Working on the "Heart" of the matter Part 2

Changing our habits and even better yet, our destiny, through the changing of the heart, may be one of the single most important things we can do for ourselves in this lifetime. As we said in the last post, keeping a journal for one week and then observing your moods, and your habits and how they coincide with times of day etc. is an excellent tool for doing this.

Your journal should begin with how you woke up, and end with how you fall asleep each day. And of course, everything in between.
For example:
7am woke up tired, cranky.
7:30 to 8:30 got into the shower got myself coffee, checked my phone, drove to work. Felt better but still unhappy
8:30 to 10:30 working, uneventful
10:45 started feeling really tired and I was bothered by my co workers comments about such and such

You can do your journal any way that you like. Just make sure to finish the entire day. If you absolutely cannot do a week, AT LEAST do 3 days. And the most important thing is to record your feelings, moods, times that you were rushing, times that you could not relax or were overly hyper etc etc. You can record your journal from memory at the end of the day if you want, or take breaks throughout the day to record a few hours of things that you've already done.

After one week, you will have to go back and circle ALL of the difficult spots. Then you will have to observe if there are patterns or repetitions. If you do not see a repetition, you may have to look again. You will also have to draw the connection between the difficulty and what you were doing and/or thinking BEFORE it happened! This form of cultivating is something I have asked a few students to do, and some did and some did not. But the ones that did, had better results in their progress.

Once you try this, if you have questions, you can post them here. Remember, there is no better time to start changing the heart, than now. Don't wait for a better time!

Next Post up just after Thanksgiving! We'll talk about some difficulties of integrating Eastern philosophy into Western lifestyle.

Laoshi Erin D. Markle
Head Instructor Gold Summit Institute
President GSODEC
Director of Buffalo-China Sister City Affairs

"Everyday in the pursuit of learning,something is acquired. Everyday in the pursuit of the way, something is dropped" ~LaoTzu