Monday, May 20, 2013

Body-mindfulness for injury prevention

Kit's blog for today (SEE HERE) on mindfulness, raises some interesting points about mindfulness and the body (a favorite topic of mine).  The one I want to briefly expand upon is the one regarding lack of mindfulness and injuring the body. 

As Kit mentions, most of the time when I've injured myself it's via not 'being there' fully in that moment; and more specifically, not having body-mindfulness in that moment.  I've found that some of my worst injuries came doing simple tasks, whilst not paying attention.  Other times I've avoided what should have been a nasty injury via having enough body-awareness to have my body move out of the compromised position.

I once tore my knee ligament quite badly getting out of a chair to check on an essay I'd just printed.  It was about 3am and the essay was due the next day (or the previous day..) at Uni.  My foot got stuck on the bottom of the roller chair as I got up and that was that.  It turned out being a more long-running injury than most, if not all, of the ones I had doing martial arts or strength training. 

This is one reason why developing a second attention, as Kit mentions, that is in the body is so cool.  I personally practice different sites of secondary attention throughout the day - or feel the whole body moving whilst listening to distant and near sounds; or focusing on as many other sensations that I can. 

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