Health

All aspects of health, including Mental, Physical, Emotional, Social and Environmental.

Anger Management

Published on by Jim
Punished BY Anger
You will not be punished because of your anger, you will be punished BY your anger. Buddha

In my early 30s, I was an anger addict or a rageaholic.  The pain of this anger and rage is what drove me to seek a way out; it drove me to what some call “spiritual seeking”.  Eventually I found relief from the anger and rage and not just relief but I came to be able to see the whole world at perfect just the way it is.  However, before I could see the truth that set me free to fully enjoy and love all that life had to offering I had to calm myself down and let go of the anger and rage.  I also had to recognize that I was the problem not the world, not the people I interacted with, not the government, not the economic system, not religions, not the authorities, not my family or friends: me, myself, I.  That is where I had to start look, at myself and my ways of thinking.

So managing my anger was became managing myself and how I looked at the world, my beliefs, my attitudes and my ways of thinking.

Oh, and myself importantly, managing my anger because a quest to learning how to relax and be healthy, of body and mind.

It was a process.  For thirty years I had been developing my ‘ability’ to be angry and now it was time to develop my ability to be calm, peaceful, joyous and loving.  I still have the ability to be passionate, one of the skills of anger, but now I am free of the fear, which is an aspect of anger that I no longer feel any need for.

I have learned a lot about relaxing and health since then and I try to share that people wherever I can.  Most often I find that people are just not open to learning yet, so I look for ways to crack into their hard exteriors and share with them a way out of that hardness.

Currently I am developing an Anger Management Workshop here in Berkeley California that I want to conduct in a public park so that anyone can attend.  I do not plan to charge for this workshop so that even the homeless will feel that can come.  It is my experience that many if not all the homeless people have some sort of problem with their anger or other emotional issues.  Maybe, through this workshop, I can inspire them to work their way out of their suffering.  Maybe…

How to Realize Benefits of Meditation in the Real World?

Published on by Jim

How to Realize Benefits of Meditation in the Real World? Part 2, Posted on: July 4th, 2012 by Rakesh Sethi

This is the second article by Rakesh on this topic.  Here are my comments I posted about it:

As I said in my comment on the first article, one benefit I have found from meditation is clarity of mind, which enables me to see the truth that sets me free to enjoy and love what life is offering. Part of that truth is watching how the human instrument, the mind/body instrument, works. For instance, I can watch as life produces stimuli to the body which in turn creates thoughts in the brain, which in turn creates reactions in the body, some of which we call emotions. I have also noticed that we can re-train or re-program the mind/body to react to stimuli and thoughts differently if we want a different experience. This is what I do mostly now in my meditations, I re-train the body/mind instrument to react to whatever stimuli life is offering with positive (healthy) emotions. The are lots of healthy side benefits of the practice that I could talk about another time.

I will add here that there are many health benefits to practicing positive emotions.  These include both mental and physical benefits.  I find that the more I practice positive emotions the more peaceful, relaxed, content and positive I feel and experience life as.  I can see why almost all spiritual traditions encourage people to practice positive emotions.

What is the True Purpose of Meditation?

Published on by Jim

What is the True Purpose of Meditation?. Posted on: November 13th, 2010 by Rakesh Sethi

This is a decent article about meditation, but I do not think the author has gone far enough, so I added my comments:

I have found that meditation calms the mind, brings inner peace, stillness and CLARITY.  It is with this clarity that I have been able to see the truth that sets me free to perfectly enjoy and love ALL that life has to offer.  For instance, I can see that virtually all the stress I experience is a product of MY REACTIONS to what life is offering: my thoughts and then my habitual emotional reaction to those thoughts.  A thought is really nothing more than an electro-chemical impulse traveling along the neurons of the brain and it cannot hurt me, it is only my reaction to the thought that can cause me stress or pain.

So I have changed my practice to include practicing positive emotional reactions to ALL thoughts.  So most of my “meditations” now focus in on practicing happiness, joy, love, peace and feeling freedom.  All of these are inner experiences and ENTIRELY a function of habit, which can be changed.

 

NHL blogger and Aurora victim, first escaped Toronto shooting (via intuition)

Published on by Jim

NHL blogger and Aurora victim, first escaped Toronto shooting.

This blogger wrote, “I can’t get this odd feeling out of my chest. This empty, almost sickening feeling won’t go away. I noticed this feeling when I was in the Eaton Center in Toronto just seconds before someone opened fire in the food court. An odd feeling which led me to go outside and unknowingly out of harm’s way. It’s hard for me to wrap my mind around how a weird feeling saved me from being in the middle of a deadly shooting.”

This is something I have always wondered about, if people have some premonition that there was going to be some dangerous situation just before it happened.  There is scientific evidence that people around the world were aware of 9/11 minutes before the first planes hit the World Trade Center.  It is like the Cosmic Consciousness know everything before it happens.

Now the challenge is to become sensitive enough to be aware of this when it is happening and both able and willing to act on that sensitivity.  I suspect that there will be a lot of false starts before one gets it down.

Trusting intuition is a hard thing to do at first, but with practice we can improve the quality of our perceptions and this can greatly enhance both our safety or health and the quality of our life experience.  It is my experience that meditation is the practice of listening to our subtle intuitions, so meditation enhances our ability to be aware of subtle indicates that danger is upon us.

I feel sad for the skeptics out there that are closed to all the benefits that intuition has to offer us.  I am not saying that all skeptics are closed to these ideas, only that there are some that refuse to even consider that we can know about events like this shooting before they actually happen.

Demonstrating Love

Published on by Jim

Lately, I have been focused on not just talking or writing about what I have to offer, but DEMONSTRATING it. Books and blogs and Facebook do not really allow one to fully demonstrating the courage, which is the manifestation of love, that I feel I have come to share. I am feeling more attracted to public speaking, in public places like town squares, malls or colleges and making videos of that to publish on my blog. The world has change radically in the last 30 years with the advent of the internet and digital communications. Books and the written word are old school, old and outdated ways of communicating. A picture tells a thousand words and a video tells a million.

Demonstrating how to love one’s self FIRST takes being in situations that for most people would be very uncomfortable in and making oneself comfortable. It is skill that comes with practice.

For now, I have my platform, it is called Earth, and I am called to travel around it speaking wherever I can find people gathered.

Dealing with Rejection

Published on by Jim

Most people experience reject all the time in their lives.  The more we stick our neck out and reach out to others the more rejection we will experience.

People reject me all the time, and as always, it hurts, for I can feel the fear that motivates any rejection.  We only reject others because we are afraid of OURSELVES and how we might react around those others.

It is not as if I go around punching people in the nose or anything that would cause people to run and hide when I come around.  No, at best I only speak to them and they react to that in a way that causes them some discomfort, injury or harm, which they then blame on me.  Lots of people have problems with me, but today I recognize that THEY the one with the problem, not me.

I no longer blame myself for people who are hurting and blaming me for that hurt.  When someone rejects me in any way I recognize they are doing that because they are hurting and have been taught to lie to themselves about that hurt, which traps them in that hurt.  I also recognize that they are not mature enough yet to be a close friend of mine.

I still hurt for them, and that hurt motivates me all the more to work against the sickness that teaches them to hurt themselves and to lie to themselves about that cause of that hurt.

I find that compassion for those who are hurting (the one doing the rejecting in this case) relieves the pain of the rejection.  We are taught to take responsibility for other people’s behaviors or choices, like when they reject us.  Therefore, when we take that responsibility we think to ourselves that there must be something wrong with me if this person is rejecting me.

This, of course, is not true; it is just what we have been taught.

Practicing compassion for those who are hurting relieves our hurt.  It takes the attention off us and puts it where it really should be, on the one who has the problem. When I feel the pain that rejection causes and comes from I am reminded that I do not want to create that pain for others or myself so I do not reject anyone.

This does not mean that I accept every invitation or friendship; it just means that I do not find fault in the other that makes me not want to be around them.

Open to the Truth

Published on by Jim

How does one know if they are open to the truth, if they have ‘eyes to see’ and ‘ears to hear’?  Does one have to ‘apply’ some truth or what others believe is the truth, or what is true for others, in order for us to be ‘open’ to that truth?

I am sure there are many people who would say that I am not open to the truth. Yet, I feel I am open to the truth, and I have gone to great effort to make myself open to that truth or anyone’s version of truth.  I have not gone to as much effort to change myself in accordance to what other’s believed is the truth.  This is why I think that people would say I am not open to the truth; because I am not willing to live up to their standards or expectation.

When I say that I see myself as open to the truth, I am referring to my ability to listen to others express themselves fully without needed to control that expression or without having and emotional response that would blind me to what they are attempting to express.

In the language of Jesus, I choose blessedness and do not take offense at anyone for anything they say.

Because I encourage people to be honest with me and I make a practice at relaxing and not reacting to what they say, I would say that I am open to the truth.

What is Love?

Published on by Jim

“Love stretches your heart and makes you big inside.” – Margaret Walker

My take on love comes from watching what is actually happening inside the body when we are experiencing the sensation known as love.  This is something that anyone can observe or directly experience if they just take the time to watch.  I come at this topic first from a detached, precise perspective, and second from an attached perspective as a human who wants to expand love.  To embrace the whole reality of love one embraces both the detached and attached perspective, giving both their due.

Love is a feeling we have inside of our body and is a reaction to thoughts.

Generally, we learn how to love from our parents or whoever nurtures or takes care of us when we are infants.  As this person comforts us, say by feeding us relieving our discomfort of hunger, we learn to associate the image or thought of this person with that comforting, and we develop a habit of relaxing around the thoughts of this person.  Relaxing is not just a physical thing, or just something we do with the muscles of the body, it is also something that we do with the nerves.

Therefore, love is a two-part process; the first is the thoughts and the second is the reaction of relaxing the nerves and the muscles around that thought.

In the beginning, our thoughts are associated with some material things like the person who nurtures or takes care of us, as we mature, our thoughts can be associated with anything, even a concept. As children our experience of love comes from thoughts of people or things that produce the good feelings

This practice or habit of relaxing is healthy in that it removes the ‘dis-ease’ we may be experiencing when we hold onto some thought or habitual tension in our body.  This is why spiritual teachings encourage us to love this or that so that we can develop a habit or skill of relaxing around our thoughts of various things that traditionally would have produces tension or ‘dis-ease’ within us.

We call these traditions ‘spiritual’ because they address what we are inspired or motivated to do; the word ‘spirit’ has the same root as the word ‘inspire’.  We are naturally motivated to seek the release of tension the same way that water is naturally motivated to flow downhill.

Therefore, when any tradition encourages us to practice love or any positive emotion, they are encouraging us to practice relaxing around our thoughts.

Some thoughts we have we have developed a habit of contracting around, and we call this fear.  A spiritual tradition might say that “love drives out fear,” for if we practice love (relaxing/expanding) around a fear producing thought we will eventually re-train ourselves to react by relaxing to that thought and thus relieve the tension, dis-ease or negativity we had experienced.

Learning to love is like learning to control our bowels and bladder; it takes practice at first but later becomes natural.

As I said above, the first part of learning to love is the thought, which is why there is no much emphasis on thinking about this process.  This can come in the form of a spiritual or religious tradition, which tries to get us to think in ways that allow us to relax around thoughts that traditionally produce contraction or fear.  Such a way of thinking might be to “love your enemies” since the idea of an enemy is of one who seeks to do us harm, we would naturally develop a habit of contraction or fear associated with ‘enemy.’  Since mostly the reality is we are just thinking about our enemies and not actually being injured by them, then we are being taught to love the thought of our enemies or to relax around the thought of those who have or might hurt us.

Once we get that love is healthy and what we want to experience it more, then we recognize that ANY thought we have we want to develop a habit of relaxing around.  We then will no longer need to discern between this or that type of thought, we just relax around all thoughts.  Hence, we will no longer need the philosophies or theologies and we can go back to being innocent “like the children to enter the kingdom of heaven.”  This enables what we call “unconditional love”, for we choose to love without conditions or criteria since we recognize that love is what we want to experience.

This is the objected behind the teachings to “love God,” where God is a concept that implies the creator of all that is.  We are practicing to love ALL that is, since it was created by this creator.  At an even higher level, we are encouraged to love the process of love, where “God is love” and we are taught to love God/love.  This moves us away from any mental activity that may be a limitation to our practice of relaxing and we practice loving the process itself.

Much of the ‘how to love’ teachings are about the science AND art of love.  The science deals with the understanding of how the human instrument works; how to relax both the nerves and muscles of the body.  The art deals with developing the sensitivity and the skill or habit of actually operating the human instrument.

I am currently writing a book that will detail my observation on both the science and the art of loving, particularly loving ourselves.  To keep informed on this book please subscribe to this blog.

 

Understanding

Published on by Jim

I have had a long-standing interest in understanding how this human instrument works.  This interest is not limited to the physical or medical functions but also the neurological, psychological, mental and emotional aspects of the human instrument.  My interest leads me to watch my body, my mind, my emotions, and myself as I go through life.  I particularly watch when I practice various spiritual disciplines or think various ways, to see the effect on the quality of life that these disciplines and ways of thinking have and WHY they produce those effects.

In my practice of watching myself and of watching others I have seen some very interesting aspects of human consciousness that when I try to share that with others I usually only get resistance.  Of course, this in itself interested me, for I wanted to know why there would be resistance to understanding ourselves.

I have seen that this resistance comes from the ego, a mechanism within the human instrument dedicated to survival of the human instrument.  It is imagined that if we understand ourselves then we will no longer treasure the human instrument as mysteriousness or ‘special’.  However, this is not true, for understanding only enhances the appreciation.  It is superstition that creates the fear of understanding.