Have Peace of Mind this Lenten Season
POM (Peace of Mind) Square
Dr Abe V Rotor
Of course you do not think of POM while you are running. Then you start to walk, exhausted, and you look around. You are back to your senses. You realize you have not been a “square”. Your sense of dimension is lost and you don't even care what shape you are in. Because you have lost the integrated balance of the four pillars of a happy, fulfilled life.
- Intellectual/mental
- Spiritual
- Physical
- Psychological/Emotional
2. Intellectual or mental – Your thoughts are assigned to two parts – the left for reasoning and the right for creativity. Either you have overtaxed the whole of your brain, or you failed to balance the two hemispheres. That's why it is important to attend to hobbies like painting and music (right brain) to balance the left which you use more often in office and home. As the body is subject to fatigue, so with the brain. A fatigued brain may lead to psychiatric condition that can not be relieved as easy as that of the body. Quite often extreme conditions are irreversible.
4. Spiritual – The biblical Seventh Day is one for the spirit, a day of communication with our Creator, with Nature. It is a renewal of relationship between man and God, a re-invigoration of the soul. Emptiness can be easily felt, but quite often, it mingles with the kind of emptiness that is hard to fill. Our spiritual life suffers every time we act on something against our conscience. It becomes dull when we fail to do the things we should in accordance with our faith. I have heard of people complaining about the lack of “meaning in life.” For me, the answer lies not in our rationale thoughts, in our physical power or emotional or psychological makeup. In fact I believe that the lack of meaning is in the emptiness of the spirit. I recommend reading A Search for Meaning by Victor Frankl, founder of logotherapy - a field of psychology which helped prisoners in German prison camps in World War II to survive.
As I continue to write this article at Room 3031 at the UST hospital (September 20, 2001) I glimpse upon a Newsweek story about 30,000 Japanese a year have been killing themselves. The title of the article is “Death by Conformity.” It is about an epidemic of young Japanese pulling back from the world."
Take the case of a 29-year old salaryman. He described how he secluded himself for three years after resigning from his company. “I didn’t even know if it was day or night,” he confessed.
Another case is about a “corporate warrior” who became a victim of economic slump affecting his company in the late 1998. He became “spiritually” weakened by an anxiety he couldn’t comprehend. This is how the report pictured the fiftyish company executive.
“At first he couldn’t sleep. Then he grew physically weak each time the train neared the station nearest his office. On several occasions he rode to the end of the line. At one point, speaking on condition that he not be identified, he went to buy a rope, then put it in the trunk of his car to be prepared for the day when he would hang himself. Fortunately the day didn’t come. A doctor helped him in overcoming his depression.” ~
Have Peace of Mind this Lenten Season.
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