Loving-Kindness

    
     My experience with the loving-kindness exercise was a good one for the most part. I felt something start to open up inside me that I have built a wall around over the years in order to protect myself from whatever it was I thought I needed protecting from. I feel like I really need to re-connect with the tiny glimpse of a much better me that I saw. I am going to continue this loving-kindness practice in the following weeks. I found the very end, where we are sending out loving-kindness to strangers and taking in their suffering a bit challenging. I hope this will become easier as I learn more about loving-kindness and practice the exercises. I would highly recommend this exercise to others because of my own experience with having a glimpse of how amazing I could feel all the time, instead of just when I am focusing on it. I believe that the more people that learn loving-kindness, the less useless suffering and heartache we will have in the world.

     A mental workout is when we take the focus off of outer things and work on our inner development. Some research has showed that a major benefit from mental workouts are actual physiological and structural changes in the brain to reflect a specific mental state (Dacher, 2006). Something as formless and immaterial as a thought or image can change the physical make-up of our body (Dacher, 2006)  Mental workouts have been proven in certain ways to change our bodies in positive directions. Doing daily mental workouts of some form or another can reduce negative psychological thoughts and emotions that hold us back in our daily lives. For example, I have a plan of setting aside time before and after work for mental workouts so I can feel prepped for the day, and then relaxed afterwards. My job is one of the biggest stressors on my psychological health.