Love and Kindness Exercise

Hello everyone. The love and kindness exercise really made me feel a totally different way. By doing the exercise, I began to feel a sensation of humbleness toward others and to many of the things around me. It was sort of a thankfulness and gratefulness that I really do not experience quite often. What I discovered about myself was that there is a part of me that is full of love and kindness and much compassion for others, especially children. That gave me a sense of great peace, and joy to be able to open my heart to others. For some reason, I kept visualizing children in the exercise.
The area of growth that I need more growth on is the psycho spiritual development because this is the area that throw everything off balance on a daily basis just because of the thoughts, feelings, and emotions that run through my mind uncontrollably. It takes me a great deal of work to get to the stillness and quiet mind, then afterwards, I am able to focus on the focal points of the exercise. Nevertheless, practice is the key, and on a daily basis. The exercises that I intend to foster is the Subtle mind practice and the love- kindness practice.

Hello everyone. Both, the Love-Kindness practice and the Subtle-Mind practice, were a great form of meditation and a great way to begin to learn to clear the mind and take control of thoughts. Both of the practices have breathing as an important part of the practice with the difference being the focal point of the practice. In the Love=Kindness exercise, once the breathing part is established, one focuses on the concept of love, beginning with a loved one and drawing that love in. Afterwards, the focus switches to a loved one’s suffering then to a group of people and even an enemy. The purpose is to begin to show love and kindness to people, and this is done in the form of a mental exercise that trains the mind to do this.

            The Subtle-Mind practice focuses on breathe alone and the mental chatter that comes as one is trying to focus on breathe. The practice helps to witness or acknowledge the mental chatter but then quickly dissolves it in order to clear the mind. When this mental chatter distracts one’s focus from the breathe, one must acknowledge the mental chatter, then focus back on the breathe until the still, clear mind is achieved. This is the frustrating part of these practices. I found that the hardest thing to begin to do is control the mental chatter. Afterwards, gaining a clear mind is peaceful and relaxing.

            The connection between spiritual wellness to mental and physical wellness is that all of these are connected.  When an imbalance exists in one of these areas, the others are affected causing an imbalance in all the body. Spiritual wellness deals with our inner life. It deals with all the struggles and turmoil that exists within an individual. This causes great deal of stress mentally and physically, which in turn, affects the body by making it susceptible to illness and disease. Mental and physical illnesses occur, which all mostly begins with an undeveloped or weak spiritual area. This can manifest in personal life by the developing illnesses or stressors one experiences in life, and in the quality of life one lives.

Love and kindness

Hello everyone. My experience of the exercise was pretty relaxing and very helpful. The exercise give you a sense of the importance of love and kindness. I would recommend it to others based on the fact that everyone needs to experience this type of meditations and even just because of what it is intended for, which is love and kindness. Like I have learned by practicing this and the reading, love and kindness paves the road to integral health.
Mental workout is the concept of allowing the mind to rethink things in a positive manner, and be able to change the way a person perceives and focuses on things. Research shows that working the mind can improve ones focus and consciousness levels. Implementing mind workouts would be during times of stress, by changing thought patterns and meditating on things like love and kindness.

Jessie Mansanales

Hello everyone. On a scale of 1-10, I rate my physical well being at a 7. I rate my psycho spiritual well being at a 6, and my psychological well being at a 5. I do work out about four times a week due to being a diabetic, and I went from weighing 360 pounds to 287. There is plenty of room for improvement in this area by implementing more dieting and cardio exercise in order to achieve my goal of 250 pounds. I am 6foot 6 inches, so I am naturally a big guy. The physical area makes me feel better when I see the results. In my spirituality, is am pretty well off as well. I attend my church every week, and have learned about prayer. I intend to straighten it more by getting more involved in prayer groups and men's groups with my church. My weakest area is the psychological area because there is plenty of stress between my 12 hour a day job, school, maintaining my health, and family. Nevertheless, I intend to start some relaxation techniques and try to set up time for these techniques in order to strengthen these areas. The goals I have set for each of these areas is to strengthen them gradually, not at a pace that sets me up for failure by doing what I previously discussed. I found the relaxation exercise very frustrating. I found that concentrating by changing color schemes is definitely not for me. I relax with a more of a mind clearing technique like mental imagery of focusing on one thing like a spec of light in darkness or a calm snowfall in a warm cabin as I watch it through the window.

Integral helath

Hello everyone. It is very fascinating how this mine-body medicine stuff works. Many people can think that it is just a bunch of bull, but the evidence is there. Upon reading the research results and all the statistical evidence, one can begin to really see how our emotions and thoughts come into play in the body's healing process. It would be great if someday conventional medicine would join forces with integral medicine. I believe that the possibilities could be very helpful and life changing for many people.

integral health

Hello everyone. It is very interesting on how important it is to have a balance of all of the body systems in order to achieve good health. Body, mind, and spirit balance is essential for optimum health. If only this concept was incorporated more in today's medicine and more study and resources were given into this concept. I think it would make a huge difference on how illnesses and diseases are treated.