Dear Integral Meditators,
We have a remarkable amount of power to catalyze our psychological development through mindfulness. The article below explains one easy to apply method.
Yours in the spirit of empowered perspective,
Toby
Mindfully Enhancing Your Psychological Development
What is psychological development? Or, put another way, what does it mean to be psychologically evolved? One simple way of answering this question is that the more psychologically evolved you are, the greater the number of perspectives or viewpoints you will be able to take on any given situation.
- An unevolved person can consider the situation only from their own point of view
- A more evolved person can view the situation from the perspective of a friend, family member or well known ‘other’ person
- Moving along, an even more evolved person will consider the situation objectively
- A still more evolved person will consider/be able to enter into the perspective of people s/he does not know personally but who are involved in the situation
Then there is considering the question from different lines of intelligence:
- What does this situation look like when evaluated emotionally?
- Cognitively?
- In terms of values or ethics?
- Physically or somatically in terms of touch and sensation?
- Spiritually?
- In terms of Gender?
And others:
- Economically
- Aesthetically/poetically/artistically
- From a child’s position
- From an old persons position
- From the perspective of history
- Anthropologically
- Socially
- Politically
- Generationally (as in past, present and future generations and how they see things)
And it so it goes on….
Here is a mindfulness exercise for stimulating your capacity for perspective taking:
Take a situation in your life that you want to investigate. Time yourself for 5 minutes. During that time write down or think about that situation from as many different perspectives as you can think of. Then pause and reflect upon what you have written or thought about allowing it to;
- inform and change your understanding of what you are experiencing and
- influence and inform the choices that you make
You may be surprised how powerful this exercise is, and how much intelligence and creative power you have when you really access the power of your own perspective taking!
Related article: Six Questions for Effective Decision-making
© Toby Ouvry 2014, you are welcome to use or share this article, but please cite Toby as the source and include reference to his website www.tobyouvry.com