Saturday, October 27, 2007

The Physical Pillar Revisited

There are those who believe that if one eats right, sleeps right, meditates regularly and follows the basic spiritual principles, they will have excellent health, reversing any imperfection that has been endured. This belief goes hand in hand with the idea that we will be showered with riches, friends, perfect partners, love on all sides. In short, we will have everything we could possibly want. If this does not happen they assume we are simply not being spiritual enough and suffer at our own hands.

This view is as illogical as it is to assume we can control the weather, or roll back time. The physical world has its laws which we can not set aside. If we have lost a limb, suffer from an incurable disease or have inherited genetic flaws, we can not reverse those things. We can, however, do much to ease the suffering of our bodies and improve our health within those laws. It is counter productive to either sit back and wait for the Creator to change us into our ideal of perfection, or to go to bed with a box of chocolates and wait for the inevitable ending of our lives here on earth. I firmly believe that living is a process and death is an event, merely a crossing back to where we came from.

We can learn to take care of our physical selves and achieve the best health we can. We can avail ourselves of the help that modern medicine can provide. We can adopt a more positive attitude toward our abilities and minimize the impact of our disabilities on our lives. We can insure that we get adequate rest, good nutrition, clean air to breathe, exercise to the best of our abilities, We can focus on what we can do, rather than what we can't. When life hands us a lemon we can make marmalade and sell it to raise money for those things we need to make our lives more productive.

A positive attitude will go farther to improve our physical state than almost anything else we can do. There is always something we can do to improve our quality of life. We can be open to experience the joy and wonder that surrounds us, often in the simplest things. It is not enough to merely look, we must See. Meditation will help us to bring our lives into harmony with the Creator and with the world around us. It also reduces stress and allows the body to renew and rejuvenate to a greater degree.

Even without obvious disabilities, we need to scrutinize our lives and correct those things which may lead to poor health or future medical problems. The body is the temple of the soul and as such deserves all the respect and help it can get to be it's very best. We should not go around judging the merits of this temple or that church or the other mosque or synagogue. We simply respect what is ours and show respect and tolerance toward others. This applies to the body as well. It is counter productive to measure ourselves against others and see ourselves as superior or inferior. We are all unique and we need to be the best unique individual we can be.

Time spent improving our health will bring many benefits into our lives, and meditation is a tool that can help us to achieve more.

2 comments:

Meadow said...

Very balanced. I like it.

Zareba said...

Thank you Meadow.

I am finding it hard to write about meditation without getting into the spiritual aspects.