Living consciously can require so much energy. As you know, an hour of mindful breathing and movement can take on quite a bit of our energy and concentration. Now try keeping this focus as you leave your mat and enter your daily challenges at home, and at work. The truth is we can’t do interacting with a physical world through consciousness alone – we would need to recruit our physical selves as well, that would require our mind and body to work in coherence. Everything in our physical form is a muscle. How we choose to nourish it to support and function in its most optimal way depends on our daily mindful habits.
This brings me to our most important muscle – the brain. When we spend time in daily meditation, it strengthens our muscle memory. With practice, the neurological circuitry in our brain fires and wires to create strong muscle memory that makes it easier for us to connect to the present moment. But what then?
Knee Jerk Reactions
With mindfulness, we get a quick insight into our automatic reactions before we act upon them. It’s a 3-second window of a chance to think before we react. With mindfulness, those three seconds are an opportunity to choose the best response to circumstances that could, depend on our past mental imprints, create a further negative outcome for us in the future.
A great analogy taken from The Diamond Cutter;
Imagine going to pick up a coffee on the edge of your desk and accidentally grabbing a cup of hydrochloric acid instead (something you would find quite commonly in a jewelry factory). You’re having an animated conversation with someone, so you don’t notice; you raise the cup to your face; you start to tip it; and then at the last minute, you catch a tiny whiff of the acid and set the cup down pronto, with a sigh of relief.
So part of why we do this work is to regain the awareness of our habitual knee-jerk reactions (based on our past conditioning) and mindfully operating in a new and improved state of understanding the difference between “causing an effect” rather than ’cause and effect’.
More about mental imprints in my next post.