Unit 8 Assignment

The two practices that I found most beneficial in this class were the Loving Kindness and Subtle Mind.  The Loving Kindness exercise helps me with people in my life whose actions annoy me.  It is hard to stay annoyed when you are sending out loving kindness to the person.  It makes me think about the fact that they have reasons or issues that lead them to act the way they do and that my being annoyed only damages myself.    It also helps me to be led less by my ego in my life.
The Subtle Mind exercise has helped me be less reactive when it comes to my children.  I used to yell at them when they would argue with each other.  Not just a normal yell but a high pitched freak out yell.  I let them drive me to madness.  I now am able to calmly get them to stop without having to freak out on them which is so much better for my metal health.  I do not have the guilt of having yelled at them and also do not have my blood pressure and cortisol levels raise from the episode.  I also have a ton of mental chatter going on all the time.  This exercise has allowed me to reduce the chatter.  I am far from a subtle mind but I am at least working on a witnessing mind at this time.  Wish me luck!

UNIT 7 Meeting Aesclepius

Well, the meditation started off on the right track.  I chose my Nana (maternal grandmother) as the loving and wise person to focus on for the meditation.  I spent the summers with her in San Diego and always had a wonderful time.  I was devastated by her death.  She is the only close person to me that has passed away so I could not think of anyone else.  Later I listened again to the meditation and realized you could use a person that was still living as well.  Anyways, like I said the meditation started off well but then I started to think about the fact that she had been an alcoholic and not a very good mother to my mom.  This got me totally off focus.  I guess I should have not picked such a controversial person but I really loved her.  Once I came to terms with the fact that she was human and made some mistakes but for as far as I was concerned made up for it by being a great grandmother I started to focus again.  That was when the dog started to scratch at the door.  He was very persistent but I got through the meditation.  Next time I think I will use Mother Teresa as my person to focus on and put the dog outside!  This meditation did not do much for me since I was not able to properly focus but meditating in general has seemed to really slow down my over reacting at my children which I used to do in the past. 
The statement "one cannot lead another where one has not gone himself" means to me that you need to lead by example.  How can you help your clients experience human flourishing when you have not experienced it yourself?  Like with most things you kind of need to be able to know how to do something to be able to teach someone else.  Plus to be the best health care professional possible you need to be at a level of optimal health.

Unit 6 Loving Kindness and Integral Assessment

It was really difficult for me to concentrate on the Loving Kindness meditation since I needed to keep my eyes open to read the phrases.  I much prefer closing my eyes and listening to someone narrate the meditation.  The Integral Assessment showed me that I am really well developed in the biological area.  I am fairly strong in the interpersonal and worldly but I have a lot of work to do on the psychospiritual realm.  I am far from arriving at the understanding of the ultimate reality of self and world (Dacher, 2006).  I really need to work on being less reactive. I also rely too  heavily on logic.  I am a Capricorn and have a tendency to need to see things to believe them.  I like facts.  There is so much in this world that can not be explained.  I need to open my being to the essential truths.
I can improve my psychospiritual self by participating in contemplative practices such as meditation and prayer.  I have downloaded the Loving Kindness exercise and the Subtle Mind exercise onto my Ipod and have been listening to those on occasion.  I also downloaded several more meditations and plan to try and meditate daily.

Reference:

Dacher, Elliot. (2006). Integral health: The path to human flourishing. Laguna Beach, CA: Basic Health.