Creating Wellness: Unit 7 Blog Assignment: Meeting Aesclepius

WOW! That is how I'm going to begin! This was my favorite of all of the practices we have done so far. I felt that it incorporated many of the different aspects that we have talked about and read about throughout our reading this far.

My meditative practices have fallen short lately, mainly because of time constraints and I realized just how much I have missed the connection I have in a meditative state to my inner self. Because I have received Reiki Attunement before, I have had others who have "spoken" through the Reiki practioner who have helped me through differen times in my life. Because of my intense connection with her and the wisdom she has shared with me through the past several years, I chose to focus on her for this exercise. We practice things like this when we are in session, but I have never done this form of distance healing and intention. It was remarkable to say the least. I felt a drastic temperature change in my body and I felt at peace and more focused when completing this assignment.

Mindfulness has restored not only my emotional but my spiritual connection. Both of these areas have felt depleted lately and I did not feel whole. Because of the peace and the feeling that I am centered once again, I will continue to incorporate these practices on a daily basis to help move towards integral health and healing.

"One cannot lead another where one has not gone himself" is a very profound statement and I believe that this can apply to many areas of our lives. It is why when someone loses a child to SIDS, they join and advocate the SIDS foundation. It is why when a parent loses a child who was killed by a drunk driver or the child was killed because they were the ones drinking and driving, that they join MADD. It is why recovering alcoholics continue to attend AA meetings long after they really need to. We learn through adversity in our lives, and we grow from the despair that shakes us to our core. Only by going through these things ourselves can we truly help others and say "I know how you feel, let me help." We can then guide others through difficulties in their life. This is why we must focus on and achieve integral health ourselves. We may then lead others down the same wonderful path of healing because we have achieved it ourselves. We can then be the guider, the healer, and the person full of wisdom that we just focused in on someone else during this exercise. How awesome is that?

I believe because of what we have now been taught, that we all have an obligation to share this information with others, and to become guided mentors and healers to those in need and teach them how to reach psychological, spiritual, and physical wholeness in their own lives. What a journey we have begun and what a wonderful place this world will be, if we can learn and grow from each other until we have all reached integral health!

Kris Sinclair

Creating Wellness: Unit 6 Blog: Loving Kindness & Integral Assessment

Hello all! I hope you have a wonderfully long relaxing weekend!

I listened to the Loving Kindness Meditation Exercise Again and found it to be even more beneficial than the last time I listened to it. I love focusing on the four sentences from this exercise and I think that I am going to place them at random places around my house so that I can see them, and meditate on them whenever possible. The four sentences that I find most beneficial from this exercise are:

"May all individuals gain freedom from suffering.
May all individuals find sustained health, happiness, and wholeness.
May I assist all individuals in gaining freedom from suffering.
May I assist all individuals in finding health, happiness, and wholeness." (Dacher E. S., 2006)

While reading Notes from a Fellow Traveler in our text, I was able to also benefit from the exercise because I already had myself in the right frame of mind from listening to the first exercise and I was still in a meditative state. However, if I would have just had to read this assignment and not be able to listen to the meditative voice instructions along with the background music or ocean waves playing, I would not have been able to have reaped as much benefit from it. When I have to hold a book and read what I am supposed to be meditating on, it is distracting to me.

What I discovered about myself is that I am falling back into an easy state of meditation. I had gotten away from it for a while and I didn't realize how much I had missed it and how ungrounded and uncentered I had been feeling lately without it.

The area that I have chosen to be a focus of growth and development in my own life is my own emotional development. Because there has been a lot of negativity around me lately where I work and even in my life in general, I have been letting it get to me and cloud my mental and emotional judgment. I have forgotten to put the protective coating of white light and peace around me. In the process, I have fallen into some negative patterns as well. I will choose to focus on positivity, joy, and peace in the midst of this struggle because I want to move into new higher levels of consciousness and not backslide as I work towards integral health.

The main exercise or activitie that I can implement to foster greater wellness in this area is to continue my meditative practices as well. My husband and I are redoing our back yard (1/2 an acre) and have started a trail down to the woods and put some meditative stones at the center of it. I hope that this will become my peaceful haven and my zen garden of sorts where I can go to meditate, reflect, worship the earth, my creator, and the universe, while I continue to grow and learn to fill myself with light.

Creating Wellness: Unit 5 Blog: Subtle Mind Practice

Creating Wellness: Unit 5 Blog: Subtle Mind Practice

For this week’s blog assignment, we were asked to complete the subtle mind practice exercise.  I was very distracted when I first began this assignment and I had a time focusing quite honestly. There were many things going on in my home at this time with my kids, the dog, the phone, etc. and I found that I had to go in my room, light a candle, and even use some of my focusing essential oils in order to move myself from a state of chaos and unrest to the first stage of a witnessing mind in order to be where I wanted to be to begin this exercise.

The gentle waves and laps of water were not as easily heard at first in this assignment and I found the stillness soothing while I first settled and stilled my mind. I have been told that I am drawn to water and that within its coolness is where I find the most peace.  During this time, I did feel the shift in thoughts and stillness as I went from an active mind into a witnessing mind consciousness. One of the issues that I am working on is that during the large gaps of “nothingness” in this assignment I either start to let my mind wander and have to get it back where it needs to be, or I get so into what I am doing, that when she begins to speak again, I have a startled reaction. This confused me because I was expecting to hear her voice again, but I guess maybe I was further away in my mind that what I thought.

The loving kindness exercise was one on focusing and feeling different aspects of what we were guided to do, and this exercise was more calming and focused on being still and living in the aspects of a witnessing mind. It was interesting to see and feel the differences in a similar exercise with very different results.

Spiritual wellness is an extremely integrated part of physical and mental wellness. If we cannot move through the stages of psychospiritual flourishing, we will be unable to achieve physical and mental wellness in its fullest degree.  It would then be impossible to reach integral health.

Within my own life, I have been focusing on mental and spiritual wellness recently and have taken the focus off of physical wellness. However, I have gone through stages of physical illness, including shingles because I was ignoring the warning signs that my physical body was sending out that says I needed to deal with many underlying mental and spiritual issues from the past before I could move on. This was a painful lesson to learn physically. Sometimes I feel that this whole process is completely overwhelming and I begin to doubt myself when I have setbacks. I forget that my  mind is in control and that I can change or intend for things to be different. I get overwhelmed, frustrated, lonely, anxious, scared, hurt, and completely stressed before I realize that all I need to do first, is still my mind and enter into a state of conscious peace and begin to let my mind heal my body, spirit, and soul. This is definitely a learning process and I want so much to achieve integral health. But some days I question myself more than others and wonder if others struggle as much as I do to succeed at this whole process.

Kris Sinclair

Creating Wellness: Unit 4 Blog: Part 2: Mental Workout

The concept of a mental workout is every bit as important as physical activity. If we do not continue to work, train, and transform our mind, we will not ultimately reach complete integral health. This can also be termed "contemplative practice" according to our text . This process first adds benefits such as stress reduction and relaxation, but after some time and practice and adherence to the meditation process, we begin to realize that it is so much more. We are gaining the ability to expand our consciousness and reach higher levels of total healing (Dacher, 2006).
Some of the proven benefits of mental workout are: an opening of the mind, gaining knowledge and wisdom, experiencing human flourishing through loving-kindness, and obtaining peace within our subtle minds (Dacher, 2006). 
I can implement mental workouts to foster psychological health by continuing these types of exercise, by going even further with my studying of different levels of meditation such as alpha, gamma, theta waves, and learning more about the aspects of transindental meditation and other areas of mental workouts that I believe will ultimately help lead me to complete and total healing of the mind, body,
and spirit.

References:

Dacher, M. E. (2006). Integral Health: The Path to Human Flourishing. Laguna Beach: Basic Health Publications, Inc.

Creating Wellness: Unit 4 Blog: Part 1: Loving Kindness Visualization

For this week's blog assignment, we were asked to listen to two different exercises and discuss what we thought about them. During the introduction, I felt that Dacher's voice somewhat detracted from the experience. I felt that he spoke in a sort of monotone way and had this been what we were doing our assignment over only, I don't think it would have captured my attention. I then listened to the Mp3 segment entitled "Loving Kindness." Again, I found him somewhat hard to follow as he tended to ramble at the beginning and I did not feel a connection to his voice. I love the book we are reading, but did not like his voice. I was rather pleased when the woman's voice came in and began the actual exercise!

I loved this exercise overall! It was very calming and I felt a sense of peace, as I used my husband as the source of the visualization of someone we deeply love. I also especially liked the water flowing in the background and found it very soothing. Listening to the second portion and focusing on myself was a little more difficult. It is harder for me to "self-focus" sometimes than on someone else. My mind kept wandering to other things, but I was able to quickly re-direct myself back to the guided exercise. My favorite part was letting go and releasing myself to welcoming loving kindness and creating stillness in that moment. My least favorite part was when we had to focus on a loved one who was suffering. Many different people came to mind at once and I had a multidimensional feeling of their suffering. At first it felt overwhelming and I began to cry, but I was able to follow the guided visualization and give back joy through this experience. This was again a very cathartic experience.

Overall, I did find it beneficial and I would also recommend it to others, however, I would also invite them to read passages from our text in conjunction with this exercise or they might miss some important parts and not truly understand the contemplative aspect of living through loving kindness.

Creating Wellness: Unit 3: Crime of the Century Relaxation Exercise

Based on my reflections, and on a scale of 1 to 10 (ten being optimal wellbeing), this is how I would rate my physical, spiritual, and psychological well-being.

A-   Physical Well-being = 4

B-   Spiritual Well-being = 6

C-   Psychological Well-being = 6

I do not feel my physical well-being as at the top of my list of priorities, which it should be. This is the last area of my being that I focus on and truly take care of and these are areas that I need to change. I need to lose weight, reduce my sodium levels, and maintain a healthy exercise regimen which will not only promote weight loss, but will also enable me to become physically healthy and strong as a whole person.



I would say that my spiritual and psychological well-being is what I am focusing most on at this time in my life. My psychological well-being is being test currently because of the loss of job situation with my husband. I (we) must remain positive, encouraging, strong, despite the odds and in the face of whatever comes our way in the next month. We will be tested every day and we know that we can make it through the challenges to come. As far as my spiritual well-being, it is stronger than it has been in quite some time. We have gone through a major transformation within this past year and have shifted from focusing on “religion” to focusing on our re-establishing our belief system on a spiritual plane that is more in tune with the universe, and not just what fits inside of a box drawn up by a church or a theologian.





The goal for my physical health is to begin a path of eating healthy once again, lowering fat and carbohydrates, eliminating pop, reducing sodium, and eating more fruits and vegetables. I need to add on more physical exercise as well to my regimen of becoming healthy. I want to continue to add yoga, etc. to this as well for a more rounded approach at becoming healthy.


The goal for my spiritual health is to continue to study Chakra, Reiki, Ayurveda, and eastern religion practices and find the center of our spiritual world through alternative methods than we have done in the past.



The goal for my psychological health is to also continue to think positively, to set forth positive intentions each day to live out and to continue to learn how to be emotionally intelligent and mature as a whole person, intertwining physical, spiritual, and psychological health.



The exercises that I can establish which will help foster a growth in each of those three areas is: Yoga, Meditation, Chakra, Reiki, positive self-talk, intentions, and I want to delve deeper into newer practices that I am still learning about such as crystal healing, channeling, and developing levels of higher consciousness as a whole.



I LOVED this "rainbow" meditation. This is my favorite type of exercise because they are using Chakra Principles through the color therapy in order to promote relaxation and healing. I am doing this exercise on the heels of a very stressful week, not only at work, but also in my own life. My husband lost his job the beginning part of this week as well, and we have tried our best to be positive. I felt as though I was doing a good job on the outside, but I was definitely holding most of the stress in and I was not allowing myself the ability to truly relax and be where I needed to be in a positive state in my mind. This exercise helped me to bring my focus back to a more positive state, so that I can create the new reality that is before us and we can move forward into this new future that lies ahead of us. This experience was very emotionally cathartic for me.