Mental Fitness Now™

Today I want to talk about two very important qualities that you start to build within ourself through any form of mind-body relaxation and/or awareness practice. People reading this article will be coming from a lot of different backgrounds, for some their awareness practice may be simple body-scanning to relax the muscles in their body and manage stress. For others it may be in the form of a regular spiritual contemplation and reflection. Either way, whenever you do any form of activity that stimulates the relaxation response you create an inner space where there is an opportunity to build what I call your natural intelligence and natural dignity. Consciously understanding and thinking about these two qualities can help us to develop them faster and more deeply in combination with any mental relaxation or awareness practice that you may have.

Natural intelligence.

Natural intelligence is simply your innate ability to learn, problem solve and generally figure things out from DIRECT OBSERVATION. When your mind and body are relaxed and calm, you have a NATURAL FACILITY to just look at things and learn about what works and what doesn’t. This natural intelligence does not require a philosophy (though by using it you may develop one), it does not require complex conceptual knowledge, it DOES require you to be able to have enough confidence and inner calm to start to trust and use it effectively. Here are a few example of where I developed and used it in my life:

- At art school as a sculpture student, I had a lot of technical problems that were involved in how to make sculpture effectively; How tall can I build this clay sculpture before it falls over? How can I communicate an emotional idea that I have in my head in a silent three-dimensional form? How can I make an effective sculpture avoiding any unnecessary processes that harm the environment (e.g. fibreglass etc…)? All of these questions can be informed by asking others, looking at other artworks and so on, but for the most part what I needed was just to keep looking, keep observing, trial and error, using my natural intelligence.

- As a mental fitness and life coach. One thing that I have discovered in my teaching and coaching career is that learning different modalities of coaching and learning will only get me so far in terms of bringing real benefit to the diverse group of people whom I coach and assist. The fulcrum of my coaching practice (and the one that I believe makes me the most valuable to others) is the ability to look at people’s lives and situations with my natural intelligence. This enables me to enter into the person’s life, understand its context, observe it, and then ON THAT BASIS offer a series of suggestions that are going to be relevant and useful to that person and that will help them direct their life in the way that they want it to go.

 Natural dignity

Natural dignity is something that every creature has. For example if you look at a mouse or an ant going about its daily business you will start to observe that, whatever dangers it is fending off or jobs that it is doing, they are basically happy to be themselves. An ant is happy to be an ant, it is not thinking about becoming a grasshopper. A mouse is comfortable in its own skin, in its “mouseness”. It is not trying to be something else, and in this you can sense a natural dignity, an unconscious self respect that the mouse possesses in being what it is.

Humans however, amidst all their mental complexity and egoic insecurity very easily loose touch with their natural dignity, the dignity of their humanness and just being who they are. Humans often look at other humans and want to be the other that they see. They look at their bodies and want another, better looking body. They look at their skill sets, consider them inferior and want someone else’s that seem better. Basically we as humans have lost touch with the natural sense of dignity that comes from being comfortable as we are, warts and all. Natural dignity is completely different from being lazy or a slob. Laziness and slobbiness is almost always accompanied by low self esteem and self loathing “I want to be something else, but I have given up trying” it says. Natural dignity is just a sense that you have, when your mind and body relax enough for it to come to the surface that says “I am comfortable in my uniqueness and the validity of my place in this world and in the universe, and I don’t have to validate myself to feel dignified in who I am”.

 So, whatever form of self awareness and or relaxation practice that you have (if you don’t have one, I encourage you to get it!), I would encourage you to nurture and develop your own natural intelligence and dignity within that space.

 © Toby Ouvry 2010, please do not reproduce without permission