C-ville Magazine, April 27-May 3, 2010
A Healthy Mind, Tips from Susan C. Stone, Ph.D., Co-leader, Insight Meditation Community of Charlottesville
1. Good health means cultivating a healthy mind as well as a healthy body. Your mind and body are connected and both require your kind and thoughtful attention.
2. Wake up and notice when your actions are driven by habitual, unexamined judgments. Become mindful of how judgment creates unnecessary stress and prevents you from experiencing the moment fully.
3. Mindfulness means being present-minded, not absent minded. It means bringing your body and mind together in the same place at the same time rather than allowing your mind to run amok among regrets about the past or worries about the future while you distractedly go through the motions of daily life.
4. Formally practice mindfulness for at least 20 minutes a day, watching your breath closely, experiencing how it changes moment by moment, and gently and repeatedly dropping thoughts when they arise. As a result of regular periods of formal practice, mindfulness will begin to enrich all areas of your life.
5. Listen to your body; it is your teacher. Your mind can concoct all sorts of reasons, many of them contradictory, about why you should or should not take a particular action, but your body, when deeply heard, tells the truth.
6. Live from the inside out. Practice kindness toward yourself first; then it will flow naturally to others. This is commonsense, not selfishness. The habit of belittling and criticizing yourself while trying to love others clogs the gears of love.
7. Forgive yourself; forgive others. Forgiveness doesn’t mean condoning your own or another person’s harmful actions; it means bringing a large-hearted understanding to the being who committed them, recognizing that we all want happiness but sometimes get confused about how to attain it. As long as you carry anger and un-forgiveness in your heart, you cannot be happy and your health will likely suffer.
8. Balance and simplify. Too much of a good thing is not a good thing. Try to bring a wholesome balance to all aspects of your life.
9. Do your best and don’t expect perfection. It’s not in the cards for humans to be perfect. We are precious beings who try hard, fail sometimes, and can learn to hold it all with kindness.
10. Relax, laugh often, and enjoy your life now. Even the most difficult circumstances contain joyful aspects, if only you pay attention.