Nourishing the Mind as Part of Health and Wellness

I wrote earlier of the need for us to nourish our mind as part of health and wellness. It is my belief that our continued existence and wellbeing partly hinges upon the use of our mind in its proper perspective. The mind is a powerful tool to us. It can make and it can break us. When used positively it enhances quality of life, and we need to continually improve our quality of life. Thus we need to be positive in our thinking.
Positive thinking is a skill by itself. Circumstances around us usually present opportunities for us to react, and the way we react requires some skill. These skills would usually be acquired over time based on life experiences and exposures. One has to be able to differentiate between the realities and the imaginaries and these too are acquired based on experience and exposure. It is the realities that should be our focus of attention and to be able to look at realities squarely and then react accordingly is to take things positively. Do not allow imaginaries to colour our actions or reactions as imaginations can be just up in the air and can just fizzle out in space.
In addition to positive thinking setting our minds towards achieving goals and striving towards set objectives will help nourish our minds. We all have daily objectives and daily goals to meet. We wake up each day with set things to do. They may be routine things and they may also be new things to do. Whatever they are how we plan them and how we execute them will need our minds to be at work. We certainly would not want to do things blindly or without any purpose. Hence, proper planning would make life a lot more pleasant. And proper planning need our minds to be at work, recalling experiences and past practices to achieve the things we have set to do. That is the beauty of the mind. The recalling bit, the experience bit, comes naturally when prompted with the need to achieve what the mind has been set to do. Am I making sense?
My favourite on nourishing the mind and enriching it is reading. Reading triggers the mind to work and depending on what you read the end result will be the mind working at a pace suited to what is read. Heavy stuff may load the mind more. We have heard the expression ‘going out of my mind’. That is when the mind is working at a very high load that the thinking process becomes stressed and overwhelmed. We also have heard of the expression ‘clear my mind’. This is good when the mind is stressed and ‘overload’. Just clear the mind of the load, or stop thinking of the issues causing the ‘overload’ and think of more pleasant things. I practice looking at images in the mind. How do I do it? I just close my eyes and picture in my mind pleasant sceneries that I have experienced before, at the same time think of pleasant, favourite music or sounds (sometime I think of the Azan, the call for prayers, or some verses of the Holy Book), while making deep and slow breathing. Go on, take a couple of minutes, close your eyes and do like what I do. Isn’t it pleasant? You may devise your own way of clearing the mind. Do this once in a while and it will help revitalize your mind. Some people go into deep meditation to nourish their minds but I believe in doing these short spurts of revitalizing the mind. It works wonders for me and I am sure it can help you too.
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Bintulu