5 Mindful Musings: Oct. 16, 2023
Here is your weekly dose of "5 Mindful Musings", a brief list of what's helping me live a more mindful life.
What I'm Reading
The Mindful Body: Thinking Our Way to Chronic Health. "Learn how adjusting your thoughts can change your health — from the "mother of mindfulness" and first female tenured professor of psychology at Harvard.
When it comes to our health, we tend to live our lives as though our ailments — our stiff knees or frayed nerves or diminished eyesight — can change only in one direction: for the worse.
Award-winning social psychologist Ellen J. Langer’s life’s work proves the fault in this negative outlook as well as the healing power of its alternative: mindfulness —? the process of active noticing where we are not bound by past experience or conventional wisdom.
In The Mindful Body, Dr. Langer unpacks her assumption-busting findings and outlines her bold new theory of mind-body unity, along the way clearly demonstrating how our thoughts and perspectives have the potential to profoundly shape our well-being.
Whether it is hotel chambermaids who lost weight when they simply came to see that their work constituted exercise, or patients whose wounds healed faster in rooms with accelerated clocks, she shows how influential our thoughts are to the state of our bodies.
Her work has likewise proven that discouraging health news can have negative effects. Learning you are prediabetic, for example — even if your blood sugar reading is only a fraction away from "normal" — may actually play a part in the development of the disease.
A paradigm-shifting book by one of the great psychologists of the twenty-first century, The Mindful Body returns the control over our bodies back to us and reveals that a true understanding of health begins with our minds."
What We Recently Shared
Equanimity: A Guided Meditation, by Joseph Goldstein. Equanimity is that quality of mind of caring perspective. Joseph Goldstein leads this guided meditation to help you cultivate this mental calmness and composure. Also, here are a few phrases for you to consider repeating:
- You are the owner of your actions (karma). Your happiness or unhappiness depends on your actions, not upon my wishes for you.
- All beings have their own journey. This is your journey.
- No matter how much I may wish for things to be otherwise, things are as they are.
- May I accept things as they are.
- May I be balanced and at peace.
- May my heart be big enough to hold the joys and sorrows without being overwhelmed.
- May I be open to the way things are.
- May I be undisturbed by the coming and going of events.
- Things are as they are.
- This is how things are right now.
- Whether I understand it or not, things are unfolding according to a natural law.
- May I open to the conditions of my life with equanimity.
- May I open to the conditions of my body and mind with grace.
- Pleasure and pain arise and pass away.
- This is the nature of life.
- For someone particular that you need more equanimity with:
- With great care, I accept how things are for you.
- I will care for you but I cannot keep you from suffering.
- I wish you happiness but cannot make your choices for you.
What I'm Re-Listening To
Sharon Salzberg: Healing Ourselves & the World. We’re living in difficult and uncertain times. Meditation can help us cope with the enormity of the world’s grief, but is it ultimately self-serving, or can it influence real change? In this podcast episode, I interview meditation expert and New York Times best-selling author Sharon Salzberg to tackle this question and more. Topics include:
- using mindfulness to harness the powerful energy of anger,
- what compassion really means,
- how equanimity can help us sustain hope, and
- why it’s acceptable to rest, even while the world is suffering and every issue seems urgent and overwhelming.
Sharon Salzberg also guides us through some of the most pertinent aspects of her book, Real Change: Mindfulness to Heal Ourselves and the World.
A Quote I Love
"To learn to be always in a state of meditation means never to let your vital energy wane.
You would never allow it to do so if it were certain that you were to die tomorrow.
It wanes because you forget about death.
Grit your teeth, fix your gaze, and observe death at this moment.
领英推荐
You have to feel it so strongly that it seems as if it’s attacking you.
Fearless energy comes from this.
At this moment, death is right before your eyes.
It’s not something you can afford to neglect."
— Suzuki Shōsan
Wishing you care and ease,
Sean Fargo , Founder, Mindfulness Exercises
Join our online community for guided meditations, group discussions, free downloads and live workshops here: Connect Mindfulness Community
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