Looking into my own life, I would rate my physical well-being at a 7, my spiritual well-being at an 8, and my psychological well-being at a 7. My physical well-being is affected by MS which is in its own affected by stress. My spiritual well-being in my mind, could always be better. I could always draw closer to God, because there is always more room to pray, study His word, and worship. My faith is very strong, but like anyone else, it can be shaken and during this time it is even more necessary for me to focus on God and draw from His stregnth. My psychological well-being is affected by stress, the lack of spiritual focus, self-inflicted and other inflicted mental harms. Things from our past can haunt us and cause us to not be able to be psychologically sound. It is not until we face our underlying problems that we will be freed from our psychological bondages and enable us to reach human flourishing.
I am placing personal goals on my self in each of the individual areas of my live. Physically I am lacking in a daily physical activity and threfore I am going to try to place a daily routine of 10 minutes of yoga every evening to not only stretch and stregnthen my muscles, but also help me release my stress and help me to relax. Spiritually, I feel I should try to increase my prayer time and my scripture reading. I spend lots of time in worship since I am a part of our praise team at church and I am now one of the co-directors of the children's praise team. I am always sitting at the piano, singing and writing songs. Psychologically, I need to learn to focus more on the positives in my life. If I work to speak with love, calmly and quietly, instead of jumping off the handle and saying things that I will later regret, I would find myself having a much better psychological constitution.
I know a couple activities that I could include in my daily life that could aid me in reaching my goals. I can place an exercise routine into my daily schedule, a yoga practice and even a quiet time in which I can focus on strictly my breath to aid me in releasing my stress and gaining physical stregnth. I could increase my time in prayer and studying the bible to give me the stregnth to face my everyday life, stresses and psychological battles.
I tried the Crime of the Century exercise. I found myself focusing more on my breath for the certain areas and breathing out my stress. I could not picture the colors. I can say that the breathing part of the exercise was very beneficial in relaxing me, for I did not hear the exercise come to an end. I believe I fell asleep and it was the sound of my children that brought me back to the here and now.
I had similar goals also. There is always room for improvement in each of these areas. I think more prayer and spiritual reading is a good start for the spiritual aspect. It is good you are already in tune with it now. I feel like stress impacts us so much that the exercises we are learning to focus our breathing and like you said yoga will help us to relieve. Saying these we regret and flying off the handle is common especially when there is children but with this class to teach us to have calm-abiding minds we will be able to think before we act or talk and have much better relationships with our families and others. Good post :)
ReplyDeleteFirst is realizing where we can improve! Since we are working on honestly rating ourselves it will give us opportunities to make these goals. You have those set! :) See if someone in your family will help hold you accountable. That way if you know they are going to ask or check in with you ... you may be more apt to hold to those you have set for yourself. I myself NEED to do that. I am not the best at sticking with my goals. I hope this class will give us the tools and better excuse to practice what we preach!
ReplyDelete