Tuesday, July 25, 2017

Feelings that age you

I feel therefore I am. Nobody said that. But everybody lives that!

So, feelings come with a strong sense of rightfulness. If you feel it, it must be right. The interesting thing, for meditators, is that they realise that there are so many feelings all tangled up, that there is never an absolute truth about this thing.

The more you meditate the more clarity comes through, that what you feel is not necessarily the right thing. This may take a while to get through, when things crush your heart. But if you are a true meditator you know this "Aha" moment also comes through. It is perhaps as close as you can get to mokhsha, that everybody talks in abstruse terms.

Elizabeth Blackburn, biologist, who apparently got funding rejected from a government agency because it clashed with orthodox religious beliefs (yes, they belong to all hues:) is into studying longevity.

And this absolutely riveting book she has written, called the Telomere Project opens your eyes to the idea of how and why we age, and what we may do to delay it.

She lists a few patterns of thinking that actually have been shown to accelerate aging in your mind. If you see the list, u will feel, as I do, that somewhere sometime we have all succumbed to this because we have been told that our feelings are guideposts. Or that because you feel so strongly about something, you have to coast along, and suffer it.

Here is her list, in a nutshell (and you must read her book, written for the layperson) to find out how to stop it. Very practical book:

* Thought suppression
* Rumination (loopy thinking)
* Negative thinking
* Cynical hostility
* Pessimism


What are the physical symptoms of all this, which causes cell aging?

* higher stress hormones
* exhaustion of the systems dealing with stress
* faster progress of disease
* Digestive system collapse

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