By now most everybody must have got the message that some sort of exercise is important in maintaining health. But something else which the medical establishment is waking up to, perhaps rather belatedly, is mindfulness; only last night I saw a snippet on a local news programme about how arthritis sufferers are benefitting from using mindfulness to help control pain.
Mindfulness is not something new; people have been practising it for at least 2,500 years! It involves simply paying attention to the present moment, a moment-to-moment awareness of what is going on in our experience. And whilst mindfulness is associated with meditation, when it is combined with exercise, it creates forms of movement such as Tai Chi and Chi Kung which are particularly powerful in terms of recovering, maintaining and enhancing health and well-being.
You can get something of a sense of what mindful movement is like by watching an experienced Tai Chi practitioner; and also by watching the way some animals move – think, for instance, of how a cat moves as she stalks her prey. Her mind is fully focused on what she is doing, in fact her whole being is concentrated on the task. (Not, however, the kind of concentration that you can see in humans who are forcing their mind on to something, brows furrowed.) She moves gracefully and harmoniously, flowing apparently effortlessly from one movement to the next. This kind of movement is strikingly different from, say, the movement of someone on a gym treadmill with music pounding through their earphones, maybe even watching a video monitor, and a mind which, perhaps, is jumping from one thought to the next.
As the cat moves, she moves in harmony with her environment; cats aren’t usually clumsy. Her movement is relaxed and supple, muscles only contracting when they need to, again in contrast to how humans often move, muscles habitually tensed to no purpose. You can get a sense that in the simple process of prowling through the garden, the cat is exercising her whole body.
Perhaps you can say that the cat inhabits her body, again in contrast to how humans can be; the runner on the treadmill watching TV has their attention away from, outside of , their body. Even, we could say, they are alienated from their body. It is as if their body is something separate, which they know they need to look after, rather in the way they might walk the dog, but which they only experience at arm’s length. Without mindfulness, body and mind are not harmonised.
Of course there is no reason why the person on the treadmill cannot make mindfulness part of what they are dong - ditching the earphones is a start. But the beauty of things like Tai Chi and Chi Kung is that mindfulness is so essential to their practice. It would be hardly possible, for instance, to do Tai Chi or Chi Kung whilst at the same time watching the telly.
Of course humans have a lot going for them that cats can only dream of. In a way the price we have paid for the much greater mental sophistication we have is the loss of the natural and supple way the cat inhabits her body. It is not that we can go back and become animal again, even if we want to. Rather, the mindfulness we develop through the practice of things like Chi Kung and Tai Chi gives us the opportunity to re-acquire something of the grace and fluidity of, for instance, the cat, without sacrificing the best of what makes us human. This is a deeply satisfying experience in which we re-connect both with our body and with the world in which it moves. Indeed the combination of our distinctively human self-consciousness with the body awareness of the cat makes for an enhanced level of being in which we feel deeply at home in our body and fully connected with the world without losing our sense of our individuality and distinctness, which is in fact enhanced. We have all the languid connectedness of the cat combined with the pristine self-awareness of the human.
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