Day 12:
Meditation isn’t about going somewhere else or having an out of body experience. It’s not about transporting yourself to another dimension or concentrating on elevating your body above the ground. Meditation requires you to stay in the moment; to be aware of your surroundings and stay conscious in the living world around you. It’s imperative to stay in the moment; there is no past or future. When meditating, watch your thoughts pass through your mind. Don’t ignore your thoughts or push them away; which is what I usually do. Instead, just become the observer of your thoughts, don’t give them any extra energy and then watch them float away. Observe your actions and thoughts in your mind in order to see life through your own eyes and not through the ones you have been programmed to see through cultural conditioning. You can either sit and observe then dismiss all thoughts or you can reflect on one issue in your life that is troubling or significant. When concentrating on this thought, bring the issue into your hand (mentally) to make it smaller than you think it is and take responsibility for the issue. The effects of meditation can create a calmer, clearer mind, more compassion for other people’s actions, and a decreased sense of self-absorption. In meditation, the ego is quieted because of the act of observation; increasing one’s ability to separate the self from the body and gain a recognition of other people’s lives will continue without you.
OKAY,
LETS
TALK
ABOUT
STRESS....
ah jeez.. i’m already getting stressed out...
In modern day society, specifically in developed countries, people can’t seem to find an off-switch for their stress responses; it goes NON-STOP! Some stress can be healthy; a moderate amount of stress that is temporary helps keep the body’s ‘fight or flight’ reaction sharpened. However, when there is too much stress in someone’s life, the body begins shutting down the immune system (one of the many), making you more prone to diseases. It can affect your digestive systems, causing constipation or your endocrine system, causing an irregular release of hormones. Too much stress can also affect your sex life and your sexual drive. It can also give you a pounding heart, an irregular beat, and high blood pressure. If you are in a lower social rank than you are also more prone to higher stress levels and disease. A study done revealed that stressed rats’ brain cells were extremely smaller than the normal rats. The stress shrunk the memory part of the brain, indicating that stress can cause difficulty in remembering the simplest things. Did you ever stay up really late to study for an exam the next day? Remember feeling stressed because it was one of the only times you’ve studied for this hard exam? The next day, you go to write the exam, then all of a sudden you draw a blank. You studied for 8 hours last night! How could you not remember? It’s because you were so stressed out that the cells in your brain shrunk causing you to lose your capacity to remember those facts.
For people in a lower social ranking, the brain doesn’t receive as much dopamine (the pleasure-giving hormone) that people do in middle or upper class. This could be the case in the ghetto, where things are often half-heartedly done, because the doers don’t receive as much satisfaction in cleaning up their yards. It doesn’t matter to them because they have other stressors that cause them to overlook the simpler things. In contrast, the richer neighbourhoods are often dotted with nicer, clean yards because people gain pleasure from them. Weight gain is also related with stress and people’s status in rank. A person in a lower rank is more apt to gain weight distributed around their middle due to stressors and lifestyles. This is also due to the fact that people in a lower class find more pleasure in eating lots of food than in their everyday lives. Eating is then the most satisfying activity that they could do and so they get fat!
Scientifically speaking, long-term stress can shorten your telomeres, the caps on the end of your DNA strands. This can cause serious aging even when you are young.
An absence of long-term or elevated stress levels is so beneficial to your everyday lifestyle. A low amount of stress helps lower blood pressure, help weight loss, encourage career and social growth, strengthen family relationships, as well as creating a harmonious environment where your body’s systems (immune, reproductive, digestive, endocrine) can function without being inhibited by stressors.
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