Street Clock... Woke up early -- around 6:45. I noticed that part of the trouble I have been having with waking up relates to the general dismal feeling of winter and part of it is just that my body aches. I give in to this sensory detail to the point that I tell myself that I cannot get up. That is not to say that sleeping might actually do me some good but I think that the process itself is one where the mind conflicts with the body. In my mind, I would be saying that Get up! It's time to greet the day and its challenges. You have quite a bit of things you could be doing. So then, in turn, the opposing argument that my body is saying is the antithesis of what my mind is saying. My body says Go back to bed. You don't really need to be up this early. Don't you feel how sore you are? Don't you feel how much you really need to sleep. Go back to bed.
I think there is a certain state of mindfulness that one must have to transcend what the body is telling us. At least, this is what we talked about tonight at a group meeting I had attended. The name of the group is called Reflections and they meet every Thursday. In these meetings, a small group of people have discussions related to mindfulness, the body, and spirituality. Tonight, there was a meditation (about 15 minutes or so), some stretching, a lengthy discussion, and then there was a serving of delicious food that sort of concluded the event.
Tonight's discussion was really interesting, though, and is particularly remarkable. The discussion centered around the body and its governance. We talked about the body's demands, necessary functions, and all of the things needed to make the body operable -- i.e. temperature, sleep, food, bodily functions, etc. One of the center pieces of this discussion was the contrasting dichotomy of idea between a person who eats to live and a person who lives to eat. I do not remember the name of the man who had made the insightful comment, but it seemed appropriate that the idea of a person who eats to live is a person that is governed more by their mindfulness (or purely their mind) instead of a person who lives to eat being someone who is completely governed by their body and its instinctual reaction (to want to eat everything). This is not to say that it is healthy or appropriate to not eat but I do believe in a certain level of awareness and mindfulness one should take before they participate in eating.
Questions of how should I use my body seem to come into mind here. One could decide consciously that I will use my body to eat this rice and this soup because it will nourish my body with necessary nutrients and will also stabilize my body temperature. In another case, a person could somewhat give in to their body's governance and plainly say to themselves I am going to eat all 6 of these slices of pizza!! Either way, the person is making a decision. The respective difference here, however, is the presence or absence of mindfulness when a person makes such a decision.
