Crises

The best way to avoid constant crises in life is to avoid constant crises in life. By increasing your awareness and general state of mindfulness, many of life's so-called crises can be avoided entirely by proper planning and responsible action.

Yes, shit happens. To a certain degree, accidents are unavoidable. However, many accidents are the results of lack of care and attention in potentially dangerous situations. Improper home or car maintenance are common precursors to accidents, for example. There is no need to invite shit to happen.

It is important to know yourself and to take full, proactive responsibility for yourself and your personal environment, which includes all spaces you occupy in life. Practice, as I use the word frequently in my writing, includes vigilant and persistent maintenance of body and environment. The practice of meditation assists the brain in taking a relaxed and clear view of your life and your environment. Exercise, proper nutrition and adequate sleep maintain the brain and body in a state of efficiency and adequacy to the task of averting or dealing with disaster.

Multiple personal crises are symptomatic of disease and/or personal dysfunction in your environment. Where there is constant and dedicated practice, crises are minimal, because practice places you in a functional and efficient state wherever you find yourself in life. Instead of being a barreling, reactive train, headed for a wreck, the person with a well established practice of health and mindfulness is like a gyroscope, always maintaining balance and simply bouncing away when it hits obstacles.

Inertia

The human brain has its own form of inertia. This inertia seems to increase with material comfort and affluence. It leads to conservatism in most who follow that path.

Hunger combats human inertia. The hunger for knowledge, the hunger for food, the hunger for human affection. These are motivators for human change, human progress. Intentional use of hunger is a powerful tool, used for centuries by those who have sought enlightenment and freedom from desire. Hermits isolated themselves from human companionship to produce a hunger for human interaction. The silence of cloisters produced a hunger for human speech and conversation. Yogis fast to liberate themselves from the distractions of metabolism.

How do you overcome your inertia? Do you even try? The seduction of routine consumption of food, alcohol, and entertainment is ever present in American life. Those who have grown rich by glutting America with consumables now try to steer its government to allow for even more exploitation of the consumers' addiction and greed. Cheaper fast food. More drugs. Less need for mobility. More bad television and distracting gadgets.

Overcoming mental and physical inertia is part of my personal practice. As I age, this requires more and more effort and mindfulness. A rigorous exercise regime is necessary. A strict adherence to a healthy diet is necessary. Daily morning commitment to make each day a day of progress, not stasis. Inertia is easy. Practicing the art of being the most growthful person I can be is difficult.

Routine

Addressing problems or self-improvement in life is often seen as a matter of self discipline. Most people bristle at the thought of discipline. It implies control by another or punishment.

I see two main ingredients for self improvement of any kind: Commitment and routine. First, I know I must commit to a goal before making any headway at all. I will do this. It is very important to first look truthfully and realistically at any personal goal. Can I do this? Do I have to step back a bit and approach this in increments? Should I start with humbler goals first and work up to the greater goal?

Once committed to a realistic goal, routine is key. Studies in treating addiction and other disease have proven conclusively that basic daily routines can make to difference between treatment success and treatment failure. Routines can be changed as needed, but consistency in approaching any goal is helpful and effective.

The most crucial part of any daily routine is setting a consistent wake-up time and regimen. How you re-enter consciousness from sleep can determine the attitude you take into your day. For example, if you do not wake naturally in the morning, setting a quiet alarm or music for the same time every morning allows you to slowly re-enter consciousness. Stretching, while still on the bed, is helpful to relax and align your body before standing up. A period of stretching, yoga or other exercise before eating or drinking anything is helpful to activate your metabolism. It also eliminates cravings for too much caffeine to alert the body into action. Getting an inexpensive yoga mat makes this process comfortable and doable anywhere.

Once fully awake, I recommend allotting some time to organize the day. I use running lists, lists which I edit each day as I accomplish items on it. There is no activity too mundane for my list. This keeps the nagging minutia of life from falling through the cracks of daily demands and contingencies. My list helps me to get the most basic and important things done efficiently. This allows time for spontaneous activity with the relaxation that comes from knowing that necessities are being attended to.

At the end of each day, I recommend taking a short time to do an inventory of the day's successes and failures. The list is updated. The priorities for tomorrow are set. Some form of relaxation before going to bed is extremely helpful. Gentle stretching and simple deep breathing while clearing the mind are very conducive to falling asleep in a relaxed state. This facilitates going into a deeper and sounder sleep.

These routines are forms of self-loving and self-nurturing. If you take the time to display kindness and gentleness to yourself, you build habits which positively effect your behaviors towards others. Spoiling yourself with hedonist compensation while routinely abusing yourself is not the way to self-development. It is addictive behavior. Beginning a healthy routine tomorrow can be the beginning of a beautiful relationship...with your own body and mind.

Stress

So much of becoming well in our bodies is adaptation to unavoidable stress. Stress is actually a negatively nuanced word for our natural reaction to inevitable realities, such as time, gravity and physical limitations. Our brains have the ability to visualize goals that exceed our physical and psychological limitations. Stress is often the conflict between the goals or desires and the reality of performance or ability.

Modern medicine has turned to drugs to medicate stress reactions. Tranquilizers and antidepressants are often used to combat stress reactions by alleviating anxiety, depression and insomnia. Often this approach enables individuals to cope with existing stress and to actually increase their stress levels under the influence of the drugs. Then other, more serious, symptoms of stress reactions arise. Drugs become less effective. The quest for the perfect enabling drug becomes a new stressor. A vicious circular process.

A more practical way to address stress is to diminish the stimulus of the stress. This entails mastering the mind (brain) and bringing it into a realistic accord with the rest of the body. This approach is simple and difficult. It is simple because it requires regular maintenance of the body which anyone can do. It is difficult because modern life distracts us from healthy choices.

The simplest way to begin is with your own body. A daily periods of exercise are essential. If you are overweight, that extra weight is a stressor which applies its pressure on your life 24 hours a day, seven days a week. It should be addressed as a top priority by adjusting your diet, increasing your activity and scheduling regular exercise. Yoga, walking, weight-training, bicycling, aerobics, tai chi....all forms of exercise are helpful when done regularly in moderation.

As the body becomes less stressed, the mind can be placed in better sync with the body through regular sleep, regular meditation and regular socialization. For some, this translates into less late-night TV, less self-centered obsessing and less isolation. For others, this entails sticking to a structured schedule, joining a mediation group/class and watching less TV. It's all about balancing your natural capabilities and tastes with healthy activities which are enjoyable for you.

Without the recognition of stress, we would not function well. Stress can often be a helpful motivator. It is our reaction to stress which causes us gain or loss in the quality of our lives. Mindful and intentional coping with stress can be a tremendous way to learn about yourself and life in general.

Fear

How much of your life is governed by fear? Fear of animals? Fear of disease? Fear of pain? Fear of violence? Fear of theft? Fear of poverty? Fear of loneliness? Fear of loss? Fear of fire? Fear of commitment? Fear of abandonment? Fear of the unknown? Fear of social ostracism? Fear of forgetfulness? Fear of mockery? Fear of passion?

My experience with fear, which is extensive, has taught me that the first step of freeing myself from its effects is to acknowledge and clearly examine it, despite my anxiety in that process. "Face your fear." It's a common approach, and it works, with practice and conscious effort.

The most dangerous fear is the fear that goes unrecognized. It eats like invisible termites at the foundation of personal integrity. Eventually, integrity gives way to fear and collapses under strain. The erosion of the German popular psyche in the Nazi era is an all-too-grotesque example.

My humanist practice has developed in part as my success at confronting my own fears has grown. I see these growth processes as intertwined. This is no surprise to anyone who has studied psychology and cognitive neuroscience.

Fear triggers fight-or-flight mechanisms in the brain and body. It is difficult to be a nurse, when fear is constantly encouraging you to flee, I assure you. But, my battle with fear began earlier than that. It began with my fear of loss and abandonment as a child. As I struggled out of a pre-adolescent, suicidal depression, precipitated by the sudden deaths of seven key people in my life, I recognized that I had to force myself to see beyond my fear responses. It was very difficult, but I did it with the routine determination and perserverance of a gymnast. And, I still do.

In this age of PTSD awareness, more and more understanding of fear is uncovered by science. Fear is hard-wired. Living with fear and trauma-memory which re-triggers it, requires practice in order to be able to function as a caring and open person in the world. The individual must change to adapt to a slow-changing world of violence, insecurity, ignorance and poverty.

Breaking free of the crippling, inhibiting and/or diverting effects of fear through desensitization by experience is at the core of all forms of human liberation. Being truly, mindfully compassionate often requires acknowledging and calming one's own fear in the moment. Being balanced on the mindful path as a humanist is a constant quest to live in internal peace with all that is human within.

Dieting

This time of year in the Northern Hemisphere triggers dieting in many people. Gym memberships climb. Anticipation of light clothing and bathing suits motivates.

This is a sign of a gluttonous society.

Eating has become a hobby for many and a mindless stuffing of the gut for many others. One problem with overpopulation is the impossibility of providing fresh, healthy food at affordable prices for everyone. Price avocados and you will understand my point.

Whatever your taste, it is important to realize that diet and weight control is simply understood. Physics determine the basic equation:

Calories consumed minus calories expended equal calories used to make body weight, muscle, skin and fat.

Daily balancing of exercise and consumption of food is part of my practice. When eating in relation to activity becomes a habit, weight gain is no longer a problem. Weight loss entails increasing activity while not changing food consumption and gradually reducing it at each feeding.

NOTE: Photo courtesy Peter Petraitis.

Sport

Sport for some is meditative exercise. The player who focuses on the ball and its goal with absolute concentration is voluntarily coordinating human conscioussness with his animal brain-body coordination. This is indeed a form of meditation and integration of mind-body. And this is beneficial and transforming when it becomes a practice for self improvement. However, spectator sports do absolutely nothing for the spectators other than distract them from self improvement. It is the capitalization of sport which is dysfunctional. It is the mob violence aspect of sport that comes from this capitalization, whipped up by those who profit from it, similarly to the way that others whip up aggression to profit from war. Sport is generally a rough form of ativistic community building. It is quite frankly a crude method, which tends to attract those who are prone to violence and narcissistic demonstrations of superiority and dominance. Incorporating physical exercise into a daily practice is important. However, the practice of individual human evolution requires solitude, meditation and inactivity as well as social exertion and activity.

Pace

The pace of life in an urban civilization can be hectic and distracting. Mastering the pace of my life is necessary for my practice. When I allow the pace of my life to be hurried by external pressures, my quality of life is lessened. Learning to do things in smaller stages often gets things done with better results. This is the beauty of learning to multi-task, if you can also learn to not try to do too many tasks at once. Practice helps me to estimate the best pace for me in daily life. Routines of contemplation, mental and physical exercise and adequate rest are essential components of my practice.