Strength on Purpose: Tools for Awakening through Mindful Fitness
/Many of us yogis feel the need for physical challenge outside of our yoga practice. We’ve invited more mindfulness, intention and conscious breathing into our daily lives and we’ve reaped the abundant benefits. So, why do we insist on getting our fitness on mindlessly?!
Our soul wants movement, it wants to play and sweat and laugh, it wants to be physically challenged and to feel amazing in our bodies. Our soul wants to yoke these needs with our need for inner peace, for calm in the midst of the storm, for clear seeing, for making choices that cultivate our fullest potential. Can we bring meditation, and fitness together? Who else out there has been longing for this marriage, thirsting for it?
The body is an alchemical vessel. Everything we do with our physical body affects our energetic body. Therefore, taking an hour to workout is a huge dose of potential transformation that is often underutilized! A workout that makes your world a better place is a practice of steady, focused awareness of mind, the merging of breath with movement, and dynamic alignment of the body.
Sounds like a lot to think about? That’s the point!
When we space out as we run on the treadmill or push past our limits in Crossfit we are reinforcing the habit of mindless movement in the world, postural misalignment that creates joint and organ problems, blocks in the flow of energy/chi/prana through our physical, emotional and subtle bodies, strengthening the habit of mindlessness: mindlessness in our work, in our relationships, in our eating, in our decision making around our well-being.
In our culture right now exercise one of the main ways that people disembody and move away from the experience of the moment. When we practice presence while we workout, each workout is an opportunity to fine tune ourselves from within.
We walk out of yoga class feeling amazing. Not only are our bodies buzzing butsomehow our inner compass feels realigned, the race pace of our thoughts a bit slower, and the din of self-doubt and judgement a bit quieter. Why should our workouts be any different?
The sanskrit word yoga translates as “to yoke,” to connect two things together to create a unity. Yoga is the wholeness the arises through the relationship between two seemingly disparate things: the mind and the body, the body and the spirit, the breath and movement, peanut butter and jelly- exercise and meditation.
To experience our bodies as a manifestation of wholeness in every arena of our lives, not just in theory but in practice, is the highest goal of mindful movement.
Practice intentional movement and dynamic symmetry, practice TRX-Yoga with me on Tuesday mornings at 10:30a, the Working Body. See you on the mat. ;)
This is the first article in this blog series exploring the question: Can we bring fitness, meditation, intention, breathwork and healing alignment together? Stay tuned for articles and videos on how to use these tools in your workouts.