There are many life stressors, which are roadblocks to natural healing. Be mindless of these life stressors.

Mindless of aging

Be mindless of aging. Forget about your age. Do not become too conscious of or concerned about your age. According to Chinese philosophy, if you cannot combat something, then blend with it.

How you age is a result of how you have lived, an accumulation of the right and wrong things you have done to your life. Do not look back with regret, or look forward with fear. Worry about aging and fear of death are life stressors to avoid.

Why you age

Aging is a disease, not a natural process of time. You age because of

·   reduced intake of nutrients due to depletion of enzymes

·   accumulation of toxins from the environment and processed foods

·   decreased metabolism, adding physical weight to the body, further increasing   physical inactivity

·   reduced lung capacity restricting oxygen supply to the body

·   free radicals attacking and damaging cells

Remedies for your anti-aging

·   To increase your enzymes for better digestion, go on a raw diet at least occasionally. Heating kills enzymes in food.

The Raw Secrets shows you how to introduce raw food into your diet to preserve enzymes for health rejuvenation.

·   To remove accumulated toxins from your body, go to detoxification in The Pillar of Maintenance.

·   To promote metabolism, exercise regularly, such as Yoga or Qi Gong.

·   To enhance qi (internal life energy) circulation, practice breathing and meditation.

·   To protect healthy cells from damage of free radicals, maintain a balanced acid and alkaline level. Make sure your cells will regenerate, not degenerate.

Acid and Alkaline Diet shows you how to alkalize your diet for optimum cell regeneration .

Remember, cosmetics and Botox™ do not reverse aging; they just mask the effects of aging. However, your body is infinitely renewable and forgivable of the wrong things you may have done to your body.

Factors delaying your aging

Factors that delay, if not reverse, aging are:

·   Genes determine how you age. Even if you don’t have good genes, you can make up for them through a healthy lifestyle.

·   The Zen's way of living in the present removes life stressors. (Zen is the Oriental practice of emptying the mind through awareness and meditation.) For more information, go to my website The Way of Zen Is A Healthy Lifestyle.

·   Humor is free healthful medicine. Learn to develop a sense of humor to eliminate life stressors in any situation.

How To Be Funny shows you how to develop a sense of humor out of daily difficult situations and life stressors.

·   Intellectual curiosity is the pursuit of truths in everyday living through awareness and meditation, which disciplines your mind to reduce life stressors. (Go to The Pillar of Mind Power.)

·   Healthy relationships, born of compassion, love, kindness, form the foundation of a healthy lifestyle.

Marriage enhances disease survival. According to research at the Veteran Administration Medical Center in Miami, individuals who were married lived longer than those who either were never married, or were separated or divorced. Companionship is a reason for disease survival.

Separation is more detrimental and devastating to health than divorce.

Unhealthy love relationships are life stressors to avoid for natural healing. (Go to The Pillar of Mindfulness to find out how to develop a healthy love relationship.)

According to Buddha, aging and death are two of the four phases of existence (birth, aging, disease, and death). Aging is as inevitable as death. Be mindless of aging, and don’t let it become one of your life stressors. Embrace aging to reflect on the meaning of life.

Mindless of obsession to lose weight

Weight control holds the key to a healthy lifestyle; it is the soul of your well-being. An ideal body weight is anti-aging. Losing a few extra pounds may add a few extra years to your lifespan. To lose weight has become an obsession with many.

Maybe you, too, may want to lose weight, just like everybody else. In fact, to lose weight is of such paramount importance that Americans are spending billions of dollars every year just to keep them in better shape. Sadly, many are lost in this battle of the bulge.

Why is that?

Zen wisdom is succinctly expressed in the following:

     Therefore,
     The sage keeps to the beginning to discover the end.
     And finds without seeking;
     Arrives without leaving;
     Does without doing;
     And knows without understanding.

The wisdom of Zen underscores the spontaneity of things. If you focus too much on "losing weight" you may become obsessed with "wanting to lose weight" instead of actually "losing" it.

Remember, to lose weight is no more than an experience of self-discovery - the discovery of your body's needs.

So forget about losing weight! Focusing on losing weight is like running after a carrot stick - it is forever frustrating and futile. Zen requires you to make losing weight a process, never a goal in your life.

There is a saying: "If you seek Buddha, you will lose Buddha." It is the profound wisdom of consciousness without being self-conscious - the way of Zen.

To illustrate, if you desire success in anything, focus on the process of the pursuit, not its outcome.

Or, in the case of creativity, let it come on its own - it may happen when you give up trying to do it However, it doesn't mean you don't do it; quite the contrary, you are being present, being available when it happens, and, more importantly, you have the wisdom to know that. And if it comes, it will come spontaneously without your conscious effort of making it happen.

Zen wisdom may help you remove many life stressors in contemporary life, including your obsession with weight control.

Truthfully, weight control is important, but not your body weight. The bathroom scale just indicates your body weight, and that is all. It does not tell you how much fat or muscle you may have lost during a given diet. It may not even tell if you are healthy or not, unless you are grossly overweight. Therefore, do not become obsessed with your body weight. After all, your body weight always fluctuates - which is a fact, and which is very normal.

When you go on any diet to lose weight, your body’s metabolism immediately starts to react and to slow down, and that accounts for the initial weight loss in any diet program - so do not be overjoyed and jump to the conclusion that the diet program works. It is only a self-delusion: initially, your body loses only water, not your body fat.

Even when you go on a fast, you lose weight, but you will gain back all the weight lost once you resume eating. The only difference is that in fasting, your metabolism may make some long-term changes that will ultimately benefit your weight loss. Given that lean muscle mass requires calories at times of rest, the amount of muscle you maintain directly affects your metabolism in a positive way. You burn calories while you sleep.

In other words, the more muscle you have, the higher your metabolism rate is, and the more calories you will burn. The converse is also true: as you lose your muscle mass, your metabolism rate decreases, and so does your weight-loss rate. On the other hand, fat, being inert, has little or no impact whatsoever on your body’s rate of metabolism. These are some of the fundamentals of weight loss.

The maximum amount of weight (fat or muscle) you can actually lose in one day is about one half pound. Since your body is about 60 percent water and one gallon of water weighs approximately eight pounds, any additional weight loss greater than one half pound may only be water, and not your body fat. Therefore, when your body replaces the water lost, weight gain will re-occur, and you are right back to where you started at an unhealthy weight. Does that sound familiar to you in your futile attempts to lose weight?

Counting calories is not only difficult but also inaccurate, because foods are not mathematic values that can be accurately quantified. The biochemical differences in different foods account for discrepancies in counting calories in foods.

In addition, calculating an individual’s daily caloric need is equally unreliable, since each individual’s biochemical and genetic makeup is uniquely different. The minimum energy used for circulation, digestion, glandular activities, and respiration also varies in different individuals due to the differences in metabolism affected by age, sex, health, body weight, and other factors.

Given that counting and calculating your calories are difficult to determine precisely and often misleading, calories charts are not only inexact but also irrelevant in your weight loss. So forget about counting calories! Counting calories will drive you crazy! Do not waste time in the game of numbers, which you will lose anyhow!

According to the Zen way, you eat naturally, and your body will find its natural weight effortlessly if it is healthy, physically, mentally, and spiritually. Any unnatural attempt to manipulate your body's metabolism to achieve the goal of weight loss will be creating life stressors of disappointment and frustration.

Mindless of the love of money

Unlike olden days, money is important to healthy living. For one thing, financial freedom facilitates you to adapt to changes as you age.

You need money to live, to retire, and to survive. It is a blessing if you already have enough.

If you don’t have enough money and you are no longer young, go and visit my website to find out how you can supplement your medical expenses: How To Get Free Money For Aging Diseases.

Free For Seniors provides information on how and where to get the free money readily available to seniors, from grants, home improvement, crafts, travel, to just about anything. The government doesn’t advertise it, but the money is there. Go and grab what is rightfully yours, and enhance your financial health!

If you need to augment your income, there are many other ways. Go and visit my website to get some ideas on making money out of what you love to do: Healthy Living Is Longevity Lifestyle.

Although money is an essential factor of human beings to survive today, you should not love money. The love of money may become one of the big life stressors that prevent natural healing

Today, people have many needs, and many products have increased their needs. Science and technology have created their cravings.

Over the centuries, society has changed, but the basic human needs are the same, as Buddha pointed out. Clothes, food, shelter, and medicine remain the same basic needs of human beings.

According to Socrates, the great Greek philosopher, human happiness could be achieved only by limiting the needs of man, and Buddha concurred.

How do you become mindless of the love of money in a materialistic world?

According to Buddha, you have to let go of your ego-self, which is essentially your "no-self" because it simply does not exist, except in your mind. Once you can let go of the self, you become nothing, and then you can be anything, because you will have become enlightened: money is no more than a symbol of happiness with its abstraction expressed in power and status.

To put it in another perspective, having "no self" does not mean you need to negate or deny your intentions or motivations in matters of money. Buddhism is not about self-denial: it is about the wisdom of knowing the impermanence of material things and therefore the non-attachment to them. Essentially, you hold your intentions and motivations in "emptiness" - with deep acceptance and understanding of them, allowing them their natural energy, but with "no attachment" to them. This enlightenment means everything going on in yourself, such as sensations, thoughts, and sufferings, and more specifically, your love of money, is impermanent ad insubstantial. With enlightenment, you will change your perception of what you really are, and more importantly, the insignificance of your attachment to all material things, including your love of money.

In Buddhism, mindfulness holds the key to liberation from the love of money, which is the root of all miseries, and which is one of the most common life stressors in modern living. One suffers by wanting things one does not have, and having things one does not want. This insatiable desire comes in the form of craving (wanting things one does not have), aversion (having things one does not want), and ignorance (delusional self-preoccupation). However, mindfulness can overcome unhealthy human desire through generosity, love, and wisdom, attained through meditation. Don't let the love of money be one of your life stressors. Go to The Pillar of Mindfulness.

Mindless of life’s problems and worries

According to the way of Zen, life is never a problem, and life should have no worries. But your mind may have created all the problems in your life.

To illustrate, when a thought or a feeling makes you uncomfortable, you do not want to cope with it consciously or subconsciously. You may choose to ignore or forget it, thereby enabling you to focus on something else. Unfortunately, this initiates your addiction to other things as a means to suppressing or alleviating the pain caused by the problem. Your addiction may lead to more problems. Logically, a problem requires a solution. Your thinking mind presents you with a number of solutions to your problems. Your rational mind then begins to analyze and choose, and in the process may create many undue life stressors, such as not knowing how to choose or regretting over the wrong choice.

The way of Zen is living in the present moment and focusing on what your are doing rather than the outcome - a way to remove life stressors, paving the way for natural healing and health rejuvenation.

For more information on Zen living without problems and worries, visit my website The Way of Zen Is A Healthy Lifestyle.

Copyright© by Stephen Lau

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