Silence that waterfall!

This weeks exercise is all about quieting the mind.  The narraroator first explains how the mind first begins as a loud waterfall.  Over time, with practice and training, the human mind can learn to silence the mind and sort out all the noise.  The mind is then compared to a quiet river merging into a calm sea.  This is something that does not happen overnight but instead is something that is developed and learned.  A human mind could be compared to an onion.  The outer layers are loud and the thoughts are hard to sift through.  As the layers of the onion are peeled back, the layers become increasingly quieter and the thoughts become more focused.  This is what this exercise was based on this week.  This was a pretty relaxing exercise.

"One cannot lead another where one has not gone himself."  This is a very important aspect of leading.  It is not possible to tell someone something that you, yourself, have not personally experienced.  This is because having "experience" is where experience comes from.  Without experience, one can only speculate on what that experience would be like.  This is very important to health and wellness professionals because a health and wellness professional is there to guide others towards a better and healthier life.  It is up to the professional to follow the directed path before they could tell someone else to follow that same path.  This is like receiving information from a doctor telling you to lose weight be he is also overweight.  One can best lead by example.  If you tell someone that a change in their life could lead to a higher level of wellness and that the work to get to that goal is worth the effort.  If the teacher does not follow that same advice then this shows two negative aspects immediately.  The first contradiction is that a healthier life may not be a better way to live.  The second contradiction shows that maybe the effort is not worth the payoff, if it was than the instructor would also be following that road.  There is an obligation of the health provider to develop themselves both spiritually and psychologically because a greater sense of spiritually and psychological health means a healthier level of wellness.  Spirituality can be accomplished by religion and by searching for aspects of life that are bigger than yourself.  Psychological health can be aided by the development of spiritual health; increased spiritual health increases the feeling of belonging and decreases the unknowns in this life that cause stress.  Psychological health can be improved by good physical health and by performing physiological improvement based exercises.

Bradly Leis