Unit 8 blog, Methods that seem to work for me

Hello everyone!  This week we are being asked to review and consider the methods we have learned about in the wellness class and choose which 2 work for us the most.  I have to say that the most recently practiced method of Visualization was very effective, and it reawakened my inner dreamer.  Before my inner dreamer fell asleep, I was wandering aimlessly through life trying to find my purpose, and then one day I realized what it was that I truly wanted to do, and that was to become a school counselor.  I envisioned myself as this strong effective woman, persistently working with children to make themselves realize their own effectiveness in the world, making them see that they can make a big difference in how the world will continue to change.  Anyway, I digress and will save the elaboration of my life's dreams and goals for another blog.

When I practiced the Visualization exercise, we were asked to close our eyes and first imagine a time when we experienced great happiness.  Then we were asked to imagine a time we experienced a sense of wholeness.  Finally we were asked to imagine a time in which we experienced "exuberant vitality, radiant health, and well-being" (Dacher, p. 145, 2006). Once we envisioned each of these moments and everything about them in terms of sensations (sight, taste, smell, touch and sound), we were asked to pretty much mash the inner and outer sensations of each of these moments together into one big ball of exhilarating, meaningful, joyous ball of profound experience.  If you were able to achieve that, you were subject to experience possibly one of the most remarkable and liberating feelings of bliss gratitude you may ever feel in your life time.  I've never used the drug ecstasy but I imagine that this overwhelming feeling is similar to that, where everything is so clear and everything about your life's path up until this point just makes sense.  I might get points taken off for language but I have to say that the power of the human mind is pretty damn amazing.

As far as the other "weapon of choice" goes, I would have to say that the loving-kindness and subtle mind practices tie for second.  Nothing trumps the visualization of the inner sanctum when it comes to conjuring up feelings up peace and warmth and light, and there are so many elements that you can add or take away from your archive of experiences to personalize it.  I did appreciate the loving-kindness exercise a lot though, because it helped me to remove my general dissatisfaction with the attitude of humanity and see that although some people act unrelentingly miserable and appear unbearable to be around, when you look past that negativity they surround themselves with all they are looking for is the same thing that I am, and that is love, kindness, happiness, health, and a feeling of wholeness through which they can connect with others.  Even those people have things on the inside that they wish to protect, and that is what I believe to be the reason they become cold and decide to shroud themselves in unwelcoming or combative energy, to protect their souls from being vulnerable to positive expectations that may not be met.

The subtle mind exercise was also very useful to me, and has been since I utilized it as instructed for the first time.  The human mind is very strong, but also very fragile as it is affected by so many external factors.  This fragility is subtle in that it is a choice we were never made aware of until we first utilized this practice and realized how much we allowed our reactions and responses to be dictated by things that are often inevitable and beyond our control.  This exercise teaches us to "gently" push these incoming negative thoughts and reactions aside so that they may pass as quickly as they arrive.  It has taught me that emotions are an inevitability, but how we respond to them is a choice.  Even if we feel impulsive to react to something that we have deemed painful or stressful, we make a choice to grasp onto specific aspects of our lives and rebel against them instead of choosing to accept the natural dynamic flow of both negative and positive happenstance in our lives.

These practices foster mental fitness because they broaden our perspective from the life we see right now in front of us to the life we are willing to work hard to have.  We are no longer stuck in a single moment, but rather immersed into a series of moments that contain opportunities for us to gradually work our way to a more profound life by strengthening our mental faculties and discarding all from our minds that hinders our progress towards that expansive goal containing happiness, clarity & meaning, love and communion with all that is around us.  In times of stress at work or at home, we can get flustered and rebel against the challenges we are faced with when the odds seem to be against us, and succumb to that pressure.  Or, we can deem these challenges as opportunities to push past what we deem as being impossible surpass, and become stronger, confident, self-assured human beings who are capable of an infinite number of things so long as we continue to expand ourselves.  Even when we try hard at something and fail to meet our own expectations, the fact that we are bold enough to try in the first place was a challenge converted into an opportunity that would have otherwise been wasted, and we can now use that as a reference point from which we can practice strengthening ourselves even further.

And that, as they say, is that.