Jumping Boxes

Can you do a box jump? I certainly cannot. It’s a popular exercise among fitness enthusiasts. It takes incredible explosive power and lots of hours training the leg muscles to coordinate the movement of jumping vertically on to a raised platform. Seeing someone do this and understanding intellectually how it works are a good start, but doing a box jump requires practice. Lots and lots of practice. If you intend to perform a box jump in the long term, this also requires maintenance training, to keep the skills and muscle memory sharp. After not doing box jumps for a while, it might seem difficult to get right back into it, but after a while it all comes back.

I think it’s pretty obvious where I’m going with this.

On Bells and Breaths

Many mindfulness meditations begin and end with the sounding of a bell. I don't believe, and many would agree, that there isn't anything magical about this. I use a bell mostly to serve as a marker for a period of formal meditation and also as a reminder to bring awareness and compassion to the present moment. Over time, the sound becomes associated with the experience of awareness in the present, and an attitude of compassion toward it. Not exactly what Pavlov and his dogs were going for, but for our purposes in practicing mindfulness, how very useful! Taking this quite a few steps further, what if other sensations could serve the same function as our mindfulness bells? What about standing up from our seat? Taking a first step in the morning? Unlocking our phones? Swiping our Metrocards? Taking a breath...

The idea here is not to strive toward constant mindful awareness of every waking moment. Rather, to investigate and explore how some experiences may shift when other common, everyday occurrences serve as a reminder to be present. Bells and cushions are great, though it might also be interesting to expand the landscape of where, when, and how mindfulness happens. 

Train Traffic Ahead

Something I struggle with pretty regularly are the negative feelings of hostility, frustration, and annoyance when stuck on the subway. There feels like such a loss of control to have my time be at the whim of the MTA on a daily basis. 

I find myself asking the question, "Even considering a train delay, do I arrive late to where I'm going, or am I on time?" It seems that the train often "feels" like it's flying and making great time, and sometimes it's constantly dragging, and "feels" like I must be over 30 minutes behind schedule. Am I? Are these feelings accurate? Are the connected thoughts really facts?

No matter how the ride "feels," can I be with that feeling before it mutates into something negative?

Mind Hyphen Body

I would love to stop using "Mind-Body" as a term in general, as if hyphenating those two separate words is enough to communicate that the non-material mind and the material body are really the same thing. It's only a concept to say that the mind and the body are interwoven; and, a distorted concept at that. Maybe it's a logical distinction at face value. We look down or into a mirror and think, "That's my body." But, what is it that is having this thought that is separate from what we're looking at? Perhaps it's more accurate to say that we have a body which has six, not five, senses: sight, taste, touch, hearing, smell, and mentation. 

What would the world look like if we simply had a single word that clearly communicated the sameness of what we currently describe as different but mysteriously interconnected things?

Monkey Business

I read a story recently about how ancient hunters would hunt monkeys. I had thoughts come up like, "Wait, why would you want to hunt for monkeys?" and feelings of sadness and worry for these poor monkeys. But in any case, the story holds a meaningful lesson about attachment, so I thought I'd share.

The story goes...ancient hunters would cleverly attach an emptied out coconut to a tree, and then bait the shell with a banana. The hole in the coconut was just big enough to scoop out the insides and put in a banana, and the hole was just the right shape for a monkey to squeeze a hand in. The hole was not big enough, however, for a closed fist with a banana in it to be pulled out of the coconut. 

Sometimes to avoid falling into traps, we have to learn to loosen our grip.