daily-health-we-cares

T here’s a part of Navy SEAL training called “drown-proofing” where they bind your hands behind your back, tie your feet together, and dump you into a 9-foot-deep pool. Your job is to survive for five minutes. Like most of SEAL training, the vast majority of cadets who attempt drown-proofing fail. Upon being tossed into the water, many of them panic and scream to be lifted back out. Some struggle until they slip underwater where they proceed to lose consciousness and have to be fished out and resuscitated. Over the years, a number of trainees have even died during the exercise. But some people make it. And they do so because they understand two counterintuitive lessons. The first lesson of drown-proofing is paradoxical: the more you struggle to keep your head above water, the more likely you are to sink. With your arms and legs bound, it’s impossible to maintain yourself at the surface for the full five minutes. Even worse, your limited attempts to keep your body afloat will only cause...

  THE THREE LEVELS OF SELF-AWARENESS Below are three levels of self-awareness along with a caveat. Why three levels? Who the hell knows? Just go with it. LEVEL 1 – WHAT THE HELL ARE YOU DOING? There’s a lot of pain and suckage in life. Over the last 30 days, how many times have you: Struggled with a relationship with someone close to you? Felt lonely, isolated, or unheard? Felt unproductive or lost on what you should do? Been underslept, under-fed, low energy, or unhealthy? Stressed about work or finances? Uncertain about your future? Been physically hurt, ill, or debilitated? Chances are if you add all of those up, you’re going to be pretty close to 30 out of the last 30 days. That’s a lot of suckage! We avoid pain through distraction.  We transport our minds to some other time or place or world where it can be safe and insulated from the pain of day-to-day life. We stare at our phones, we obsess about the past or our potential fut...

When we meditate, we inject far-reaching and long-lasting benefits into our lives: We lower our stress levels, we get to know our pain, we connect better, we improve our focus, and we're kinder to ourselves. Let us walk you through the basics in our new mindful guide on how to meditate. This is a guidebook to the many different styles of meditation, the various benefits of each practice, plus free guided audio practices that help you learn how to meditate. How do you learn to meditate? In mindfulness meditation, we’re learning how to pay attention to the breath as it goes in and out, and notice when the mind wanders from this task. This practice of returning to the breath builds the muscles of attention and mindfulness. When we pay attention to our breath, we are learning how to return to, and remain in, the present moment—to anchor ourselves in the here and now on purpose, without judgement. In mindfulness practice, we are learning how to return to, and remain in, the present mome...

    Meditation and Control Meditation is a very complex business. The word  meditation  implies not only the brain concentrating on a certain subject but also a great deal of attention. But primarily meditation means to measure. The whole question of becoming is involved in it, which is to measure: I am this, I will be that. I am greedy, but I will gradually become non-greedy, which is a form of measurement, which is a form of becoming. Both becoming in the affairs of the world and psychologically becoming. Measurement is comparison, to compare  what is  with  what should be , the fact and the ideal, the fact becoming the ideal. All this is implied in the word. Indian gurus have brought this word into the West and made a lot of money out of it. They are multi-millionaires. I have met some of them; they are appalling beings, all out for money. To inquire into meditation, you have to inquire not only into measurement but also this constant becoming somet...