UNIT 7 QUESTIONS

Hello eveyone, I hope you all are having a great week so far.  Here are my responses to the questions for this week.

1.       I found that this meditation practice was a good practice.  I have an uncle who is very spiritual, an artist of paints and wood carvings, he meditates and is very connected with nature.  I choice to visualize him because growing up he was sort of an outcast from the rest of the family and I never understood why. He had practiced and did the things that made him happy no matter who didn’t like it.  Now that I am older, I have a connection with him that I understand. He is smart, wise, happy, healthy and successful.  Although he lives in Hollywood, Florida now , we do keep in touch and I can always talk to him when I am feeling down and he always has uplifting things to say.  I am very much like him and by using my uncle as a focal point, it has helped me to see his wisdom and connect with it in a way that I can practice it.  This is his web site, you can see all the wonderful things he has done,  http://www.paulsaintlaurent.com/1.html.  The practice of mindful meditation has helped me further my own healing of self dought and lack of patience. I have learned more about myself and how to practice loving-kindness to others.   I have gone further in buying additional cd’s of meditation music.  Even thought I have been practicing meditation yoga in a group setting for over a year now, I truly understand what she is saying and why.  I can feel the energy it brings that makes me feel alive and new. I will continue to explore and true new practices in addition to the cd that I have from this class.

2.       “One cannot lead another where one has not gone himself” (Schlitz, Amorok & Micozzi, 2005).  What does this phrase mean?  Today’s conventional medicine is about treating the physical symptom rather than incorporating spiritual and emotional healing and treating the body as a whole as with integral medicine.   Physicians see people’s aliments as external and treat them with medications and/or surgery.  What is missing is the relationship with the patient the internal healing.  Doctors are simply not required to learn this part of healing. Medical school offer holistic healing as an option to students and not as a requirement.  In essence all of the quadrants discovered by Ken Wilbur is essential to healing.   Physicians are just beginning to recognize the importance of integral health in the medical field.  They know that when a patient has for example, hypertension its cause can be numerous factors such as, poor diet, lack of exercise and emotional stress. By addressing all quadrants then the patient can be healed.  Therefore, what is meant by the previous phrase is that doctors need to practice what they preach.  Or in other words, they need to be more educated on the integral approach of healing along with the scientific knowledge.  When a physician practices meditation, relaxation, imagery and is aware of the mind, body and spirit connection then they can help to treat their patients on a more personable level with care and loving-kindness.

A perfect example is that my daughter who was 20 at the time (about a year ago), was having anger issues.  She had little patience and would have anxiety pretty easy.  Fly off the handle over the slightest thing.  She don’t exercise much, eats a junk food diet along with energy drinks and works at a vet where there is stress in dealing with clients.  She went to her family doctor where she then asked her a couple of questions from a questionnaire sheet then proceeded to prescribe her a low dose of Prozac.  I was very disappointed in this and firmly do not believe in any of these medications.  I let her take it for a short period of time and as a result, she felt worse, she started to become depressed and down.  She was told not to stop taking it all of a sudden due to negative side effects such as, feeling of suicide.  Once she stopped taking it, I asked her if she was ready to listen to my suggestions.  She stopped drinking energy drinks, ate breakfast and more healthy and I am still working on the exercise part (she don’t take after me for that).  She feeling much better and she is more calm than she was before.  I told her to start a journal writing down her feelings and to take a breather everyone in a while like walking her dog on the beach.  It just goes to show you how impersonable these doctors are.  This doctor is very young and has not been practicing very long either.  I think that it should be mandatory for medical schools to teach integral medicine. 

Cheryl