Best Of

How do you improve your health?

With healthy thoughts, which leads to healthy actions/behaviour...

• Eat healthy first rather than "later".
• Breakfast: Vegetable juice, coffee, fruit
• Meditation
• Stretching with Breathing
• Calisthenics that work more than one muscle to cover "more ground" pushups, sit ups, squats
• Cardio every day and occasionally to heart rate of roughly 190 minus age (but work up to this if cardio is new)
• Laugh. Read cartoons. Hang with people who like to laugh.
• No smoking, no more than 1 drink of alcohol/day, limit sweets to occasional
• Fish oil supplement
• Learn strategies that work for you to do things you don't want to do (example exercise)

LCHF veggie
Keep moving

@Jeroen said:

So it depends on what one does with the attention. If one attends more closely to the body, one notices more strange sensations. The question is, should one?

You know when you do a body scan, you become aware of sensations occurring in the part of the body being scanned...From what I gather one acknowledges the sensation then carries on with the scan, an as @FleaMarket has mentioned just label it, for example "ache" "tingling" "pain" "throbbing" etc etc...

It’s a bit curious to have to consciously manage the attention in order to not get caught in the sensations of the body. It doesnt feel right? I tend to just go freely where circumstances take me.

Normally when one is doing a body scan, one is consciously managing their attention as their attention systematically moves over their body, however some may just sit and home in on where the sensations occur ... (six of one and half a dozen of the other)

I think the important thing here @Jeroen, is the empty nature of it all, the sensations come and go...... and it's all about developing 'an openness' to awareness...

Bearing in mind (pun intended) Awareness-Consciousness-Mind (often interchangeable) all seem to have one thing in common, which is they are that which knows... intrinsically knowing

"Awareness is fundamentally non-conceptual-before thinking splits experience into subject and object...It is empty and so can contain everything, including 'thought'. It is boundless. And amazingly it is intrinsically 'KNOWING !"

@Jeroen said:
So it depends on what one does with the attention. If one attends more closely to the body, one notices more strange sensations. The question is, should one?

It’s a bit curious to have to consciously manage the attention in order to not get caught in the sensations of the body. It doesnt feel right? I tend to just go freely where circumstances take me.

If I understand Vipassana meditation, when one encounters these sensations one labels them with what they are. A tickling sensation on the brow is something you bring your attention to, label it as "tickling" until the sensation diminishes, and return to your breath. A memory or imagination you are distracted by is labeled "memory" or "imagining" until it diminishes and your attention returns to your breath.

I think these things are done to practice not being distracted and not feeding the distraction with your attention. So while I believe one should acknowledge the sensation, if it is not pressing, it should not be fed with further investigation thus allowing the attention to remain focused to a greater extent on the attention's target.

Another zen smell.
In my world....

Our identity easily fills itself with thinking about thinking as two mirrors will when reflecting off each other in duplications that flitter off into an imagined infinite.
While it can be used by a qualified teacher to fill an intellectually oriented student to the point of bursting to show them the futility of such mental exercises, unsupervised it often just leads to a general disheartening of their entire practice.
Such navel-gazing is usually just another ego play that effectively maintains the very dream that the Buddha tried to teach his followers to awaken from.
Do you think wakefulness is a subject of your thought
or
to a transcendence of being subject to your thought?

@Jeffrey said:
I'm still looking for more strategies though. Do you have any?

I thought I did but they turned out to be fair-weather friends. They all work great until they're put to the test. Your strategy is one of the better that I've tried. I've heard it called "No Zero Days" and even if it is just one push up, you can at least use that one push up as a small grounding point to prove to yourself with direct experience you can do something you don't want to do. Then hopefully build from there. Where I run into trouble is the continuation. If I stop for even a single day, all progress crumbles.

Another strategy I've tried which usually only works when I'm in at least a fair mood is what I call going in with the mindset of "Half-assing" the task. I struggle to attempt tasks due to need for perfection and fear of failure so if I go into the task with the permission and assumption it won't be perfect or even very good at all or even that I'll complete it, then I find I have a much more relaxed attitude about it and will give it an attempt vs not doing it.

Of course ideally on days where I remember to let go of self and attachment, and on days where I can muster the will to do so, I find I can take the energy used fighting the things I don't want to do and reflect it outward as compassion and concentration since in that moment I no longer identify with the desires of self. However this too is much easier state to remain in on fair-weather days, though it works to small degrees on any day I can muster enough care to give it an honest attempt. Sometimes that's enough for the breath of fresh air I need to snap out of my mind-controlled funk. I had actually forgotten how to tap into that and reliving it in the explanation here helped remind me, thank you.

@FleaMarket said:

@Jeffrey said:

• Learn strategies that work for you to do things you don't want to do (example exercise)

Any examples or some that work for you? My tool kit is needing a revamp.

Hi I still looking for more strategies. One that works for me is to just do whatever I don't want to do and once it's done then I don't have to worry about it. Example is the exercise. Another strategy is to do at least one thing per day that I didn't want to do. Also obviously we are talking about good things to do but that you avoid doing. Not talking about things you shouldn't do that you also don't want to do! Another strategy is to just do one thing per day that you don't want to do. Or do one half hour of stuff per day that you don't want to do. That way in a month you do 30 things you didn't want to do or you do 15 hours of stuff you didn't want to do!

I'm still looking for more strategies though. Do you have any?