we learn to open ourselves to the positive potentials of such relationships, and we learn to graceful open ourselves to love and kindness as well.  Once we successfully achieve this, we become more susceptible to not only positivity but negativity fostered through this openness towards others.  What the Subtle practice is able to help us achieve is a firsthand look at the way our minds translate everything outside as well as inside from an objective level.  It gives us access to our witnessing consciousness, where we mentally take a front row seat and observe the steady flow of thoughts and feelings that enter our minds, without allowing the entry of these thoughts and feelings to alter our mindset.  It is an alternate form of openness, because we open our minds to all things we perceive on all levels of conscious perception, but strengthen the ultimately Constant state of mental acknowledgement without giving excess attention to a single thought or feeling.

Last semester I successfully completed this exercise, and it was one of the greatest clams I'd ever experienced - it felt transcendental, like I was one with everything, like I was at peace with everything.  With more and more practice I hope to achieve this feeling again, the feeling of Unity consciousness.  But i must first achieve a state of calm-abiding, which will come in time once I have achieved consistent witnessing consciousness without exception.

-Ajax

The Loving-Kindness Practice

As I practiced this exercise, I found that unlike prior times of practicing I was better-able to reach the state of inner stillness and calm where I could 'observe' my thoughts and feelings and inner/outer sensations, but I did struggle.  I struggled with the more imaginative aspects of the practice, and had a hard time visualizing many of the instructions.  Ultimately though, I would say I benefited from this practice, and after trying again I was able to imagine taking in the suffering of my loved ones, dispersing the storm cloud of their strife after taking it in as my own.  Still, it was a frustrating practice at the beginning and towards the end, and mainly the only thing I accomplished was quieting my mind down and sort of zenning out - I just don't feel as though I accomplished what the main objective of the practice was, though I did complete the practice feeling open to the world.

The concept of a mental workout requires the training of one's focus and awareness, not only of the immediate external environment but also of one's current capacities for both, and an understanding of one's strengths and weaknesses in mindfulness.

Are you optimally well?

For Unit 3 in my college wellness class, I asked myself this question..  I took this class before, but ended up being unable to finish it up the way I hoped I could..  But looking back at my previous blog post for this unit, I realize I am in a much more different place now than I was then.  The following is the introductory paragraph that I had written last semester for this unit.

"This week, my Wellness class has asked us students to analyze and rate our own wellness on several scales: Physical, Spiritual, and Psychological.  For those of you who may read this and aren't in the same class and aren't sure what I'm talking about, the Wellness class I'm referring to is one that is teaching us the concept of integral healing, which is a balance of physical, psychological, and spiritual treatment where one is asked to take an active role in manifesting their own healing, going beyond what modern medicine and science are capable of.  It's a beautiful concept, the idea that with the right state of spirit our bodily and psychological health can be positively affected and controlled/altered to make us generally healthier people.  It almost seems too good to be true, but when you think about it, it makes perfect sense.  People adhere to external stress all the time - it consumes their physical health, psychological well-being, and diminishes whatever spirit they may have had before because it takes over the tangible areas of their lives.  But people who are always in good spirits, calm and relaxed, constantly in a state of 'zen' within every environment they are in - I've never seen someone like that in bad shape, or heard of someone like that being unhealthy.  I guess when it is so visible when we lose control of what goes on in the world outside of ourselves, it is easy to relinquish the control we have on the inside because as human beings, we are so affected by external/environmental circumstances that we cannot change." (Ajax, 2014).  Not entirely sure I cited that correctly and I'm fairly certain that I won't take myself to court for plagiarism, but it's better to be safe than sorry.

Last semester when I was in this class, I was so optimistic and clear-minded..  It seemed like things were getting better, I changed my diet and started eating less and when I do eat I try to keep it light and healthy, and maybe it's just a side effect of my body adjusting to the healthier way of life but my spirits haven't been high.  This is relevant because this unit asks me to measure where I stand on a scale of 1 to 10 in the realms of Physical, Psychological, and Spiritual health.  Physically I think I'm doing better, I'd say I'm at a 7 now when before I was at 6.  Psychologically, I would say I am at a 6 or 5.  And Spiritually, as life's adversities come and go, and I realize where I am in my life compared to where I'd like to be, and it's been getting to me a little bit.  So with that said, in spite of my waning emotional/mental state, my spirit is still strong at an 8.  I don't intend to give up and I do intend to become better, so I'm going to continue looking up and working towards my goal of betterness in all areas of my life.  The goals I had written for each area of experience are similar to what they were last semester.

Physically, I want to be more muscular and flexible, less gelatinous and able to endure much more physically.  I just want to be physically fit and weigh loss, look in the mirror and see some inner beauty projected to the outside, or at least find humbleness in what I look like now, but that's more of a psychological goal.

Spiritually, I want to confidently devote myself to a set state of mind and continuously maintain it.  I have beliefs but my passion for them has diminished considerably, which depresses me and possibly puts me into the current state of apathy I'm in.  I want to realize me purpose in life and have the resource at my disposal to go after whatever it is with intensity, and maintain the momentum of integrity until the day I die.

Psychologically, I want to be at peace with my life, but not in the way of indifference - I want to be able and willing to see the reason for things that have happened, and put the pieces together to form a greater understanding of my life.  I want everything to mean more to me, to make me more motivated to change the things I can for the better.  I also want to be rid of my need for external validation of my identity and worth as a person, and to live and be driven to satisfy my own expectations of myself rather than those of everyone else.  But you know what else I would like that has changed from last semester?  I would like to stop feeling so alone, and work harder on building strong relationships and friendships, 'ships that are more honest so that they can endure, and i want to stop being so willing and ready to throw in the towel and give up on getting to know other people, and especially give up on letting them get to know me.  We all fear rejection at points in our lives, but I'm really realizing how detached I've always let myself become from others to the point where I don't even know how to begin to make friends, or continue a conversation.

To achieve these goals, all I can do is take it one day at a time as I have been.  Some days are bound to be harder than others, and some seem like a breeze, and I'm on top of the world.  I think I'm simply going through a "my life and relationships aren't fulfilling" phase.  We all experience that in life at one point or another right?  Or is that just me bein' crazy?  I have to remember that self-reliance is a big thing, and I also have to remember that although we are alone, it is through our interactions with others that we also find who we are.  Sometimes this awareness of how we compare to other people is bad, but at other times, it's constructive and useful and necessary to catalyze personal growth.  So another thing I need to do to achieve these goals is to become more secure in myself that I can see admirable qualities in others that I could stand to develop for myself without beating myself up about not already being admirable in that rite.  If all that makes sense.