I bought a new stop watch the other day because I have overused my last one. In fact it was just the timer function that I used most over the last couple of years that had cause my watch to wear out. If you come to my yoga classes you will hear my watch beeping to indicate a minute is up and here is why.
Set your timer to One Minute
The power of a Minute was incorporated when I started drills within my warm-up session. I got tired of counting reps and really wanted to just focus on physical sensation of the muscles rather than focusing on how many more reps I have to complete. You see, the idea of mindful awareness to me isn’t about completing a number of reps or counting how many reps I can achieve but really it is about being able to tap deeper into feeling inside my body. The concept works along the principles of Einstein’s theory of relativity; where time is relative to the observer.
If you loose track of time – It’s too easy
Let’s say if you decided to take on walking lunges and you’re going along back and forth feeling into your quads, hamstrings and gluteus and loving the movement and feeling your core activate… then Ding! one minute is over before you could even think about the time. This is a classic example of something that isn’t challenging. You would then choose to decide to either start lunging with weights in your hands or to add an additional movement with your lunch like a side bend to twist.
If the minute feels like forever – it’s challenging
Now you have a 6kg dumbbell on each hand and you start lunging, you can’t help it but it’s so much core engagement needed just stay in a lunch before stepping forward, you’r thighs are starting to burn and you don’t know how many steps you’ve taken but all you are sensing is the sweet burn on of the muscles you’ve set-out to train. You’re wondering when this minute will be up because it’s taking forever….. then your trainer tells you that you have 30s left and all you want to do next is to throw the dumbbell at her! Ha ha! Well my friend, you’ve just made that minute work for you rather then you working for that minute! You Win! …and you don’t even know how many reps you did because in all honesty, it doesn’t matter. What you have just done is slow movement of deep tissue activation, because you are not counting reps any more but instead focusing on form and muscle activation. Complete this with your regular sets and turn your practice into a mindful one.
Applying the Power of a Minute
Really the world is your oyster when it comes to exploring the power of a minute in your own day to day lifestyle. Here are some of my personal exploration of my minute power when it comes to my own mindfulness practices.
- Drinking my cup of coffee
- Enjoying a cup and savouring the first minute of being one with my favourite mug of brew.
- This can be done with any food or drink that you’d like to savour taste and appreciation of flavours
- Mindful walking
- If I’m walking up to the train station or just whilst walking my dog. I start a minute mindful mindful walking, feeling my feet pressing down on the floor, grounding and balancing as I take the next mindful step.
- Breath awareness
- When walking or sitting, or when I’m just looking out the window – taking a minute to focus on taking deep breaths
- Eye Gazing
- While seated in nature, I would set my focus on a leaf, or flower and practice a 1 minute gaze focusing my vision and attention on one object and taking notice of my mind instinctive need to take control but working on holding my attention for 1 minute. (or maybe two if you are looking at increasing your mindfulness practice)
- Active Listening
- Same thing with your eyes, this time listening to sounds with your attention (no judgement) on the nearest or furthest sounds you can hear.
- Sitting with your emotions
- Emotions are truly meant to be felt, sometimes we busy ourselves to avoid the feelings of tough emotions, so a non-threatening one minute of sitting with our feelings (again without judgement) just allowing feelings to be felt.
- Prayer
- This is a very powerful one. I find it useful to set aside a minute to pray for someone who might need a thought whole hearted prayer. Perfect to do while in a traffic jam.
- Minute of gratitude
- A minute of thinking of as many things you are grateful for in your life or current moment.
- ….the list goes on.
Please share in the comments, the things in your awareness you can practice your Power of a Minute. I would love to hear them. x