R4B Mastery: Reaching for Well-Being [updated links]
... by challenging limiting beliefs and aligning with the dharma
This post introduces a strategic psycho-spiritual process for achieving well-being and presents specific practices for the twenty-first century that are aligned with the dharma.
The nature of needs and wants that arise in awareness is that beings are motivated to achieve them. The lives of many beings may currently be unfolding amidst emotional resistance to what is, uncertainty about the future and a plethora of multiple stressors and dissatisfactions.
Well-being can become a high level strategic aspiration to mitigate the causes and conditions that contribute to personal suffering. Achieving states of well-being involves optimizing one’s thoughts, feelings and behavior for this aspiration. Consider below a psycho-spiritual process that parses this optimization into step-wise components:
clarify strategic intention,
use momentary awareness for insightful guidance,
examine limiting beliefs and the nature of mind
use direct experience to dissolve the limitations of prior beliefs,
align intention and action with principles of the dharma.
This psycho-spiritual process for optimizing well-being is aligned with the dharma path, paradigm and practices that have emerged over the past twenty-five hundred years.
1. Clarify Strategic Intention
Momentary intentions vary widely within and across daily activities. Clarifying one’s strategic intention expands the time line for consideration. A process for carefully formulating intention is described in the beginning stage of the R4B Method. Repeating one’s strategic intention silently and aloud in rhythm with breath in rhythm with movement heightens awareness of and commitment to the intention. Repeating it silently as a mantra while engaged in sitting meditation complements the intensity of R4B meditative movement practice.
Practice 1: Consider 1 and 0 as two states of being: Let “1” be thinking and programming one’s mind. Let “0” be the absence of thought, known as emptiness or shunyata in eastern spiritual disciplines. During R4B programming and mindful mantra sessions, consider using about half the session for state 1 [programming] and the other half for state 0 [emptiness]. Notice and consider adjustments to wording of the programming input as variations arise in awareness. More precisely refining the wording of one’s strategic intention to align with the dharma is a psycho-spiritual skill. [see #5 below]
2. Use Momentary Awareness for Insightful Guidance
Careful formulation, repetition and adjustment of strategic intention heightens practitioner awareness of related thoughts and feelings. This enables more frequent and helpful detection of guidance provided by hints, clues, signs and signals that appear in momentary awareness. Be advised that guidance can arise from a range of sources, including both beneficent light and samsaric darkness. Discerning the source of guidance as coming from light or darkness is a psycho-spiritual skill. When awareness of beneficent guidance is converted into action, progress is more likely to occur.
Practice 2: Pay attention to hints, clues, signs and signals that appear in awareness. Test the value of their helpfulness by taking action. Recognize there may be a learning process of discernment underway. This learning process includes detection and subsequent dissolution of egotistical self-ishness. Discernment includes learning who, what and when to trust as direct experience contributes to the trial and error development of this psycho-spiritual skill.
3. Examine Limiting Beliefs and the Nature of Mind
Observation of thoughts and feelings through self inquiry can enable the identification of limiting beliefs that are obscuring the path to progress. This inquiry develops a deeper understanding of how one’s mind has been unconsciously operating in daily living. What was unconsciously assumed to be true can be challenged by possibility thinking that is outside the box of limiting beliefs. These possibilities can be formulated as short term goals and longer term aspirations, then repeated during meditative movement and sitting mantra meditation.
Practice 3: Consider an important need/want/goal/aspiration. Ask yourSelf, “What are my limiting beliefs that have prevented me from reaching this need/want/goal/aspiration? What have I not done that might have surfaced additional relevant information that might enable progress? What have I not tried and why? How have my limiting beliefs been restricting my progress?” Clarify the limiting belief(s) about this by orally recording them or formally writing them down. Keep this handy in preparation for practice #4 below.
4. Use Direct Experience to Expand the Dissolution of Limiting Beliefs
The dharma path, paradigm and practices rely on the test of direct experience to validate their strategic benefit for dissolving suffering and enabling well-being. Using insightful awareness to detect progress is a psycho-spiritual skill. These insights develop confidence in the power of such meditative practices to dissolve the causes and conditions contributing to suffering and dissatisfaction. Those causes may include attachment, negative emotion and ignorance of the dharma.
Practice 4: Identify and separately challenge key limiting beliefs by carefully formulating and repeating an actionable goal that is incompatible with the limiting belief. Take action consistent with the ideas and solutions that arise in awareness. As learning ensues from the results that are directly experienced, recognize the development of a paramount psycho-spiritual self management skill is underway. Sustaining the development of this life skill absolutely supports the achievement of strategic intentions for the remainder of one’s life.
5. Aligning Intentions, Choices and Actions with the Dharma
As practitioners assimilate these insights and experiences, it is important to go beyond personal needs and wants to aligning intentions with the dharma. This accelerates progress. Think of the dharma as an extensive twenty-five century long compilation of insights about:
how the nature of one’s mind and behavior contribute to personal suffering,
how to be liberated from suffering, and
how to achieve states of well-being.
There are different levels or layers of the dharma expressed by the meditative traditions that have arisen over the past two and a half millennia. As expressed in a recent post, possibly the most accessible dharma principle is cultivation of the four immeasurables: kindness, compassion, empathetic joy and equanimity. Cultivation of the four immeasurables contributes to the dissolution of suffering and enables states of well-being.
Combined Practice Set #5:
KINDNESS: Identify potential acts of kindness and take kind action. Interrupt and correct thoughts, feelings and behaviors that are unkind.
COMPASSION: Take action to alleviate the suffering of other beings. This includes generosity of support and conscious focus of vibratory energy.
EMPATHETIC JOY: Recognize resentment when it arises, dissolve it by extending exhalations, and cultivate empathic feelings of happiness and joy in other beings.
EQUANIMITY: Soften intense positive and negative emotions as they arise by shifting awareness to the breath and extending exhalations. Cultivate calm composure.
There are somewhat deeper layers of the dharma path, paradigm and practices. These include:
cultivating and sustaining moments of gratitude for having a precious human life,
dissolving attachment and resistance to what is, by recognizing and accepting pervasive impermanence,
recognizing the vast interconnectedness of all that is,
recognizing moments of primordial wisdom, which include;
a noteworthy sense of understanding the nature of life and mind, and
a knowing of what, when and how to be and do.
These deeper layers have occasionally been touched on in previous posts and will likely be considered in future posts.
May this post be useful for all who are motivated to attain more frequent and enduring states of well-being.
🙏💕🌎
ib
always free. unsubscribe at any time.