Breathing: A Confluence of Body, Mind, and Spirit – 2
[Exploring Life] Breathing Into Discernment: The first article in this series explored the importance of developing breath awareness as a means to explore the intuitive and deeply integrative realm of thoughts, feelings, and emotions that flow throughout the confluence of our everyday lives. Breathing affects everything in our experience, and our first task is to [...]
Nature of Belief: Dying to Live
[Exploring Life] How do our beliefs change when we are faced with our own mortality? Our lives are fragile and inexorably transient. Our presence will transform when we die. The nature of our transformation at death is an unknown and, in spite of our proficiency in creating fanciful stories that propose an explanation and perhaps [...]
Mental Degradation: Multitasking and the Inner Athelete
[Exploring Life] In Mental Degradation: Multitasking I explored the possibility that multitasking, or the ability to simultaneously process tasks, is a delusion. What really happens in the brain is a rapid shifting of attention between a series of tasks that creates the illusion of simultaneity. This constant shifting of attention is also the basis for [...]
Disaster: Toxic Breath
The end effect of the Gulf Oil Spill disaster will not be known for many years. Some of the effects will be immediate and obvious, while others are far more mercurial and illusive. As with all disasters, a large contingent of people will be employed to distract and counter both the breadth and depth of [...]
Functional Fitness: Functional vs. Dysfunction Exercise
[Exploring Life] One of the most important principles in a functional fitness program is the even, coordinated development of the muscles. Unfortunately, many exercise programs tend to treat muscles as if they exist in isolation. Strength exercises that isolate muscles can be dysfunctional with respect to the proper functioning of the body. Balanced muscle development [...]
Mental Clarity: Attention Training
[Exploring Life]In How To Get Unstuck From (almost) Anything, Joseph Cardillo provides six learning strategies designed to help us break out of confining patterns of thought and behavior through the art of being new, a phrase that originates in core martial arts training. Joseph is an expert martial arts practitioner and the author of three [...]
Optimal Breathing: Stress
[Exploring Life] What makes you hold your breath? describes the importance of optimizing our breathing pattern in order to promote healthy digestion as well as calming the nervous system. The authors recommend that the stressors that are the root cause of holding the breath be identified as they happen. This brings us to the threshold [...]