Meditation and yoga are the perfect additions to our fast-paced modern lives. These ancient practices come with huge rewards for the mind, body and spirit. Incorporating meditation into your daily life has profound benefits including reducing stress, improving concentration, boosting the immune system, increasing happiness, and slowing the aging process. In addition to calming and anxiety-reducing benefits, when you practice yoga, you build muscle strength, improve your posture, prevent cartilage and joint breakdown, improve bone health, prevent digestive problems, and set yourself up for a better night’s sleep. Nourish your entire being, balance your soul, and enhance your life when you practice yoga and meditation.
Circumstances often dictate our character, not our character is defaulted or flawed. Our character may be hindered by such conditions that we act in ways outside of our nature. This excerpt from Mirror of Intimacy: Daily Reflections on Emotional and Erotic Intelligence by Alex Katehakis and Tom Bliss reflects on circumstance from a compassionate viewpoint. It is a daily meditation to bring our awareness to and intent for more compassion for ourselves and to others. No one knows the exact circumstances anyone is under.
At the conclusion is a set of questions to journal about your personal circumstances and how they affect your life at this moment.
CIRCUMSTANCE
“I am tired of people saying that poor character is the only reason people do wrong things. Actually, circumstances cause people to act a certain way. It’s from those circumstances that a person’s attitude is affected followed by weakening of character. Not the reverse.”
~ Shannon L. Adler
The conditions we’re living in at any given moment color our perceptions of our own and others’ lives. We’re all born into unique circumstances, and cannot ever completely understand another’s situation, no matter the depth of love and intimacy shared. Details of our life partners and even our children conditions are not all known because every individual’s circumstance combines so many levels of life: material, emotional, mental, and spiritual. It always sounds a bit funny to hear people gossip about the personal lives of celebrities, as we seldom know the real-life situations of our friends and family, much less of people we’ve never met. In fact, we rarely know our own lives half the time. We’re continually faced with confounding circumstances that try our patience, perhaps giving us unending opportunities for spiritual refinement.
When it comes to the elements that set the stage for our lives at birth, we may wonder whether caregivers create or react to, a child’s personality. The dispute between nature versus nurture is longstanding but in recent years we’ve come to believe that a child is shaped by both. Perhaps all potential influences on us co-exist in a symbiotic state–a house of mirrors from personal to interpersonal to planetary. Ultimately one of the only knowable truths is your on circumstance, which includes your actions, as well as your perceptions. Perceiving that others suffer more or less than we suffer can be as much a part of our circumstance as the home we live in, the work we do, or the relationships we’ve built. May we hold a place of compassion for the circumstances of others, as we know from experience the over-riding importance of our own.
DAILY HEALTHY SEX ACTS
What are your current circumstances? List the first five that come to mind on a blank piece of paper. Now draw a circle, and create a pie chart to show the amount of “pie” each circumstance eats up in your life.
Did you list only material circumstances or did you include emotional or mental circumstances, too? How much do love, anger, grief, and other feelings emerge on any given day? Do you have dominant thoughts? How does your mindset inform your circumstance?
Reflect on the outer circumstances that indirectly affect your life–the perceivable circumstances of your lover, family, friends, community, and world. Do you recognize their circumstances as yours by association?
“Life Isn’t a Matter of Milestones but Moments” ~ Rose Kennedy
I began running when I was fourteen after meeting Persian woman who’s son I babysat. We instantly became friends. She and I would have long, intimate conversations. Our nightly runs and strolls through the hilly neighborhood streets gave us the opportunity to become quite close. Her husband and my mother were often away for work. Endorphins and close communications soothed our sorrows as did our friendship.
Even after I moved, I continued to jog through other neighborhoods. Running became my sanctuary. I explored new territory and escaped the pain living at home. I didn’t realize it until many years later that my regime of running was a form of meditation. It was my solace. It was the one place where I had control. I could be with my thoughts and feelings without anyone else telling me I was wrong or stupid. I gave myself the respect to listen while others were too busy to pay attention.
I reaped many health and psychological benefits from running. Running increased my lung capacity, my muscle strength, muscle tone, and my endurance.
For some regular running increases metabolism for weight reduction, promotes good mental health, and overall mind/body/spiritual health. Jogging releases endorphins a natural painkiller and mood enhancer. It increases the capacity to focus, practice perseverance, and dedication. It’s no wonder runner enthusiasts exist everywhere.
Meditation
Meditation offers many of the same advantages as running. Meditation is deliberately paying attention moment by moment. It is being acutely aware of what is happening inside and outside of our body and mind. Meditation is listening to our minds chatter, sensations in our body, and the connections to our surroundings.
Meditation and Running
Although most people run while being plugged-in, stopping to check and respond to our mobile mail, or listening to our iPod, taking a brief break from our digital worlds has tremendous benefits.
Mindful running is unplugging, paying attention, and making the choice to focus internally and externally. It entails suspending any agendas, goals, deadlines for the moment and enjoy the full experience of running free. Running while meditating gives the opportunity to sort through problems, find solutions, and let go of any frustrations of the day.
Mindful running is a practice. It is not a performance, a comparison, nor a pre-determined result. Mindful running is directing our attention. Soak in wisps of the wind as it softly tickles the hair on your skin. Take in the sweet smells of fresh blossoms in the air. Taste the saltiness of the ocean air if you are so fortunate or the sweat that bubbles above your lip. Bask in the warmth of the sun and delightful sights as your body swiftly sweeps through the streets. Each stride is an opportunity to notice all that we see, feel, hear, taste, smell and think without criticism, judgment, or evaluation. The regime for mindful running calls for soothing kindness and curiosity.
Personal Time
There is so much to learn from our thoughts and feelings. Running provides self-reflective time for greater awareness. By paying attention, creative solutions can be discovered. And curiosity while roaming in nature and natural surroundings can create a spiritual connection. The next time you run leave your ear plugs, your mobile, or any other digital device at home. There is a whole world to discover and experience not only outside but in your mind.
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