Adults in Crisis

Your daily thoughts and meditations can consist of how you can make contributions to yourrelationship. They should also include an examination of your interactions with others each day and how well that you demonstrated love, respect, and honesty.  You can utilize your list of behavioral expectations as a guide in your daily meditations. The manner in which you meditate is up to you. You will need to find a means to isolate yourself from others during the times when you meditate. The hardest part of meditation is your ability to focus. This may take time to develop. You will want to divert your attention from your worries and other factors that contribute to your irrational thinking. Some people can focus on a meditative activity immediately. There are breathing exercises and ways you can position your body that may help you. Research this for yourself, and develop a system that allows you to relax and remain focused on the targeted thoughts of the day. You will need to start out with small steps in this process.

With meditation, as with any new activity in which you engage, it will take time for your mind and body to adjust to this new skill.  However, the more you practice the art of meditation, the better you will get.

You may want to start your daily meditations by reflecting your daily interactions and how you demonstrated virtuous behavior.  Over time, you will be able to expand your meditative thoughts to images of a broader meaning that comes out of your contributions to the human condition.  The goal of your meditations will be to connect your daily actions to a higher meaning in your life.  This will help you to connect to your spiritual side.   Are your actions providing a benefit to another person? How does this  contribute to a higher good?  Can you connect your actions to how you feel?   Through quiet reflection time each day and by using the virtue format to reflect, you will be able to focus on how well you are engaging people and writing your legacy.  If you were to pass away today, what would the people who know you say about you?  If you could write an epitaph for your gravestone depicting the kind of person you are, what would you say? Are you avoiding people? Are you expecting others to satisfy your needs?  You may be waiting for others to respect and love you instead of demonstrating these virtues on a daily basis.  You may be thinking that others will seek you out and love you.  You need to meditate each day in order to regain a sense of reality and a proper perspective on what is important.  Many times, life stresses will cause you to lose perspective, which in turn causes you to become irrational and mix up your priorities.

Through a daily ritual that lasts at least 30 minutes each day, you can reflect on life and rediscover the truth about what is meaningful and what is not. Many people spend most of their day reflecting on meaningless information.  This is information over which they have no control.  Do you obsess over things you cannot control?  Do these thoughts consume you and cause you to be distant or hurtful to the other person in your relationship?  Once you maintain a daily meditation ritual, you will gain the ability to see beyond your daily hassles and focus on what you can do to improve your relationships and find greater meaning in your life.

For those of you who would like some initial thoughts on which to meditate, the remainder of this chapter contains a list of daily reflections.  These reflections will target some of your irrational themes that you pick up from your daily experiences with other human beings.  These reflections do not target just the virtues of love, respect, and honesty; they also target themes that you may face that cause you confusion or concern.  These reflections can provide you with ways to see the truth about a relationship and how you can fight your tendency to look at situations in irrational ways.  You may not gain a sense of spirituality right away during your daily reflections.  However, as you begin to think more rationally and incorporate the virtues of love, respect, and honesty in your relationship, you will find your spirituality.

Meditations

Meditation 1: How You Feel Is Not Necessarily Who You Are

This daily thought is a great meditation for person who begins to associate his bad feelings with the type of person he is. Have you experienced hurt in your childhood? If you think that a bad feeling is a reflection of your personality, you are making this connection through irrational thoughts. Once you begin to see that your bad feelings are separate from your personality,you can begin to allow those bad feelings to exist and not be so inclined to look for quick fixes to feel good again. People are drawn to chemical substances or other instant pleasures because their irrational thoughts have given them bad feelings. During this meditation, reflect on the day’Äôs thoughts and actions that contributed to your feeling bad. Spend time looking at how you came to the conclusion that you are a bad person due to these feelings. Was this evaluation of your behavior based on how you demonstrated love, respect, and honesty?

Initially, you will associate your bad feelings with morally relative themes. Maybe you do not have a big house, a sports car, or the job that you want. Maybe you think your life has not measured up to what is depicted in romance novels or the movies. How will your pursuit of these symbols of happiness improve your relationship? Will you go from a bad person to a good person once you attain these status symbols? This meditation can help you to identify the source of your bad feelings. Allow yourself to feel bad, but also look at how this feeling has impacted your ability to demonstrate the virtues outlined in this book. Let this be a signal that you are not looking to an absolute morality to guide your relationship.

Meditation 2: How Someone Makes You Feel Is Not Necessarily Who They Are

This meditation is similar to the first. You are reflecting on how you evaluate other people with whom you come in contact. Many times people will share their views or provide feedback that may cause you to feel sad, happy, elated, or hurt. You may often make the mistake of evaluating others by the feelings they provoke within you. This can cause you to act in irrational ways based on irrational assumptions. On what are you basing your feelings when you interact with another person? When someone makes you feel good or bad, what did he do to provoke this feeling? Does this automatically make him a good or bad person? You may be surprised how many times you have dismissed a person in your life because of his honesty. The truth can hurt if you are not ready to accept it. You may have dismissed an honest, trusting relationship because your evaluation of that relationship was based on irrational thoughts. This meditation can help you to assess a person according to the virtue system outlined in this book. Think about what another person said to you and how the statement made you feel. On what did you base your conclusions about this person? If he was being honest and respectful, were you angry at the truth? Were you thinking other irrational thoughts? If you can answer these questions, you will get a clearer picture of what is making you feel the way you do. You might not like it when others make you accountable for your actions. Sometimes you simply may not like someone’Äôs communication style or way of life. It is important for you to remember that how a person makes you feel may not represent the type of person that he is. He may actually be a very honest, respectful, and loving person.

This is also true for those individuals who make you feel good. Look at why he is making you feel good. Is he being dishonest with you by telling you what you want to hear? Is he demonstrating respect and love to you? Would an alcoholic's best friend be someone who went out to a bar with him? How do you think this same person would react if you told him that he had a drinking problem? This meditation will challenge your irrational thinking and allow you to reflect on how the virtue system can guide you in a relationship.

Copyright 2002 Jay Krunszyinsky

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