Loving-Kindness

This week I practiced the loving-kindness exercise. It involves taking the pain and suffering from yourself, your loved ones, and all living things and replacing it with the love and good intentions of your heart. The exercise is meant to diminish self-centeredness.

This exercise taught me that I have more difficulty focusing than I even previously thought. I constantly experienced mental chatter and even anxiety during the first few minutes of the exercise. I notice I have trouble being in silence and noticed my jaw clenching slightly. I feel like this may be because I am too worried about my responsibilities in general and of the coming day.

I realize that this can be a very important exercise, but feel I should continue to focus on training my mind to relax until I am able to sit in silence comfortably and just relax.

"Mental Workout" seems to be simply practices that are designed to strengthen mental functions such as attention and memory. They can be very useful in my case. Like all things in life, you get good at them through practice. The experience I had with this weeks exercise was most likely normal for a first-timer. More training and "mental workout" is certainly needed in my case. I will continue to practice these exercises gradually. I think it is important to ease into them. If you can only remain focused for three minutes one day, maybe you will for five the next.