Greetings,
The loving-kindness exercise is a type of practice that brings about mental training by first focusing on your own feelings. You are to “grasp” them and release them and examine how they feel and fill up with these good feelings. Then you are to think of someone who is suffering and bring in their bad experiences and send out your good experiences with them. You are also to try to “still” your mind and expand the feeling of this loving-kindness to people around you. I really like this concept because it has a feeling of “giving” to it, and not just about me.
The subtle-mind practice uses our breath as the first reference point of focus. We think about our breath and how it is moving as a way to clear our mind. When our mind wanders, we come back to the breath. Once we are able to effortlessly “lose” ourselves in the breath focus, and not let the mind wander, we can focus on “stillness”. You can come back to focus on breathing if you lose your concentration, but the focus now is on how still your mind can be. This stillness can lead to acute awareness and ideally bring you to the Unity Consciousness state.
I find these two mental practices very different. The loving-kindness practice is more of an “active” relaxation practice where we think about different things to release the mind of “clutter”. The subtle mind practice is like a meditation where we clear our mind of any foreign thoughts or movements. I find this one much harder to achieve.
Spiritual wellness is the last piece of the puzzle for integral health. Once we are able to master our basic biological needs, and begin to focus on others, we enter the psychological phase. Then once we are in the psychological phase, we began to learn empathy and compassion towards others, not just for our own wellbeing. This leads to the spiritual phase. In this phase we are focused on the world around us and how we can make a difference and help to achieve wellbeing for all.
This connection has manifested itself in my life in the last year. I have become much more conscious of a need within myself to give back to the world and be of service. I am seeking answers and knowledge and hope to become more gracious and aware.
Take care,
Karin
Hi Karin - You have such an eloquent, yet easy to understand way of explaining each assignment. I don't find these exercises as fulfilling as you seem to. I would like to ask - what was your reaction when the "static" came on the CD? Were you able to relax through it?
ReplyDeleteHello AK, You know what, I listened to the exercises in the downloads area of doc sharing. The professor in seminar recommended it, so I di that and do not even recall hearing the static. However, I always have so much "noise" in my house, from my husband with the games on sportcenter all the time and my daughter playing music or the computer, that I rarely get any true quiet in here and I just tune out what I do not "need" to hear. Survival instinct in my case!
ReplyDeleteTake care,
Karin
Hey Karin!
ReplyDeleteI agree with Mary in how eloquently you express yourself. You really did a great job explaining the purpose of these meditations. I am getting a lot out of these. I'm playing around with the time of day I do them in order to see if the effects are different.
Be well!
Hi Karin,
ReplyDeleteGreat post! I agree with you that the subtle mind practice was harder to really get into. I found that my mind wandered a lot and that I really had to concentrate on my breath the whole time. I know that with practice I will get there. The loving kindness practice was definitely easier for me exactly how you described it. Because it is more of an "active" practice where the subtle mind is more of a meditation with focus on clearing your mind of thoughts. Great work!