#140 Outside reality: our 24h dream world. A Zen perspective

Outside reality: our 24h dream world

                                                            A Zen perspective

We say that we are dreaming during the night and thinking during the day.

Indeed, few times during the day we are truly thinking but it is only when we have to focus on something for a specific task, purpose or decision. But how often and how long go we do that? .

Even so when we are focusing on something how often our mind starts wandering about something, somebody, somewhere else. When you are driving, where is your mind? When you cook, where is your mind? Even when we work in front of the computer where is your mind?

Why that ? Because most of our activities, even those requesting some attention and decisions are routine and we are on automatic behavior like having a car on cruise control.

Few words about night dream:

Adults have around 5 to dreams per night for a total duration of around 45 +/- 10 min. Kids dream more than adults. The first dream called REM (rapid eye motion) occurs quickly and is very short (only few min.). The others appear around every hour or so. During our life we are going to dream around 100,000h. Some people dream more than others. Some dreams are memorized, others are not. Subjects of dreams vary greatly from one night to the next, from one person to the next.

Dreams can be fun, scary, erotic, weird, related to something or somebody, etc..

How and why we are dreaming while asleep is still totally unknown.

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#139 Our discomfort zones Dec. 18th 2016

                   Our discomfort zone

Outside things that trigger discomfort can be anything: people, events, situations, food.

Obviously hought and emotions may also trigger discomfort.

Discomfort is a physical and emotional reaction to something, something that we dislike or don’t feel comfortable with. Learning to be comfortable in our discomfort zones is a wonderful idea but the task is not easy.

If you learn this skill, you can master almost anything. Unfortunately, most people try to avoid discomfort.

Subconsciously or not, we run as fast as possible in the other direction. This is perhaps the biggest limiting factor for most of us and it’s why you can’t change or don’t want to change your cozy habits.

Think about this: many people don’t eat vegetables because they don’t like the taste. We’re not talking about the end of the world but just about stupid taste. So we eat what we like the most that is bad stuff. The simple act of avoiding something that tastes different i.e. the discomfort, makes people unhealthy. The beautiful thing is: learning little discomfort isn’t a bad thing. In fact, it can be something you may enjoy with a little training.

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#138 How to become a positive thinker? part 3 Dec. 4th 16

During a busy day, it becomes all too easy to focus on the negative. You might feel tired, overworked, and stressed out by all of the conflicting expectations and demands on your time. As a result, negative thoughts can creep into your mind. While we know that thinking positively is better for your state of mind and body , we also know it is good for our health as we mentioned last week. Research has demonstrated that + thinking can have a wide variety of benefits, from improving your self-confidence and psychological well being to actually boosting your physical health.

So what can you do to control your stream of negative thoughts and replace them with a more positive outlook? Even if you are not a natural-born optimistic, there are things you can do to develop your positive thinking skills and reap some of the benefits of + thinking.

Positive thinking skills starts by focusing, analyzing then controlling our negative thoughts and feelings: (more…)