Loving and Kindness

I found that the background sounds of the ocean helped me to relax and concentrate on what the speaker was saying.  Breathing in the pain of other person or people was a hard concept for me at first, but as I grew with the exercise, I found it easier to put the suffering into my heart and then breathe out peace, health and happiness to the person.  I have been working overtime all week and am pretty exhausted.  This could be the reason why the CD relaxed me so much that I began falling asleep.  I think it was a good first try for me, but I know that I will have a better experience, if I try it again when I am more alert.

I would recommend the CD to others, because it helped me to experience each step for a period of time rather than rushing to the next part of the exercise like I did when I just followed the instructions in the book.  The exercise also helped me to open myself up to not only loving others but to actually understand how important it is to love myself before I can reach out to others.

A “mental workout” is using practice of contemplation to calm our minds, so that we can further develop our ability to be more aware of our inner selves.  As we would work a muscle to make it stronger and more useful, we can also exercise our minds through contemplative practice, so that eventually, we can know and experience all levels of our inner selves.

Research has shown that the benefits of a mental workout are that it can reduce our negative emotions and boost our positive emotions.  This in turn affects the mind and body which helps us to fight disease, and defend against distressful and negative emotions, which work to give us the ability to be healthy and well.

I can implement mental workouts by first making them a part of my daily routine.  It is important to set aside a specific period of time to devote to getting to know our inner selves.  I would start slowly allowing between 5 and 15 minutes for my “workout” until I am more comfortable with longer periods of time . I would then find contemplative exercises to use to help me go into my inner self.