Experience flow in Central Arkansas at a Flow By The River Total Fitness Boot Camp. BrickhouseBodymind.com is a mind body fitness blog, encouraging personal transformation through informative articles on integral lifestyle issues such as stress relief, sexuality and relationships, and transformative practices like strength training, meditation and yoga. The website is designed to help you train your body, sharpen your mind, and unleash your spirit, making total fitness a reality for everyone.
Okay, so a lot has been happening. I got sick, my precious 12-year-old golden retreiver, Grace died the middle of last week, and I have been assimilating some new training techniques. Long story short, I’m still working on the mindfulness in your workout article. However, I have the chance to watch a few more talks on TED.com, introduced in the last blog entry, and I thought it might be fun to share a couple of my favorites with you. This is, of course, a two-way street, so I’d love for you guys to share your favorite talks in the comments below. And the article on bringing more mindfulness to your workouts is coming soon, so stay tuned.
The purpose of this post is two-fold. 1) I want to introduce you guys to a terrific website at TED.com. 2) I want to prime your minds with a bit of homework for an article coming later this week on making all elements of your life better through the cultivation of mindfulness.
Last week my dad turned me on to a website called TED.com. It’s a fantastic resource for anyone interested in learning more about science, technology, art, design, business, culture, etc. The website’s subtitle is “Ideas worth spreading,” and it presents (completely free of charge) lectures on all aforementioned subjects by some very knowledgeable and compelling characters. The talke are generally around 20 minutes in length and are well worth the time.
So, homework assignment 1 - check out the following lecture from TED.com. If the player below doesn’t work for you, just follow this direct link. It’s 18 minutes 44 seconds.
Okay, how do you feel now? I for one was very enthralled by this talk. I can tell you I had a visceral reaction to her pulling out the actual brain and spinal cord there. The idea that so much flimsy meat is what controls everything my body does is at the same time astounding and a little sickening. It’s hard to imagine that lumpy mass with its slinky tail, housed inside the bony structures of my body is what makes my human awareness with all its exquisite obsessions possible.
And this brings me to my point. The integral approach seeks to understand life from all available perspectives. This lecture you’ve just watched is a perfect example of the different perspectives on the human mind.
There is an external, scientific perspective illustrated by bringing out the physical brain. This makes a lot of people (myself included) a little uncomfortable precisely because it reduces the special-ness of the human being to so much squishy flesh. It reminds us how vulnerable we really are.
There is an internal, personal perspective, which is what she describes as she experiences the stroke. Notice too, that this perspective changes as she goes back and forth from right-brain euphoria to left-brain panic.
There is finally an internal, interpersonal perspective illustrated by the phone call she makes to her colleague in an attempt to get help. Because of her situation, they have a difficult time communicating and agreeing on what’s happening in her head, but there is finally a mutual understanding that she needs help.
Now for homework assignment 2 - check out this video of Ken Wilber manipulating his brainwaves by meditating while hooked up to an EKG machine. It’s 10 minutes 10 seconds.
This again drives home the concept of multiple perspectives. What I really want you all to get a handle on before my next article on mindfulness is that our internal, personal experiences are inextricably linked to external, physical correlates. This is the mind-body connection we’ve all heard about for so long. It’s for real. Furthermore, this also works the other way. Our physical state of being manifests in our mental/emotional state of being.
You truly are a bodymind unit.
Please comment below if you have thoughts on the videos in this post, or if you want to share your own experiences with the body-mind connection. And be sure to check back later this week for tips on bringing more mindfulness into your life.
First off, a quick apology for letting nearly two weeks go by without a post. I have been earnestly training for this race, as well as getting together material for a string of features over the next couple of weeks. There’s a new episode of BrickhouseBodymindTV going live tomorrow, followed closely by a long article on using the yogic bandhas to enhance core strength and ensure proper alignment in all you do, then I’ll be releasing the BrickhouseBodymind Blueprints for effective warmups and cooldowns that go along with the intelligent stretching articles. So again, sorry for the lengthy absence.
That said, the OT50 is actually two races, one that is 50 km (approximately 31 miles) and another that is 50 miles, both of which started at Maumelle Park just outside Little Rock at 6:00 a.m. on April 19, 2008. The bulk of the distance in both races ran along the Ouachita Trail from its trailhead at Pinnacle Mountain State Park and followed it around the north side of Lake Maumelle. The outbound leg included a jaunt up the east side of Pinnacle Mountain, which is a steep climb from about 400 feet above sea level to the summit at 1011 feet. Here’s a map of the course with landmarks and mile markers, or you can download this kmz file to scope out the Ouachita Trail 50k course for 2008 in Google Earth.
Editor’s Note – What follows are my personal impressions and interpretations of Scott Sonnon’s latest book, Prasara Yoga: Flow Beyond Thought. My use of the term “integral,” both in the title of this article and throughout the body of it, to describe Coach Sonnon’s work is not meant in any way to confuse it with nor to marginalize Sri Swami Satchidinanda’s Integral Yoga Hatha or Sri Aurobindo’s The Integral Yoga, both of which stand on their own as seminal works. I only mean to indicate how Scott’s approach employs the primary integral strategy (which produces the All-Quadrant integral model described in my article on Integral Fitness) of assimilating truths from all sources available, whether ancient, modern, or somewhere in between, in order to present the most complete picture of human development possible.
I’d like to start by thanking one of my readers, Duff (of fallingfruit.tv and precisionchange.com), for turning me on to the work of martial arts champion and Circular Strength Training® developer Scott Sonnon. For a voracious seeker of light like myself, personal development can be charted along a path upon which the most significant twists and turns are tied to landmarks such as the reading of a specific book or the discovery of a specific writer or teacher.
At age 29, my own path has several of these major landmarks – Roshi Philip Kapleau’s The Three Pillar’s of Zen; the wonderful fiction of Tom Robbins, which led me to Alan Watt’s The Book on the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are; my first yoga teacher, Matt Krepps, who pointed me toward Godfrey Devereux’s Dynamic Yoga, and the work of Jed McKenna; the fiercely voluminous library of Ken Wilber; and now Scott Sonnon, who has empowered me to take yet another turn in my personal journey.
What Scott Sonnon presents in his latest book, Prasara Yoga: Flow Beyond Thought, is a digitally digestible, postmodern path to enlightenment. With the human body as the vehicle, it is an exquisitely sophisticated, integral approach to Hatha Yoga.
Juggling the tasks of working on this mind-body fitness blog of mine, doting on my stunningly sexy wife, and working a full-time job makes finding time to work out and burn off all those beers I drink on the weekends a difficult task. I try to be creative in working more activity into my off hours, but those are egregiously limited, so my solution to this problem is to get more creative in trying to make my working hours more productive … and by productive I don’t mean hammering out more TPS Reports, I mean burning off more calories during my workday so I don’t have to work as hard in my precious off time to stay fit.
For this article I put together my top ten tips for burning more calories during your workday. If you follow even half of these, I guarantee you’ll be ahead of the pack when it comes to staying lean and mean.
