An Entrepreneur’s Gym Workout for the 3.0 World - Exercising Body, Mind and Intuition in a Single Wo
For some time I’ve leveraged my gym training for reflection, meditation and to access intuition. I’ve found exercise to be a great opportunity to access stillness and truth and to improve mental fitness at the same time as physical fitness.
I often start my workouts on the treadmill where I state my intentions for the workout. For example to unchain my body from the limitations of my mind; that my body can be as strong as it wants, as healthy as it wants, as muscular as it wants…; that through the movement and spaces in between, my body will remember the truth and potential of itself, letting go of any falsehoods it may have accepted and is holding emotionally and to bring itself back to a state of optimal function.
After a couple of minutes during my jog I’ll seed my intuition by asking open ended questions like, “What do I need to know for my meeting with Russ?”. I ask the questions of the Universe – you could ask them of Source, your higher Self…whatever you call your sense of a higher power.
I’ll then integrate meditation. I figure why just let my mind wander with a lot of useless or even destructive thoughts when I could be improving my mental fitness too. In his book Search Inside Yourself, Google engineer Chade-Meng Tan writes that meditation is exercise for the mind. When you go to the gym you are training your body so that it can gain more strength and physical abilities. In the same way meditation is like training your mind so that it can gain more mental abilities including becoming calmer and more perceptive. You can focus your attention more strongly and for longer.
So, why not combine the two!?
I’ll shift my awareness such that I’m the observer to my body running on the treadmill. I then pick a single point in front of me and stare at it softly to bring my mind into a state of presence – not “me” but rather my mind as I believe that the real “I” is always in a state of presence…which is covered by the noise and stories of my mind. If my gaze moves left I‘ve noted that it’s often associated with a thought entering my mind about the past; if my eyes move right I’ve noticed it’s often associated with a thought entering my mind about the future. In either case I witness the thought going through my mind and bring the gaze of my eyes back to the center point. If I feel tension or discomfort in my body from any of the thoughts I observe where I feel that in my body and witness it without judgment, again, asking my body to come back into alignment with truth, until the discomfort is dissolved and bring my awareness back to the center point. If the thought that I witness happens to be an answer to one of my questions that I asked earlier I’ll make note of it as a mental bookmark to return to later. I’ll then ask more open ended questions, return to a singular focus on the center point and see what comes next.
Similarly when I’m training with machines or free weights I’ll let my self become the witness to my mind being the neutral observer to my body performing the exercise. Interestingly I find from this neutral place that my body is free to perform optimally which often includes more repetitions or higher weight than what it might have done based on some arbitrary goal my mind thought was “right”. This is partially because being in a neutral or positive mindset, versus thinking negative entropic thoughts, has a positive effect on the body’s energetic field. So, ironically if you use your workout as a mental catharsis dwelling on negative thoughts, these thoughts will have a negative weakening effect on the body counter to the whole point of working out.
I believe that exercising my body, intuition and mind together gives me a significant edge over my peers who don’t. It optimizes my time and results in more physical, mental, and spiritual benefits than I’m probably even aware. For further inspiration I’ve included below some excerpts from Chade-Meng Tan’s book Search Inside Yourself which I recommend to anyone wanting to become more mindful.
About Rob Pilz
A financial and business creative, I love building and optimizing businesses. With a talent for creating leverage, my current passion is creating methodologies for making businesses humanly sustainable and high performing. Always looking for ways to improve the odds of business success I’ve developed a process combining reason and intuition to make better faster decisions that I call Zero Point Decision MakingTM. I welcome your questions or comments at my website www.robpilz.com, to my email address at rob@robpilz.com or phone U.S. 646-480-0507, Canada 604-722-5361.
Related reading:
Article by Entrepreneur and Business Advisor Rob Pilz – 8 Things I Learned As A Business Executive Developing My Intuition
Search Inside Yourself by Google Engineer Chade-Meng Tan and Book notes
Related quotes from the book: “Meditation is exercise for the mind. When you go to the gym you are training your body so that it can gain more physical abilities. If you lift weights you will eventually become stronger. If you regularly jog your times will be faster and you will be able to run farther. In the same way mediation is like training your mind so that it can gain more mental abilities. For example, if you do a lot of mediation exercises your mind becomes calmer and more perceptive. You can focus your attention more strongly and for longer. One important similarity between exercise and meditation is that in both cases growth comes from overcoming resistance. For example, when you are weight training every time you flex your biceps in resistance to the weight of dumbbells, your bicep muscles grow a little bit stronger. The same process happens during mediation. Every time your attention wanders away (from your breath) and you bring it back, it is like flexing your biceps. Your muscle of attention grows a bit stronger. A second similarity between exercise and mediation is that they can both significantly change the quality of your life... If you never exercise and you put yourself on a regular exercise regime, a few weeks or months later you may find many significant changes in yourself. You will have more energy, you will get more stuff done, you will get sick less often, you look better in the mirror and you just feel great about yourself. The same is true for meditation. After a few weeks or months of starting a regular meditation regime you have more energy; your mind becomes, calmer, clearer and more joyful. You get sick less. You smile more. Your social life improves – because you smile more, and you feel great about yourself.”
“Train at the level of physiology. We can usually experience emotions more vividly in the body than in the mind. Therefore when you are trying to perceive an emotion we usually get more bang for our buck if we bring our attention to the body rather than the mind. More importantly bringing the perception to the body enables a high resolution perception of emotions. High resolution perception means your perception becomes so refined across both time and space that you can watch an emotion the moment it is arising. You can perceive its subtle changes as it waxes and wanes and you can watch it the moment it ceases. This ability is important because the better we can perceive our emotions the better we can manage them. When we are able to perceive emotions arising and changing in slow motion we can become so skillfull at managing them it is almost like living that cool scene in the movie The Matrix…”
“A useful reason to develop a high resolution perception of the body is to strengthen our intuition. A lot of our intuition comes from our body. And learning to listen to it can be very fruitful. Many studies show, as demonstrated in Malcom Gladwell’s book blink “ that the body provides physiological responses to the environment long before the mind notices. “There may be a neurological explanation for why intuition is experienced in the body. Mathew Lieberman’s review of research showed evidence suggesting that the basil ganglia are the neuroanatomical basis of both implicit learning and intuition. The story behind basil ganglia is once again best told by our friend Daniel Goleman. The basil ganglia observes everything we do in life, every situation, and extracts decision rules. Our life wisdom on any topic is stored in the basil ganglia. The basil ganglia is so primitive that it has zero connectivity to the verbal cortex. It can’t tell us what it knows in words. It tells us in feelings. It has a lot of connectivity to the emotional centers of the brain and the gut. It tells us this is right and this is wrong as a gut feeling. That may be why intuition is experienced in the body and the gut but it cannot be easily verbalized. “