Exploring Mind - Body - Spirit

Topics Covered

• Gratitude for Our Body
• Paying Attention to What is Helpful
• Can't vs Won't, Need vs Want, and Responsibility
• Why meditate?

Gratitude for Our Body

We often take our body for granted, until a part of the body starts causing trouble. Then we feel upset or disappointed. However, how often do we thank our body for feeling good?
One type of meditation is to experience a part of the body and simply cultivate a feeling of gratitude or appreciation for that part, thanking it for working as well as it does.
A variation of this meditation is to bring awareness to various processes in the body, appreciating what that process does for us. This is more abstract than appreciating specific parts of the body, so we may not get concrete visual images.
Some processes to appreciate are:

• Respiration
• Digestion
• Purification
• Perception
• Regulation
• Expression

A complete description of this technique can be found in "Real Meditation in Minutes a Day", Wisdom Publications, 2008, p131-141.

Paying Attention to What is Helpful

Our mind seems to be conditioned to pay attention to what is not working or what is "wrong" instead of paying attention to what is working. If we do a task or someone does a task for us, it seems that we find it more natural to critique ourselves or the other person than to complement them.
This is curious since it takes just as much physical energy to point out what was done adequately or well as it does to point out the defects.
Some people feel that unless they draw attention to the defects in themselves or others, the person will not improve. This has actually been disproved in several areas; negative reinforcement does not work as well as positive reinforcement.
Some people will counter that with the observation that when they give themselves or other negative reinforcement, the person improves. And if they give positive reinforcement, the person does not improve, or does worse. They attribute the change in performance to the feedback the person received.
Actually this observation is simply evidence that people, ourselves included, tend to perform tasks within a range. If we have a performance that is unusually poor, then that was an accident, and the next one is likely to be better, closer to the average. And if we have a performance that was unusally good, the next one is likely to be poorer, again closer to the average.
So the reinforcement has nothing to do with the short term changes in performance. However over the long term consistent attention to what is done well tends to inprove performance, and consistent attention to what is not done well tends to degrade performance.
We need to apply that to ourselves and to others, remembering that it takes just as much energy to give positive or negative reinforcement. We therefore want to spend our energy in a way that will yield improvement.

Can't vs Won't, Want vs. Need, and Responsibility

We want to watch how the words we use to oursevles and others can influence us.
When we think to ourselves or state, "I can't do ...", then it means we are not capable of doing the action. When we say "I won't do ...", then it means we are making a choice and taking responsibility for that choice. Saying "I can't" is often used socially to be nice, however it is usually not true. While we may chose to use "I can't" to be socially appropriate it is probably better to at least be honest with ourselves and say "I won't".
Similarly we often say "I need ..." when the truth is "I want ..." Using "I need" has social uses, however if we confuse our needs and our wants we can put more energy into obtaining something than it is worth. Advertising is essentially the art of causing someone to confuse a want with a need. When we become more honest with ourselves we are less open to such manipulation.

Why meditate?

The question was raised about we can be pusing ourselves in meditation to constantly "do better". Most spiritual traditions are quite clear that we cannot rate the quality of our meditation by the experiences we have while meditating. We can tell that our meditation is working because of the experiences we have while not meditating. That is, we are more compassionate, more patient, more wise, in our interactions with the world.
While meditation can certainly be used to have peaceful, or relaxing experiences during meditation, its spiritual purpose is to train our mind to relate in a loving way with Spirit, a presence that has no essential form. So we meditate to train our minds to be loving without having a form to love.
As we practice this, our mind naturally learns to love and express love without needing to be in "meditation". It is like a skier who practices balance exercises. Their body learns to balance better on the slopes, not just while doing the exercises.
Sometimes the meditation practice time can be quite boring, or uncomfortable. If it is having positive results in our daily lives, then we can trust that it is doing some good. If we are not sure, or if the meditation experience is becoming too uncomfortable, then we should consult with someone and see if a different technique or practice style would be helpful. But we don't do that just to have more pleasureable experiences in meditation. The marker is always how we are relating to others.