Paying it forward

Lets see….Look back over my personal assessment, I scored myself psychologically and physically at a 7 and a 1 or 2 spiritually.  I felt that I was having some mental issues pertaining to my sons struggles in school and with his pre-adolescent attitudes.  Physically, I was starting to get into some bad eating habits after losing a ton of weight, but continued with my workout regimen.  Spiritually, I didn’t even think about anything about myself…only that I was struggling with my inner connection and was blocked in finding ways to rejuvenate that connection.  I am excited that we have a break between terms.  I haven’t worked out for the past week, but I have been watching what I eat without overdoing it.  I am aware of what I can and can’t eat and starting to focus on what I want to work on at the gym.  Mentally I have gained a clear perspective of life and the situations that present themselves. I have worked hard with my son and found a way to assist him and keep him focused on his responsibilities in a positive way.  Spiritually, I am still struggling, but not as much as I was before.  I have at least gained tools that I can use and found my way of opening myself up to my inner soul.

I think all of us had a great experience through this class.  At first it is not easy to focus all our attention on ourselves to find what needs to be changed and improved.  People don’t really like change, and they hate admitting what is not so great about them.  Now that I have come to terms with which I am as compared to whom I thought I was, I can focus on benefiting my life and the lives of my families by implementing change to raise all aspects of life.  Changing my perspective can help other realize that they should change theirs and eventually create a pay it forward affect.

Implementing Integral Health Practices

Health and wellness professionals foster the growth of development through all aspects of live for their clients.  If one does not experience the process they teach, they are lacking the ability to provide the best care for themselves and for their patients.  By implementing integral health practices we are able to reach an inner calmness that enables us to gain a clear perspective and wisdom that can be spread not just within our selves, but influence those around us.  Achieving this status promotes positive thoughts and actions towards ourselves and others.  Personally, I have always felt that I have excelled in all aspects of life at some point in time, but never at once.  I have learned that the psychospiritual, biological, interpersonal, and worldly aspects of the human experience greatly affect the other since they are all interconnected.  Knowing that our plan needs to be based on our current situation of experiences, ability to deal, and potential to grow, I found that I need to find a balance between my physical, spiritual, and psychological areas of my life.  Over the past year, I have focused primary on my physical health.  I feel that in doing so, I have neglected the other two.  Although physical fitness does give me a clear mind psychologically, I still have tendencies to allow my emotions to interfere with my judgment.  I feel that achieving a clear sense of psychological perspective will allow me to reconnect to my inner spirituality.  My primary objective is to achieve a greater sense of spirituality within myself to reconnect to my beliefs and way of life.  If I can find a balance between all, I believe I will be able to help myself reach this higher connection of inner spirituality.

            At the beginning of this course, I believe my ratings on a scale of one to ten where somewhere around a seven for both physical and psychological wellness.  Unfortunately, my spiritual wellness was closer to a two.  I have found that through these past nine weeks, my physical wellness has dropped to a five or six.  This term I have taken on an additional course and have had to sacrifice some fitness time for studies.  Instead of keeping a close eye on my eating habits, I continued to consume foods that weren’t as healthy and provided little energy.  Fortunately, one of my courses required thorough analysis of daily eating habits and physical activity.  This opened my eyes to the situation, and allowed me to focus my energy on the parts of physical wellness that needed to change to improve my status.  Psychologically, I have kept a clear mind and been open to new ideas and ways of dealing with issues.  I feel I have improved to an eight or nine.  Recently, my sister confronted me about some family issues that she had been avoiding to discuss with me.  She had noticed changes within my psychological perspective and how I was able to think logically without emotional interference.  I felt that I have always been able to deal with issues in this way, but apparently my views were different than those surrounding me.  Spiritually, I feel as though my connection within myself has reached a three, but still needs significant attention.  Although meditative practices performed within this class have triggered a reconnection process for my spiritual well being, I feel there is more that can be done to prevent me from losing my sense of self in my everyday life.

            Personally, I have always wanted to participate in an event such as a marathon or triathlon.  Since I really am not a great long distance runner, I have found myself completely interested in triathlons.  I wish to participate in the next indoor triathlon at my gym and finish within ten minutes of my husband.    I believe that physically I can dedicate myself to at least four workout sessions a week.  My health level leaves potential of reaching six sessions a week.  Each workout session ranges from 60-90 minutes.  I have found that I tend to perform more cardio workouts than strength training. I plan to focus on completing three strength training workouts and two cardio sessions a week.  By doing this, I can greatly improve my endurance needed for the next indoor triathlon event. I believe that I can train my mind to focus on the goal at hand and block outside distractions that prevent me from completing my fitness training for the event.  I have devised a strict workout regimen that should be maintained each week.  Now I can focus my mental energy on training my mind to focusing on my personal goals for each workout.  This involves preparing my bag and getting my daughter to the child center within an hour and a half after she wakes up.  This will ensure that I will have the time set aside for my workouts and this time will not interfere with other daily activities.  Psychologically, I strive to reach a calm-abiding mind.  I have found that allowing myself to take a step back and witness the commotion around me, I have been able to prevent myself from reacting with my emotions and change my reactions to less complicated fashion.  Unfortunately, I have not been able to stay in this state of mind without fully cautioning myself before an event begins to storm.  My goal is to start my mornings out with an understanding to be aware, observe, clear my mind of clatter, and then react.  I feel that if I start my mornings with a brief meditative process I can focus my mind on the areas in life I wish to place my attention, rather than jump to the distractions. Throughout the day, I plan to take a minute when needed to focus on my breath and center my mind to this mentality.  By doing this, I can refresh my mind throughout the day and keep myself on the right path to a quiet mind. Spiritually, I wish to regain the connection that I had to myself and to nature.  I have found that evening meditations of loving-kindness allow me to push positive feelings to situations that conflict me emotionally.  I have also started a blog page as a kind of public journal site.  This way I am keeping communication with close friends and family members about current life experiences, thoughts, and feelings.  This allows me to clear my mind of the clatter and seek different perspectives that may not have crossed my mind.  I feel that in de-cluttering my mind, I am breaking done the mental blockages that prevent me from reaching a deeper connection within myself and my beliefs.  Prayer within nature also gives me a sense of inner peace and connection to the elements. I feel that if I can take 10 minutes to sit and feel my surroundings of the earth, I tend to rejuvenate those inner tingles that make me feel like myself.  I feel that in continuing with at least one of these practices a day will gradually improve my spiritual wellness overall and provide me with positive incentives for other aspects of my life.

            In order to make sure I am staying on the right path to achieving a greater level of physical, spiritual, and psychological wellness, I plan to check-in with myself frequently.  I feel that in doing a goal assessment every week will determine what changes I have been successful in improving and areas that need improvement. This way I am constantly reflecting over the changes I am trying to implement.  I feel that the beginning stages of change are the essential moments for progress evaluation.  For the first couple weeks, I will perform a daily check system to verify if I have completed my physical, psychological, and spiritual goal for the day.  After the first month, I have will start to evaluate my progress from where I began to where I am at the present time.  This will allow me to gain a sense of my improvements and possibly adjust steps within my plan to reach higher goals.  Performing weekly assessments in all departments will keep me constantly strategizing on what needs to be worked on and possibly goals should be changed for a higher level of achievement.  I also plan to incorporate the opinions of my husband and close friends.  By informing them of my goals, they can ask me about my progress and what my plans are.  This can develop a pattern of health and wellness discussion that can continue for life.  Instead of focusing on distracting events within daily life, I will be focusing on the challenges and plans to change and make my overall life better and getting closer to achieving integral health.

a lighter perspective....make it personal

Personally, I feel as though I have struggled with some of the practice sessions that didn’t feel completely like me.  This could have been the reason for my difficulties with concentration.  The practices that most influenced my life and I plan to continue are the loving kindness and visualization techniques through meditation.  Although I found that all the perspectives of each practice session were completely beneficial and brought my attention to changes needed within myself, I felt as though I could never fully relax because there was a barrier mind thoughts towards the lessons of the techniques.  I am someone that can sit at a desk with my laptop at my finger tips and just write.  Getting my thoughts out on paper or on the computer help me to processes my thoughts and feelings.  Which I think is very similar to calm-biding and witnessing mind.  I am able to release my stored up thoughts and feelings to reach peace and contemplate what has been going on and what I need to change it.  This is my personal meditation.  Now when I am around nature and away from worldly distractions, my meditation is just me sitting with a cup of coffee and enjoying the view while my mind takes me to different thoughts that can be processed and accepted.  I think the number one practice that affected me the most was the loving kindness meditation.  I am not easily mind blown, but this practice blew me away in how easy it was to take difficult issues and put them in a love bubble.  It really changes your perspective of how you react to everything.  I have decided to start a new blog that consists of whatever I decide I need to get off my chest.  This can allow me to release the thoughts and feelings within myself and take time to reflect.  I can also receive comments from friends and family about what they think which can give me alternative perspectives and really keep I focused on my inner self and overall wellness.   After these blogs, I really want to continue with the love and kindness meditations to give me the warm tingly feeling that keeps me positive and determined to deal with life with more lightly.

new revolations

I feel kind of lucky this week with my ability to focus through this week’s track.  Even though my lucky mind focus came through recuperating from being sick and having so much going on throughout the day that I was completely exhausted, I still felt relieved that my brain wasn’t in constant thinking mode.  It was kind of refreshing to have my body and mind drained, so I was not preoccupied by to do lists, homework tasks, appointments, etc.  I found myself calm-relaxed and ready for psychological exploration.  Mostly, because I didn’t have to move from my comfortable position and just got to relax without releasing any additional physical energy for the day. By having my guard down, I was able to really get into the meditation and let my mind flow were it needed.  I am really beginning to have revolutions through these meditative practices.  I have been focusing my energy this week on a combination of assessments and love-kindness practices.  It has been a little challenging at home with my son, so I have been evaluating myself as a person and a mother.  Through these assessments, I found deep perspective on how I can change and work on communication.  Instead of reacting abruptly, these meditations have allowed me to stop, listen, and hear what my son is saying and take it more seriously.  I am finding that my reactions are calm, focused, and I am able to choose how I want to react to him and certain situations.  After assessing situations and observing the emotions that come up, but not out, I begin the love and kindness practice.  I feel this helps me take a lighter approach to intense issues.  There are hardly any tense issues that come up within my family, but situations of high stress have been developing with a teenage boy.  I feel with love-kindness, I have been able to send feelings of love and kindness towards high stress issues which make them easier to deal with and change my feelings of the high stress issues altogether.  When there is a feeling that creeps over an issue or a person, it usually remains present whenever the issue or person arises. If you can redirect your focus to fill that aspect of your life with love and kindness, then we can change our feelings surrounding that part and change it to something we can approach with great ease and welcomeness. 

“One cannot lead another where one has not gone himself”.  I truly feel as health professionals it is our obligation to have experienced or invested our time into what we direct our clients to go through.  It is important to have perspective from their shoes, which can help in how we approach their treatment and path.  I feel in experiencing this for ourselves we are better in direction and better at our jobs.  How can we expect others to participate in practices that we have not confronted ourselves?  Having a healthy spiritual and psychological perspective in all aspects of life gives you this level of knowing and provides you with better guidance for your patients.  If we are encouraging our patients to develop an integral life, how can we assist them in the right direction if we have not been there ourselves?  That only leaves us at the blind leading the blind.  We must implement these practices that we have learned in class to our daily practices.  The healthier we can stay in our own lives, gives us a great ability to help others with theirs.

Integral assessment with love and kindness

In order to identify the aspects of my life that need attention, I have focused on the my son's school work difficulties causing me the most distress and finding my best ability to grow and develop is to work with him on improving ways of handling his work load and more effective was in addressing difficult emotions to each other.  I know that immediately I need to involve myself in more love and kindness meditative practices to ensure I am approaching my son and myself with love and kindness.  This way when highly stressed, I can take a step back and work towards it with an open heart and compassion.  I realize that plans need to be made on both my son's end and myself to ensure long term change.  Even though working with him on his struggles can help him know, we need to work together to find a way or a routine that becomes something he can use his entire life.  This can also be used for how we communicate with one another.  Instead of becoming harsh and thoughtless, we can use love and kindness towards one another, understanding the others imperfections and accepting them for who they are.  Opening the heart towards each to communicate and understand each other better.  In analyzing these types of issues and changes, we can develop psychospirtually towards strengthening our minds towards these different perspectives.  We can both develop a better listening and guidance by clearing our mind of random/ personal thinking and allowing a different opinions, thoughts, and feelings enter to understand a different viewpoint.  Keeping ourselves in constant check can keep us on the right page in achieving this sense of peace and resolution.  This can allow us to grow individually and together.  Improving on our current status is in great need...and continuing assessments can keep up flourishing towards a better future.

not so perfect after all...

I am kind of wishing that I might have done my loving kindness exercise after my integral assessment.  I find that my mind is filled with things that I need to change, and things that are difficult for me to realize.  This week I have caught my sons cold and have been feeling under the weather, which has lead me to put off homework and makes me quite anxious.  I feel satisfied with how I approach my life to a point.  I do not take enough time for personal relaxation and reflection to work on development.  I am starting to wonder if not taking this time is affecting my family.  My son is growing up and needs to have more independent time to himself and his friends.  My husband and I have been learning this and providing this for him, but to a point.  He has been struggle greatly with school, but feels more pressure when he is getting assistance from me.  I need to reevaluate how I help him.  I have been allowing my way of doing homework and studies are the way I teach him….and personally it isn’t working.  Instead of insisting what he has to do, I need to be more aware of his needs for improving his life.  I guess I was always afraid that he didn’t care, but after deep assessment, I am realizing that he has cared the whole time; I was too closed off to notice.  My frustration with his school work issues has caused me to be more ridged and present less love and kindness.  And what child doesn’t need love and kindness…all of them do!!  I have known this forever, and I am the one that has been failing at providing motivation for him through love and kindness.  As for many of you..this week’s assessments and love-kindness practice has left us a little disturbed with our evaluations.  But I really do believe that through the love-kindness exercise, we can focus on those parts of our life that are struggling or need change and approach them with love.  We can accept the past and move forward to a better future, because all of us had the guts to face our life and focus our minds on the changes that needed to be made!