In today’s culture, we limit ourselves in the way we think about our minds and bodies. Treating our minds and bodies as separate in our lives and our educations trains us to be less than the full and highly developed people that we can be.
In modern Western culture we tend to draw a sharp distinction between mind and body. This idea permeates many of our practices and we generally categorize activities as either mental or physical. This distinction has been reinforced in our educational systems ever since we were small children. In Western medicine, there is a clear line between physical and mental disorders and they even have different groups of practitioners. We treat the human body as a machine, and with our scientific approach we’ve become particularly good at treating and curing disease and prolonging life (even in very unhealthy states). Treating our bodies as machines has generally not given us much respect and appreciation for our bodies. The work that we associate with the mind is often considered to somehow be more important than the work that we associate with the body. As we increasingly live in our heads, some of us remember to make a point of carving out some time in our busy schedules to fit some “physical activity” into our lives.
We have accomplished remarkable things as a culture by emphasizing exclusively mental work and rational thought in particular. Separating body and mind has probably played an important role in the development of a very complex modern society and our staggering levels of scientific and technological achievement. However, our approach is not without some downsides. Many of us are on some level separated from our true selves and from nature. In many ways we are behaving like domesticated animals as we play the roles that society asks us to play. Of course there are many factors involved but it seems that there is some relationship between these things and living primarily in a world of thought. These realities generally serve the needs of a complex organized society (and particularly the interests of the status quo). However, there is a natural tension between the needs of an organized hierarchical society and the general levels of personal development within the society. Developing a mind with rational capabilities and substantial technical knowledge is just one aspect of being human. In addition, living largely in our heads while generally neglecting our bodies has generally not been mentally or physically healthy for us.
The separation of mind and body is nothing more than a belief that we can choose to believe or not. It is a belief that has deep philosophical roots and that has generally prevailed in modern Western culture, although no one has ever proved it to be true. There doesn’t actually appear to be any possible way to prove that mind and body are separate using rational or scientific methods. I have no interest in exploring the rabbit hole of comparative philosophies of the mind, but it is worth noting that the distinction we draw is actually a pretty unusual approach for a group of humans to take. Eastern philosophies and indigenous philosophies don’t draw the same lines between mind and body, or even between individual bodies and nature in the same ways we do. Mind-body separation does not seem to be the way of nature. When we venture into nature one thing we often find is that our minds increasingly start to work together with our bodies and our mental chatter starts to quiet.
Because treating our minds and bodies more as one is a personal choice it’s helpful to consider possible benefits and consequences. On a personal level, there’s relatively little downside to start treating mind and body as one. We can get substantially more benefit from our exercise and our athletic pursuits if we use them intentionally to develop our mental skills in addition to our physical fitness. We can learn ourselves much better as we perform integrated mind-body exercise, which will help us live more fully. If we care about developing ourselves more broadly as people, it makes sense to work to erode the mind-body wall. We’ll also be able to increasingly get out of our heads which can increase our feelings of happiness. However, a personal risk of deeply challenging the mind-body wall is that we may become less docile and more likely to change our lives and rip up our status quo. There’s also a chance we might also become inspired to go into nature and do things that could hurt us or even kill us.
Eroding the wall between body and mind is something we can focus attention on doing in our training and athletic pursuits. Using athletic training to work on our mindset and mental skills can supercharge our workouts and our lives. Here are some practical suggestions:
Be fully present in your body. Pay close attention to your physical experience and tune in to the sensations in your body. Does your body feel any different than normal? How tired or fresh do you feel? Do you feel tight anywhere?
As you work with different intensities, feel how hard your body is working and get to know its sensations and feedback. Learn to be able to pace yourself. If you use a heart rate monitor, it can serve as a tool to help you learn to self monitor your intensity.
Tune in to the rhythm of your breathing. Tune in to the rhythm of your exercise (running motion, up and down movement of a weight or your body, etc.).
When you notice your mind wandering bring it back into the sensations of your body.
Tune in to your environment. Feel the air, the temperature, the humidity, smell the smells, and notice your natural surroundings.
Repeat your affirmations (learn more here). They will motivate you and they will manifest in your life.
As you hit the rough patches in your workout be grateful for the opportunity to challenge yourself and remind yourself that you’re the kind of person who crushes rough patches.
Do mentally challenging stuff in training. Run in the rain. Work out in the snow. Bike at night. Swim outside in really cold water. The more you do it, the more you become someone who is willing to do anything.
Participate in sports that demand focus and require you to tune into a complex environment. They will erode the fictional separation between mind and body faster than anything.
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