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My mother, like most women of 75, has a few health problems. She is a little heavy, she has cholesterol plaque in her arteries, her high blood pressure sometimes gets out of control and she has trouble sleeping. After losing heart over traditional mainstream medicine at some point, she decided to try something alternative – something holistic. She chose meditation. A half-hour session twice a day, each day. It’s not like it was easy for her to take the time out, running her florist’s shop as she does. But she just decided to go for it. That was five years ago. Today at 80, she has been regular with her transcendental meditation all this while.
So how does it actually help her? Did she actually gets her blood pressure or her cholesterol down? She certainly has. She only takes a small dose of blood pressure medicine now, much less than what she used to, and her blood pressure is completely normal for her age. And she’s managed to lose about 50 pounds too. As much as they tried before, she never managed to do it. There have been lots of studies into the logic behind meditation. Some of them have been more credible than others. The most credible ones were conducted by the National Institute of Health in accordance with all accepted standards of research. The least credible ones were commissioned by the Maharishi University, an establishment that has a great deal invested in the success of transcendental meditation.
A study at a venue as respected as the American Heart Association has found that transcendental meditation actually has real tangible benefits for people like my mother who are at great risk of a heart attack, people with long-standing coronary problems. The study didn’t just happen on that finding; they followed about 200 subjects for years and found that the people who were at high risk of a heart attack or a stroke. Half of them were subjects who were merely given the traditional advice about changes to their diet and their exercise habits. The other half, were 100 subjects who regularly meditated; of all the subjects who meditated, only 20 had heart attacks or strokes later in life. In the other group, there were more than 30. In general, the meditators dropped their blood pressure by five points, and had fewer complaints and diseases in general.
The encouraging thing about meditation is that it doesn’t need any special ability, education or attitude to be successful. The subjects in the study hadn’t even passed high school, and didn’t make more than $10,000 a year. All that meditation needs is, that you look inside, and help your body relax, loosen its stresses, and aid the body in cutting down on the production of stress hormones. One thing no one really understands yet, is why it is that lower levels of stress hormones should make you healthier. But as long as it works this way, and is easy to achieve, we could go along, and wait for the day that they find out why it works. From what we know now though, work it does.
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power of observation
Self- confidence is something that people find difficult to have. There are people who find low self-confidence influences the way they see themselves and their performance. Contrary to what most people think, self confidence is not something that only the gifted and blessed could have. With the help of personal mastery, individuals could now start building on their self-confidence.
Personal mastery is about self-development and self-improvement. It is about loving yourself and accepting yourself as you are. You need to acknowledge your weaknesses and at the same time strengthen them. Personal mastery is about loving yourself.
To attain personal mastery and confidence, it is important to believe in yourself. It is also important to be content with yourself. To develop self- confidence, self-acceptance should occur. Self- acceptance is about accepting not only the good things in life, but also the failures in life.
Aside from self-acceptance what else can you do to achieve self-confidence through personal mastery.
? Understanding thoughts and emotions- forgetting about a bad habit or behaviour would make us more aware about thoughts and emotions. By becoming aware of our emotions and behaviour, then we will be able to overcome and correct our behaviour. But once you have decided to change habits and behaviour, there are different strategies and methods that you can do gain mastery over them.
? Self discipline. Changing attitude and behaviour, or even perspective might take a while. Change does not happen overnight. You need to gather enough knowledge and start learning and practicing the skills that you would like to improve and develop.
? Have a clear vision on what you want to happen in your life. To be able to move forward in your life, then it is important to have clarity. Seeing what you want to have in a clearer image would encourage you to work for it.
? The choice is yours. You can choose what you want to experience. Doing something important for you and something you love, would give you enough confidence to continue with what you have started.
? Commitment and trusting. To be able to attain personal mastery for development and growth, you need to trust yourself that you can undergo the process and commit yourself on the process.
When developing self-confidence through personal mastery, we would have to develop some characteristics. We would develop self awareness, which is about our readiness to look at our past, accept it and the same goes for the present. Aside from this, we also develop self-knowledge which is about understanding our past and our attitude. Not only should we understand them but also be able to comprehend the basis for such attitude or experience. Last, we develop self discipline. Self-discipline is about how we make sure that our goals and vision are translated in action and achieved. We need self discipline to make sure that we do not back-out just because of simple and little disappointments and setbacks.
Building self-confidence can?t be done on just a snap. Self- improvement can be a never-ending process. There are people who even acknowledge that self-improvement can last even for a life-time. Sometimes, we can only say that we are fully masterful of our life if we have reached our dreams and goals. Personal mastery can help use with growth and eventually with success. We just need to continue with our dreams and be patient.
