Tuesday, December 1, 2009
Saturday, November 15, 2008
Enhance The Quality Of Your Life
One of the simplest things you can do to enhance the quality of your life is to........slooww doownn. Is that a radical suggestion in this day and age?
Isn't life supposed to get faster, more technological, more sophisticated and fantastic?
Whether it is happening or not the trepidation we can experience in life can far exceed the momentary experiences of joy and happiness. In other-words the potential for suffering, pain and discomfort can greatly overcome us even from an early age, and infact much of what is associated with feeling great is in general terms experienced in the time of our youth, it is only as we get older that gradually and inevitably the body is forced to slow down until the point where it cannot do anymore and eventually dies. Of course in many cases people don't really slow down until they hit a brick wall, such as being faced with the shock of a life changing circumstance, in the form of some sudden debilitating illness, a terrible accident, or experiencing the loss of a loved one.
In moments such as these life is not offering us any consolations but rather is revealing a hard lesson that if we are to understand anything from it we must accept that there are events outside of our everyday experience which we cannot control.
If this is true how then can life be looked upon as lesson of understanding? How can we learn to embrace experiences and grow from them, (since it must be obvious to most of us that this body is not going to live forever as already described, your body is eventually going to dissapear, everything you see and experience as your body is going to pass away without a doubt and there is nothing anyone of us can do about that)?
Therefore it seems obvious to say (and yet it doesn't seem obvious to perhaps most people) that in order to understand and grow one must embrace the living breathing being as a process of inevitable change, and rather than trying to protect or hide or dissociate from this living process, it behooves us to whole heartedly (and with a great depth of feeling) to directly enter into the circumstance of fully engaging in this process of observing and understanding what the body-mind is, not merely from some objectified scientific stand point of external observation but rather from the place where you stand in and as the body-mind, right there in your noticing of bodily existence and through your experiencing of bodily existence as a living process.
Infact that is the only place where we can begin to grasp the real circumstance that we are in and it is from there that a deepening process of self-understanding can begin.
MEDITATION
Meditation is truly a place where you can find solace if you really know 'how' to meditate, even 'where' to meditate and even 'when' to meditate.
What is meditation?
Perhaps the simplest way to view meditation is to look at what we all do at the end of the day, yes....we go to sleep. You could say that sleep is the first and most direct form of meditation. You don't need to be involved in hatha yoga, tai chi, chi gong or anything of the kind to go to sleep, you do it naturally.
The body eventually winds down whether you want it to or not and zap! you are in sleep land, the place of dreams, or deep sleep or even blissful sleep, which is when you wake up and for some inexplicable reason and feel re-engerized and even ecstatic because you slept very well.
Apart from the most basic and most natural form of meditation in sleep, there is the meditation of doing something with a strong will or intention, requiring a very direct focus of energy and attention to complete a task without being distracted by internal or external events.
However the meditation that is pertinent to serve slowing down and relaxation is the meditation of whole bodily relaxation, where you allow the bodies entire mechanism (both internal and external, and very specifically it's internal mechanism's and processes) to relax to the point of releasing tensions and stresses from the mind and the body, tensions and stresses that you ordinarily would otherwise be meditating upon.
Therefore the art of meditation is to be able to maintain that asana of relaxation in the midst of any and every activity whether you are working, playing or resting, since even while resting it is still possible to be in state of stress and discomfort for a variety of reasons. Discomfort may even be unavoidable for any number of reasons, including illness, long term injuries, mental stress, emotional stress, fear, doubt, and so on.
Thus to engage in a practice of learning how to relax the whole body under any and every circumstance would be a very useful practice to learn and understand, for such a practice would certainly enhance the quality of your life if you knew how to do it.
Isn't life supposed to get faster, more technological, more sophisticated and fantastic?
Whether it is happening or not the trepidation we can experience in life can far exceed the momentary experiences of joy and happiness. In other-words the potential for suffering, pain and discomfort can greatly overcome us even from an early age, and infact much of what is associated with feeling great is in general terms experienced in the time of our youth, it is only as we get older that gradually and inevitably the body is forced to slow down until the point where it cannot do anymore and eventually dies. Of course in many cases people don't really slow down until they hit a brick wall, such as being faced with the shock of a life changing circumstance, in the form of some sudden debilitating illness, a terrible accident, or experiencing the loss of a loved one.
In moments such as these life is not offering us any consolations but rather is revealing a hard lesson that if we are to understand anything from it we must accept that there are events outside of our everyday experience which we cannot control.
If this is true how then can life be looked upon as lesson of understanding? How can we learn to embrace experiences and grow from them, (since it must be obvious to most of us that this body is not going to live forever as already described, your body is eventually going to dissapear, everything you see and experience as your body is going to pass away without a doubt and there is nothing anyone of us can do about that)?
Therefore it seems obvious to say (and yet it doesn't seem obvious to perhaps most people) that in order to understand and grow one must embrace the living breathing being as a process of inevitable change, and rather than trying to protect or hide or dissociate from this living process, it behooves us to whole heartedly (and with a great depth of feeling) to directly enter into the circumstance of fully engaging in this process of observing and understanding what the body-mind is, not merely from some objectified scientific stand point of external observation but rather from the place where you stand in and as the body-mind, right there in your noticing of bodily existence and through your experiencing of bodily existence as a living process.
Infact that is the only place where we can begin to grasp the real circumstance that we are in and it is from there that a deepening process of self-understanding can begin.
MEDITATION
Meditation is truly a place where you can find solace if you really know 'how' to meditate, even 'where' to meditate and even 'when' to meditate.
What is meditation?
Perhaps the simplest way to view meditation is to look at what we all do at the end of the day, yes....we go to sleep. You could say that sleep is the first and most direct form of meditation. You don't need to be involved in hatha yoga, tai chi, chi gong or anything of the kind to go to sleep, you do it naturally.
The body eventually winds down whether you want it to or not and zap! you are in sleep land, the place of dreams, or deep sleep or even blissful sleep, which is when you wake up and for some inexplicable reason and feel re-engerized and even ecstatic because you slept very well.
Apart from the most basic and most natural form of meditation in sleep, there is the meditation of doing something with a strong will or intention, requiring a very direct focus of energy and attention to complete a task without being distracted by internal or external events.
However the meditation that is pertinent to serve slowing down and relaxation is the meditation of whole bodily relaxation, where you allow the bodies entire mechanism (both internal and external, and very specifically it's internal mechanism's and processes) to relax to the point of releasing tensions and stresses from the mind and the body, tensions and stresses that you ordinarily would otherwise be meditating upon.
Therefore the art of meditation is to be able to maintain that asana of relaxation in the midst of any and every activity whether you are working, playing or resting, since even while resting it is still possible to be in state of stress and discomfort for a variety of reasons. Discomfort may even be unavoidable for any number of reasons, including illness, long term injuries, mental stress, emotional stress, fear, doubt, and so on.
Thus to engage in a practice of learning how to relax the whole body under any and every circumstance would be a very useful practice to learn and understand, for such a practice would certainly enhance the quality of your life if you knew how to do it.
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