Interpreting Mindfulness

Sun Highlights Jewish Settlement, Jerusalem

I live my life in a constant state of exploration. Google is my friend and youtube is a close second. I love to research topics that flow across my consciousness over time. At about the same time I learned about the Kettlebell training, I came across an article about Mindfulness with respect to health. I discovered an article where Dr. Ellen Langer described how experiments she performed showed that it is possible that a lot of our physical and health conditions can be mentally influenced. I always end up taking away odd things from articles and stuff I read and what I took away from this is that it is far better to live life being mindfully aware of what you're doing and how you're living than to stumble mindlessly along.

In an odd coming together of an act before the understanding occurs, I had come across a living circumstance where I had switched from mindless to mindful application of something quite common in daily life. Late last year I went in for my bi-annual dental hygiene and during the session the hygienist mentioned in passing that she always started brushing her teeth in the same location. So the next time I brushed my teeth I did as usual, jammed the toothbrush into my mouth and started randomly swishing here and there. In the midst of that mindless random swishing her comment popped into my mind and I realized that my approach to tooth brushing was very random and inefficient. So from that moment I started brushing from the lower inside right, around the lower, the upper, four times, and switched to the outside upper and lower, four times around. It took several days to make that the ingrained habit of how I brush my teeth, and to this day if I'm in a rush I'll briefly forget and do the jam and random swish before I remember and get back on track to efficient brushing.

Several weeks later, when I came across the concept of mindfulness I realized that my toothbrush methodology change demonstrated a great example of accomplishing a task in a mindful vs. mindless way. My exploration of the concept of mindfulness though found that the topic traversed into a realm of meditation and spirituality that crept into an uncomfortable range of thought for me. However, I found the concept of mindfulness to be quite useful in terms of dealing with daily life so I chose to limit my exploration and application to practical approaches of mindfulness in life that results in physical and mental well being, without exploring the spiritual depths of mindfulness.

Over time I will write in this blog the mental aspects of some aspects of life as related to mindfulness as well as how I can practically apply mindfulness to my pursuit of fitness.