One of the things that I have been really focusing on developing in 2010 is the way I combine my mental and physical fitness. Basically this has centred around using physical workouts to alternate between intensely focused and energized states of mind with deeply relaxed, thoughtless awareness. I’m going to explain it in the context of a weekly circuit training session that I do, but if you understand the basic principles you can apply it to whatever form of exercise you are doing. Here is the basic process I use:

Stage 1:

After warming up, I will prepare all the equipment I need to do the exercises in my circuit training session. I will then spend 5-10 breaths breathing deeply, relaxing my body as deeply as possible, and making my mind thoughtless, empty and yet fully aware.

Stage 2:

I then move into position to do my first exercise, let’s say a shoulder press. I pick up the weights, get in position and really intensively focus my emotional and mental energy into my physical body, and in particular on the muscle groups that will be working in the exercise.

Stage 3:

For the duration of that exercise I will then work physically hard, keeping my mind and emotions in that very intensified state, and channelling all the mind energy into the physical movement. I use the mind to really train the muscles to work hard for that short time.

Stage 4:

Once the shoulder press is finished, I then take 3-7 deep slow breaths, moving back into the deeply relaxed non-conceptual state of body and mind. The body is deeply relaxed, the mind thoughtless, empty and yet fully aware.

Stage 5:

I then move to the next exercise, intensively focus my emotional and mental energy on my body and relevant muscle groups, and do the exercise in a very intense, focused emotional, mental and physical state. And so it goes on….

The whole circuit training workout is spent alternating between these two states

• Deeply relaxed, thoughtless awareness between exercises
• Intensely focused mentally, emotionally and physically during the exercise

Try it, I can’t describe how much I have been enjoying it. Some of the benefits include:

• Physical exercise ceases to be mechanical or boring, the mind and body come together in a highly synchronized unit
• Concentration in general and the ability to alternate effectively between relaxed states and intensely focused states of mind increases exponentially
• Physical fitness and muscle quality improves and accelerates
• You come out of the workout with a mind that feels diamond clear, and a body that feels deeply worked out, and yet relaxed
• Your ability to channel your willpower into the present moment increases dramatically. The confidence you gain will flow out into other areas of your life.
• If you are a meditator like me, you will have found a way of combining your meditation practice with the time you devote each week to physical fitness

© Toby Ouvry 2010, you are welcome to use this article, but you must seek Toby’s permission first! Contact: info@mentalfitnessnow.com

Over lunch today I gave a talk to a company group on “Success in finding work—life balance”. It was a pleasant group to give the talk to, one of the reasons for this being that they were prepared to engage in a bit of conversation and debate around the issues that I was flagging up with them. We spent quite some time reflecting on how to improve the quality of our commuting time, and I just want to share some of the things that we looked at as I think really they are relevant to all of us.

Everyone spends time each day commuting, whether this be in the sense of travelling to and from work, or between appointments, picking up and dropping off kids from school, play dates, social functions and so on. I myself probably spend an average of an hour and a half of work related commuting per day, plus another half hour of family related walking, collecting and so on. So, that is at least two hours per day, five or six days a week for a huge chunk of my life. Seems like it is really worth investing a bit of conscious care and attention in right?

Here are the three main areas that were highlighted in our discussion:

1) Don’t unconsciously spend the whole of your time travelling from work thinking about work (or the activity that you have been engaged in prior to travelling).

This is very easy to do; you finish work, start to drift home, and before you know it you are back home forty five minutes later and you realize that all you have been doing is thinking about stuff that you were doing that afternoon. Rather than doing this, try and consciously use the travel home time as a way of putting down your work, moving into a relaxed space, and preparing yourself to enter the evenings activities with a new and fresh mind. If you are driving, you can do this simply by paying attention to the physical and sensory process of driving itself, rather than driving automatically as your thinking mind is doing something else. If you are using public transport, take some of that time to do some simple deep breathing and muscle relaxation.

2) Find good quality material to engage with on the way home.

I do a lot of my listening to personal development, meditation and other related topics that really interest me on my MP3 player. Because I make use of my commuting time in this way I actually listen to a whole range of really stimulating and mind expanding material that I would never have the time to listen to otherwise. A little bit of planning and preparation for my travelling enables me to use my commuting time in this way which feels wonderfully productive.

If you are in a car, making sure that you have good quality talks or music to listen to on your stereo can really make your travel time much more meaningful and enjoyable. Taking the time just to remember to put that book in your bag before you leave for work can make the quality of your journey on public transport far better.

3) Don’t get affected by other people’s negative energy on the way to and from work.

A little secret for you; there are many, many people in this world who are just happy to spend their travelling time stewing, looking miserable and are only too happy to pass their feelings on to you! When I step into a MRT or train carriage, one of the first decisions that I make is not to catch the infectious psychological diseases that so many of my miserable looking co-travellers seem to be labouring under. This is not always easy, because if we are tired we may not naturally be feeing all that wonderful ourself, so it really requires a conscious effort to say NO to the negativity, and focus our mind on making the quality of our time on the train or in the car as enjoyable and relaxing as possible.

There were many other things that we could have looked at around this issue, but these were the three that were overtly discussed. As with so many thing in life, we start to use our commuting time well when we realize what an opportunity it is, and make a conscious decision to start making positive use of it. 

© Toby Ouvry 2010, you are welcome to use this article, but you MUST seek Toby’s permission first.

This is a quote from someone called Ann Landers (whom ever she is, I don’t actually know). I found it while re-reading a book called Stress Management by Charlesworth and Nathan, which I would recommend to anyone. Anyway, it made as big an impact upon me the second time as it did when I first read it, even though I had completely forgotten about it in the meantime. I think it is such an interesting exercise to try and watch yourself when you are by yourself, and really have an honest look at who you become when there is no one there to try and maintain an appearance for. It is actually quite a difficult thing to do as we have such resistance to taking a good, honest reflective look at ourselves (we are afraid of what it might tell us?) but since we are the person that we have to spend 24 hours with day in day out, is it not worth investing regularly in an honest and reflective relationship with who we really are?