Unit 4 Blog

The love and kindness exercise was interesting for me.  I enjoyed the sound of the ocean in the background and found that very relaxing.  This exercise was a little different for me because when I meditate, I only focus on internalizing positive energy and thoughts, whereas this exercise asked that you take in negative thoughts and dissolve them in your heart.  I found that a tad bit difficult for me, especially when it was asked that we focus on taking in the suffering of people that we did not know.  I consider myself to be quite the humanitarian, meaning that I care about all that may be suffering, whether I know them or not, but because I did not have a specific person or group of people to focus on, it was kind of challenging.  I liked the exercise but found it not as appealing to me as the others before it.  I plan to try it again and see if I get different results by having a different mindset.  I would recommend this exercise to someone else to try at the very least.  We will only know what works for us if we try new things.

The mental workout is a concept that basically identifies the fact that just as we would have to have a commitment to anything else in life to make it flourish, we must have the same commitment to our minds.  Practicing loving-kindness and having a subtle mind or wisdom are two important steps.  This process also takes practice.  Research shows that these things drive human flourishing.  I can implement mental workouts to foster my psychological health by locating and completing exercises geared toward mental workouts, such as the exercise for this week.  I also plan to learn more about other ways that are deemed to be mental workouts that lend themselves to the same type or similar results in comparison to the audio mental workouts.