Thursday, February 16, 2006

Featured exquisite mind webpage: mental factors

Meditation practice requires work, effort, and persistence. This work can be joyful or arduous depending on the attitudes we bring to practice. Traditionally, there are five mental factors that tip the scale towards more joyous practice. These are faith, wisdom, energy, insight, and concentration. These factors will be explored in this section. These mental factors contribute to the psychological seat we bring to practice. Exquisite Self-Care can also help to provide a solid foundation in which to realize these mental factors. Humans have the unique capacity to consider their own minds. To practice mindfulness meditation is to consider the mind in a deliberate and pointed way. This way, however, is not what we are typically involved with. It is not problem solving, creativity, worrying, regretting, planning, rehearsing, or any of the other possible facets of cognitive activity that we might typically be engaged with. As such, it takes some getting used to, and it takes some time to reorient our brains to be comfortable with what is essentially doing nothing – nothing other than experiencing our experience in the moment. Doing nothing? “That’s downright un-American!” And so, our minds may thusly protest. Faith, wisdom, energy, insight, and concentration will help us to retrain our minds to this unusual and rare activity of considering our own minds as objects of our own minds. Read more ...

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