Universal Love and Kindness Exercise/ Integral Assessment

 Love and Kindness Exercise
The universal Love and Kindness exercise had us relax and empty our minds and focus on this saying:
May all individuals gain freedom from suffering.
May all individuals find sustained health, happiness, and wholeness.
May I assist all individuals in gaining freedom from suffering.
May I assist all individuals to find sustained health, happiness, and wholeness.
We repeated this saying for 10 minutes. I feel that this made me focus on others and trying to help them and showed me that helping others is important to help myself grow and to help others know that people really do care about them.

Integral Assessment
When doing the Integral Assessment we had to close our eyes and focus on our psychospiritual, biological, interpersonal, or worldly and see what aspects of my life need to be focused on. I choose interpersonal to focus on since I do not have very many close friends because I have a hard time trusting people and often do not find the time to go out and make new friends since I work full time, am a full time student, and I have children. I feel it is important to have friends and people to talk with and rely on and I am going to try to make more time to get out and meet new people.

Mental Fitness Power Point

http://portal.sliderocket.com/BFOMH/Angela-Vanorsdale_Hw420_Unit-5-Project

Mind Exercises

Well compared to last week this exercise was a lot easier. The sound of the waves was very relaxing to me but the sound of the ladies voice was not. I think the most frustrating part of this exercise for me was her voice. Once I got past that and focused on what I was suppose to be doing I found this exercise to be very relaxing. I think the more we focus on negative thoughts the more we worry and wish things would change. If we focus on positive thoughts we are happier and feel more secure in the choices we are making and we don't regret them!

Love and Kindness and Mental Exerices

After doing the Subtle-mind practice and the Loving-Kindness exercises I found that only doing them once helped for the time being, but if I would add these into my daily life that I would feel less stress and become more focused. Both of these practiced focused on deep breathing and rhythmic breathing to help to connect body and mind together. There were some differences between the two exercises such as Loving-Kindness wants you to focus and think about loved ones, people in the world, and oneself, and the Subtle-Mind exercise wants all thoughts that enter the mind to be acknowledged and them forgotten so that one can go back to focusing on breathing. I think that both of these exercises were relaxing and helped me to focus on taking things in small amounts instead of trying to focus on everything at the same time and overwhelming myself.

            The concept of mental workout means to make you mind think quickly and focus on things it is not use t doing. It is important to make our minds work so that they are always learning things and focusing. This will help to improve our everyday lives and hopefully help as we get older to keep our minds in shape and remember things. I think it would be important for clients to do mental workouts and I would encourage them to do them for about 10 minutes every day to help them to improve their minds.

Unit 3

Based on your reflections, and on a scale of 1 to 10 (ten being optimal wellbeing), where do you rate your A-physical wellbeing, B-spiritual well-being, C-psychological well-being? Why?

 I think physically I would rate myself as a 5, I feel that I need to work harder to get into better shape and I need to stay more focused on what I eat. It is important to fuel our bodies and not just eat because we can. Spiritually I would say I am about a 7, I have started to attend church again and I am trying to make it a priority in my life. I have never given up my faith, just got on the wrong path every now and then. I think psychologically I am an 8 I try to stay level headed and strive to become more mentally strong every day.

Develop a goal for yourself in each area (physical, spiritual, psychological).

Physical goal- To start to exercise 4 days a week.

Spiritual goal- Start to get more involved with my church.

Psychological goal- To graduate from college with my degree.

What activities or exercise can you implement in your life to assist in moving toward each goal?

I think taking a walk a few days a week and getting out and playing with my kids more will help me to increase my physical activities. I think just volunteering to help in the church and helping out when needed will help me become more spiritual. I think I will be able to graduate as long as I keep myself motivated and focused.

Complete the relaxation exercise The Crime of the Century. Describe your experience. (Was it beneficial? Frustrating? Etc.)

I think this exercise helped me to relax and focus on setting goals and achieving them. It helped me to see that I am able to push myself and visualize my goals once I achieve them. This helped me to see what my life would be like if I was balanced and that is part of my goal I set.

Journey on Relaxation Exercise

In this exercise we learned to find a comfortable place to sit or lay down and to relax every aspect of our bodies. This included loosening any tight clothing so that we did not feel confined. The exercise then had us take deep breaths and clear our minds. This helped our mind and body become relaxed and we were only focusing on relaxing and nothing else. We concentrated on our blood flow through our bodies so that we could have our mind and body work together and keep focused. I feel that this exercise worked great and did help me relax. It went through step by step and kept us relaxed and focused.

Reflection Statement

I am hoping to help people learn that there are different aspects of healing and that they need to find out which one fits them the best. I think it is very important for people to know that our mind, body, and spirit all control us in one way or another and each one works with the other to keep our bodies balanced.

Welcome

Hello Everyone and Welcome to my page. I am currently taking a class at Kaplan University that requires me to blog about what we are learning each week in class. I think this will be a great way to get people to see what Kaplan has to offer and to see what interesting things we get to learn about. I am very excited to be doing this and I hope that people will learn a few things from me.