Best Of

I keep trying.

Me too.

I always feel better after exercising even if I have to drag myself kicking and screaming.

Understood. Kicking and screaming is our undisciplined 'monkey/mind/being'. We all know samsara.

What works for me is a realistic regime. At the moment I walk one day and exercise the next.

@FleaMarket said:

I always feel better after exercising even if I have to drag myself kicking and screaming. Why is it so easy to keep setting aside?

We are easily persuaded not to do things...if we allow thought to have its own way...

Tis said in Zen when a (beneficial) urge arises just do it before the emotions have a chance to talk the self out of it...

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?