Intro
In our modern complex society, it's very easy to become mindless. Actually, in any society or time period, it's very easy to become mindless. Mindfulness is a difficult skill to master and like anything, requires practice and more importantly, guidance and exemplars.
Mindfulness is often talked about in self-help discourse and traces back historically to many practices. As a teacher and more so as a martial artist and coach, mindfulness is very much alive in Karate and Judo. Mindfulness in both past and present contexts, is a multidimensional concept representing the amount of centuries it has aged through. Below is an exploration of how mindfulness can be applied to many disciplines and how it has many layers.
Mindfulness in Judo
As a Judo practitioner, 'uchi-komi'/entry practices is important to understand how a throw technique starts. This importance of how you start a technique can be likened to the sentiment that we need to learn how to walk first to run. In Judo, we need to learn how to optimally start the throw to end the throw (let's not worry about submissions today). A good Judo-Ka would not throw with tension and excessive force. The very name of 'Judo' translates to English as the 'Gentle Way'. To many, Judo may be misconceived as requiring solely brute force than technique. Here, Judo would exemplify the importance of mindfulness. It is this mindfulness which highlights the benefits of calmness and an open mind, which are prerequisites to understanding the physics and mechanisms to launching someone into the air and to the ground. Only then can we appreciate grip, where our weak links are, foot placement and how we can be more efficient with our energy. This takes time! It's very easy to skew this process by doing more simpler component training like strength training. And of course, there is no right answer as some may learn via competing, self-defence or through YouTube, who knows. Don't forget, just because you win, doesn't mean you know everything.
If we take this microcosm of Judo to the complexity and multi-dimensional meta of life, mindfulness sets the tone, the beginning of all your practices in a conscientious and conscious manner. It helps bring forth the voice of reason in the back of your mind to our otherwise impulsive, reactive and emotional raw state. This can be for when you wake up to when you begin work to when you start your car to when you start writing a message to someone.
"Use your common sense!" he said angrily...
Let's step out of this Judo space. I often hear frustrated voices day to day,
"Use common sense!"
"Why can't people just use their common sense?!"
When I try to find the root cause of this perhaps increasing social paradigm, I find myself coming to the same conclusion. We don't practice 'mindfulness' day to day, in everything we do. Common sense is actually there for most people. It's somewhere, it's just not readily available. These small practices (or the lack of) extends to a societal level. As a society, we are practicing more mindlessness than mindfulness. And we shouldn't blame society or anyone for that matter. Rather, I encourage us to take up individual responsibility to appreciate mindfulness and how this concept and practice can help our society. Indeed, "common sense" becomes available when we are mindful. How you do anything is how you do everything. When we are mindful, our voice of reasoning becomes louder, and we become more conscious. We are then better equiped to make our resulting actions more representative of our mindful minds. From personal experience, this practice of mindfulness guided me through turbulent emotions in a tough moment. For example, when I was anxious/scared of falling off the edge of Mount Kosciusko during my summit, being mindful helped me pick the better choice rather than mindlessly reacting.
What does mindfulness practice look like day to day?
If how we do anything is how you do everything, then what is something we do all the time? Breathing and thinking. Therefore, mindful/deliberate breathing and meditation are keys towards snowballing/ripple effecting/butterfly effecting these practices to other practices in our lives. Take a moment to think, what are your practices day to day?
We should first take control over our breath and then take control over our mind. Breathe through your nose and fill up your stomach (diaphragm) with air. Then empty the stomach. As a personal trainer, I see many people breathing in and their stomach shrinks. Practice the inverse. Like anything, practice this slowly and deliberately till it becomes more automatic. In Karate in Japan, my father tells me, they practice this breath-work for 3 years before they get serious about practicing more technique. As we become more mindful of our breath, we can bring this mindfulness to other parts of our body and mind. The goal, the components required to fulfill the goal and the road map to how to achieve the goal becomes clearer.Oh, my shoulders are so tense and raised. My posture is poor. Why am I feeling nerves in my stomach? Why do I struggle to unconditionally surrender and love?
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