Week 5 Blog:

This week instead of focusing on loving-kindness I focused on the subtle mind exercise.  This was another hard week.  Just like last week I was out of town for the weekend celebrating Easter.  I have to say that I did like the exercise of subtle mind better than the loving-kindness exercise.  It had the same people speaking and same ocean sounds, but didn't seem that there was as much to the meditation.  I was able to better focus during this exercise and follow what they wanted me to be doing. Last week the focus was on loving someone with the mind, whereas this week the focus was calming the constant thought in the mind.  I focused on where everything was coming from and worked to quiet my mind. I was able to imagine my mind like a computer screen where if I had a thought come in that was not what I should be thinking about I would either "delete" or "re file" the thought.  I was able to identify each time a random thought would come in, redirect it, and refocus on what I was supposed to be thinking of.  I will admit I am not perfect at the process yet.  I am trying to make these exercises my daily morning process but am not there yet.  I plan to save these and try them once again later.

All aspects of wellness are connected, something that I am learning more and more recently.  Sometimes we have to have something unpleasant happen in our life before we are able to realize how unfocused the rest of our lives are.  I have always thought I was a healthy person.  Sure I have anxiety but thought I did pretty good physically and spiritually.  I never thought about the fact that they are all connected.  Recently I have had a loss in my life.  It was this point that I realized how unhealthy I was.  Not only was I not eating the right foods, I was physically inactive, mentally I felt like I was falling apart, and my spiritual health was no where close to where it should be.  I decided I needed to make a change.  I started working out and changing my diet; I began Pilates, yoga, and meditation; I also started focusing more on my faith.  You have to start somewhere and for me that was   working out physically.  I started out slowly with yoga and began taking classes.  I will say that the more I worked on myself physically they more I wanted to fix the other things in my life.  I know that you can't fix one thing with out fixing the others.  This is still something that I am working on and right now am moving my focus a little more towards the spiritual aspect of my growing.  I feel great physically, and am doing a lot better emotionally.  I can't wait to see what my life is like when they are all better developed.  When it comes to mind, body, spirit.  One leads to another and you can't be healthy until you are healthy in all aspects.