Creating Wellness – Meditation Part 1

Every one knows that exercise is good for our body. By exercising regularly with a program over time, you can achieve strength and flexibility. What can you do to achieve strength and flexibility of the mind? What “exercise” helps you achieve clarity, focus, purpose, and understand deeply who you really are? What do you need to practice to increase your ability to be conscious about yourself and your actions?

The answer for that is meditation.

While your body needs movement to function well; your mind needs stillness and relaxation to stay focused and in the moment.

• What is getting between you and a better job?
• What is getting between you and better relationships?
• What is getting between you and a better life?

To answer these questions, examine your behavior patterns. Can you break them down into Beliefs, Judgments, and/or Emotions? Feelings and Sensations are the building blocks of Beliefs, Judgments, and Emotions. Can you describe these as they manifest in your body? Start in the building blocks: focus on the feeling and where the sensations arise in the body or you can focus on the images in your mind or the conversations in your brain about what ever is going on. All of this is subjective.

• Can you separate your identity from your body and mind?
• Can you break free into a deeper, broader sense of identity?

Turning your intention inward to your thoughts and emotions and monitoring them as sensory events is a way of detecting when you are on “autopilot” -- your brain is actively pulling you into memory, planning/fantasy or judgment and away from the here and now.

As we interact with our environment, we develop strategies for processing information and overcoming challenges. If we are not mindful, these strategies become our conscious and subconscious response to everything. We become fixed in our routine, even when it is no longer the best strategy; this stress is how frustration develops.

Mindfulness practice trains your nervous system to know itself better and interfere with itself less. You would have the freedom to ignore your brain pulling and stay true to your original intention.

Why do we need to know when our brain is pulling us away from “the moment” and into memory, planning/fantasy, or judgment? A common trait of people who are seen as and see themselves as “happy, lucky, fit, or successful” is their ability to live in “the moment.” We all have internal monologues that can boost our performance or sabotage our best laid plans.

Next week I will give an example how meditation supports a mindfulness practice to create wellness in your life.