Unit 8 Blog Post

Review the exercises and practice sessions you have completed in this course. (Loving Kindness, Subtle mind, Visualization, meditation etc.) Choose two practices that you have determined to be most beneficial. How can you implement these practices in your personal life to foster “mental fitness”? Provide specific examples.

The loving-kindness exercise is when you think of a person you love and you let yourself fill up with those feelings of love. Then you send those feeling to that person. Also you think of a person in pain and you breath their pain in for them and then breath it out, eliminating it. The subtle mind exercise is when you look inside your mind to view your own thoughts, feelings, beliefs, and processes. By doing this you can affect the way you think, feel, and make decisions. The visualization exercise is just that visualization, this is great especially before bed, you can visualize what you want, how to get, something or someone that makes you happy; it is very calming. Meditation is a calming, mind-focusing, breathing exercise that can be done anywhere, anytime. It slows your breathing and heart rate and allows the mind to become more alert and attentive.

The two practices that I find most beneficial are the subtle mind and the meditation. I find the subtle mind practice beneficial because I allows me to get to know myself better and to help we look at how I make decisions so that I can affect my mind to make better decisions, consistently. I find meditation beneficial because it allows me time away from the world to focus my mind and to relax my body. I can implement the practice of the subtle mind into my life by setting aside time to explore myself, I find the morning, directly after I wake but before I get up, to be a good time, to do the subtle mind practice. I can implement meditation into my life also be setting aside a time to devote myself to it, I find that directly before bed is a great time because it allows me to relax and let go of some of the stresses of the day. Also when I am stressed during the day I find that just meditating for a few minutes is extremely helpful in coping and managing stress.