Have you ever found yourself arriving at these realizations: 1) I have no earthly idea what I’m doing in this flesh and bone meat suit, and 2) I definitely would like to be able to do more with my body and have more control over it?
If so, then I can promise you, you are not alone! As a trainer, movement specialist, and lifetime mover myself, this is a battle that I know all too well and see all too often. Without discriminating for color, size, shape, age, height, history, heritage, or even experience, the concepts of unfocused, unintentional, inadequate, incapable, unimportant, non-directed movement are a familiar fallacy it seems the entire human race wants to be able to entertain.
What do I mean by fallacy, you may ask? If you prefer, you can substitute it with delusion or myth. Well, frankly, whether we like to admit it or not (usually willful blindness is the easier road to travel), we are knowingly, or unknowingly, creating and contributing to all of it! That is, our inner experience and outer experience, in each and every moment of every single day, is entirely our doing! You see, we have been trained to think of our mental experience and our physical one as separate. We disassociate from our vessel, our experience of our bodies, at our own expense, in favor of focusing what we see in the world around us. We are creating deficiencies in the entire system because of lazy thinking, a lack of focus, no mastery or control over the vehicle we ride in, in every single moment. Now, without hurting feelings too much, I am not placing blame! This isn’t all our fault, and the good news is it seems there is a deconditioning happening – on quite a large scale.
It’s quite silly really. Just think how easy it for us to put any and everything else before prioritizing our health and wellbeing. It’s the lowest man on the totem pole. Our last priority. The first thing to go the moment the pace of life picks up. “I’ll go back to the gym next week once this work project is finished.” “I had been going to yoga but then my kid got sick, and we went on vacation so I just sorta stopped going.” Think about it. As life gets busier and busier, taking time for ourselves rarely, if ever, finds its way on to the ‘to-do’ list, let alone gets to the top! This is surely a thorn on a much larger bush, but, nevertheless, the sentiment is monumental. Let me spell this out for you. We are getting further and further away from the center, the core of our being. We let distractions and unimportant nonsense come before the single most important variable in the equation, us! No matter how you square it, your body, your vessel, the vehicle you can never escape, is without question being neglected. Without the care of this core, you threaten all of it! Every aspect of your life is under direct threat. Not of earthquakes or terrorists. The real threat is you!
Before you assume I am being critical and that this is a nihilistic, pessimistic approach to the health and wellness of humanity, let me say it isn’t that at all! Rather, it’s a plea for us to regain the conscious responsibility that we have to ourselves, to attend to our need to feel empowered, and to help us use these miraculous, amazing, imaginative bodies we have to our absolute benefit. The disconnect here lies simply in the fact most of us are completely unaware of how our thoughts, beliefs, behaviors, actions, and unhelpful habits (or lack of), contribute to the lack of expressed potential in these bodies (and in our lives more broadly)!
Let me simplify this for you – not everyone is naturally gifted as an athlete or mover or discovered their physical potential early on. So, when it came time to take on this responsibility, we quickly realized that it’s bleeping HARD. And, what is it that we know best about change or doing things which, from our perspective, are hard and challenging? We don’t like them! Anyways, we have a million other things to do throughout the day, month, year. We have other priorities that seem to be of far greater importance. We have bills, and relationships, and kids, and work, and more work, and more work. There is a never-ending cycle of hoops we must first jump through before we can tackle this fitness, exercise, gym issue. But I ask you and challenge you to ask yourself: When did something which literally affects every single thing we do become such a grueling task?
Well, now that we all know how delusional we are in our approach and relationship to our bodies, let’s discuss what we really need to hear. The answer to how do I regain control?
The Nervous system is king.
Proprioception. Never seen this word before? Well, what is it and why is it important?
Proprioception is typically defined as our perception or awareness of the position and movement of our body in space. It is sometimes even described as the “sixth sense”. But it’s really so much more. It’s the internal dialogue of all the senses and systems in the body communicating with each other to provide the best insight to us possible. It’s the guidance system we all have which allows us to navigate this vessel through the physical jungle gyms of our environment. By doing so, you are literally creating a roadmap of coordination and communication from the brain to the body. As much as we discuss the mind-body relationship, it should almost go without saying, however, what MYND MVMT does is work diligently to reinforce the importance of this sole concept: THEY ARE ONE SYSTEM!
Think of this as a system not too dissimilar from the infrastructure we drive our cars on – roads and highways! Now hopefully, if these surfaces are well maintained, then we should have no problem getting from point A to point B. But, unfortunately for anyone who has ever actually driven or traveled by road, we know this is rarely ever the case.
Myndful fitness is about bringing our conscious awareness, intention, focus, and direction into our vessel – into our bodies. It’s about connecting, on purpose, our thinking with the way we are moving, and by doing so creating big results. Results not just in the way we all want to think of results. Yes, you will have nice abs, be “skinny”, jacked, ripped, strong…fill in your preferred phrasing here. More importantly, you are learning how to take back control of your body, your focus, and in the end your life!
Myndful fitness is that ah-ha moment. It’s the moment when a genius idea pops into your head and you feel the shiver down your spine and the chills throughout your body. It’s the moment when you remember the name of that one person you just couldn’t recall. The moment when you’re trying so hard to remember, forcing the information or picture further from your mind, and then realizing minutes later just when you had forgotten you forgot, the name comes jumping out at you. It’s that moment you feel the summer sun for the first time of the year, resting on the back of your neck, when you close your eyes and the warmth encapsulates your entire system. It’s when you can see the bright, shining radiance of yellow creeping through the thin protection the eyelids provide. The beauty of how these moments resonate with us all doesn’t take much thought, or intellectualizing. These are moments we stop and realize that we are without thought. We find ourselves in a picture frame, still, trapped, at ease, present!