LIFESTYLE AND ACTIVITES
The Art of Balance - Living a healthy lifestyle
As I see it, living a healthy lifestyle is a combination of just a few major concerns. It involves the physical, which includes our external and internal environments, the mental, the active, namely exercising, and karma. Following some simple rules will reduce our risks but never totally eliminate the potential for problems. That's life. There is always a trade-off with any choice, that's the very nature of choice. So what do we do? We inform and educate ourselves of the various risks, we protect ourselves in a cost effective manner and then we live and enjoy ourselves in a manner that remains consistent with our ideals and goals. In the end we hopefully pass through life's final stage with no regrets, no obligations and no conflict.
Physical Environment
Our physical surroundings... are they safe? Are they toxic? Do they pose any long-term dangers due to exposure? What are the elements that we must be most concerned with? Power lines, EMF's, chemicals, pollutants, etc? Having complete power to choose a healthy environment to live and work is often difficult. Improving it is not. Air purifiers, Magnets, Energizers, and many other products and techniques can all assist us in our exposure to the elements. Simply shifting electronic devices to a corner can a make a great deal difference. Feng Shui is the ancient art of not only beautifying our living and working environments but also a way of capturing the highest level of Chi, or positive energy, that an area can produce and allowing it to impact our lives. It will ward off harmful elements and produce truly positive and beneficial results.
Our physical environment all includes our diet and what we put into our bodies through consumption. I have devoted most of this website to the value of a healthy diet and what this means to our long-term wellness. We are all generally exposed to more harmful toxins in the food we eat than the elements we either breathe or reside in. Increasing incidents of every major disease support this fact.
Peak Mental Performance
We all want to be at our best all the time. To be thinking clear, with an excellent memory and a sharp, decisive ability to work through issues and to be at peace with others, our environment and ourselves. The question begs, how do we obtain this level of clarity and oneness? That is a question that perhaps only God, Buddha, Ram or whomever else you may worship can truly answer. Enlightenment is an ideal and since we as humans are by our very nature, imperfect, total enlightenment may be just a fantasy. Ahhhh, but it doesn't mean we can't strive for a higher level of competency, inner peace and understanding.
A very wise close personal friend once told me,
" People are like onions. You can spend most of your life in therapy peeling through layer after layer of emotions and past occurrences and spend most of your money trying to determine what happened when you were 6 years old to make you, in some way, possibly act like you do now... OR... you can learn to meditate, forgive everybody for everything wrong they have done to you, forgive yourself for everything wrong you have done to yourself or to others and then... Live in the Moment, Free and Clear! You decide which path makes more sense?"
I think you probably have an idea which road I have chosen to take and which I would recommend to anyone else.
This last bit of advice I believe sums it all up better than anything I have ever heard. It invokes forgiveness, meditation, leaving pre-conceptions and limiting experiences behind and living for Now, the moment, the essence of our existence at anyone time. Now this is all far more easily said than accomplished but it is what we should and must strive for. Finding the occasional moments of clarity reward us in this endeavor. I wish you great success in your own attempts to higher consciousness.
Exercise
A healthy body is not really healthy without some consistent level of exercise. We evolved from creatures that all were active in finding food, protecting themselves and occasionally in just playful diversions. We all still possess those innate needs but many of us find ourselves fortunately comfortable and unfortunately sedentary for lack of motivation or purpose. Our body will atrophy with time, no one is immune, and the only course of action that will stop atrophy is weight resistance training. This should therefore be a part of every person's daily routine. Weight training need not be excessive nor designed to increase bulk, those myths have long since passed. Weight training should be performed at a level that helps us maintain a peak body condition.
The other major component of exercise is aerobic activity. We all must tax our bodies aerobically at a certain minimum level to not only help our lungs and heart (our respiratory and circulatory systems) maintain existing levels of conditioning but the very nature of dramatic movement cause our white blood cells and lymphatic fluids to move and circulate and to therefore improve the overall effectiveness of our immune system. One last significant benefit of quality exercise is that it helps our body to rest, particularly to sleep. Sleep is extremely important to great health and a lack of sleep will affect both our physical and mental productivity. So it becomes quite obvious that the highest levels of understanding, clarity and speed of thought would be difficult or impossible to obtain if one were too weary.
Karma
There are many great works that spell out the concept and the forces of Karma far better than I can do in a paragraph or two. I will try to provide you with some within this site. For me, the quantifying of Karma is the most difficult to teach or to assess. To me the concept is to live life without causing harm to another, by creating no bad karma and passing on positive Karma, we can make our world a better existence for our following generations and for us here today. To me Karma is about legacy, not necessarily broadcasting a legacy to be recognized during our lifetime or after but in simply creating a legacy to be proud of with no conditions attached, because it is the right thing to do.
Conclusion
Now you have my initial thoughts on some very challenging elements in our lives. Some of these have a great deal of scientific and logical support, other are essentially conclusions I have drawn after being blessed to have had exposure to some of the most gifted and brilliant practitioners/advisors that are in the world today. I always enjoy other viewpoints and offer my own time, discourse and website space to those opinions which challenge me or enlighten me further. Please feel free to share your thoughts with my site visitors and me.
