Bicep Curl for the Brain

Hey, welcome back to your Daily Mindfulness. In today's session, I want to talk about why we can view meditation as a form of mental fitness. You know, we have a gym on almost any street corner. We all know the benefits of taking care of our bodies and we have a rough sense of how we would do that if we wanted to. When it comes to training our minds, we're often not raised with an understanding of what those resources are.

One of the cool things about meditation is that it, it kind of fills that gap. Uh, I know when I was young, a lot of teachers told me you need to pay attention, you need to focus, but none of them actually taught me how to focus. This is the how for a lot of different things related to presence, compassion, openness, vulnerability, empathy, and concentration. I like to think of the meditation almost as a bicep curl for the mind. So if you think about what we're doing, we center our attention in the present moment, or let's just say the breath to keep it easy.

And what happens. We notice the mind wanders or starts to think about other things, we gently bring it back to the breath. Mind wanders, we bring it back. And you see this motion? It looks a lot like this motion, right? So it, in some sense it is a bicep curl for the brain. The weight of the world, the weight of the heaviness of our thoughts is pulling our attention away and we get to bring it back, pulls us away, we bring it back.

In the same way that the weight of the dumbbell pulls the arm down, we pull it back up, pull it down, pull it up. And I think this is a helpful way to frame the meditation simply because we look at the, the, the weight of the dumbbell as an asset. It's an ally. We need it in order to strengthen the bicep. But a lot of times when we think of the mind wandering, it feels like a hindrance, something that's getting in the way of the meditation.

I think we can look at it in the same way we view a dumbbell. Without the mind wandering, we wouldn't have the opportunity to strengthen attention. Without the mind wandering, we wouldn't get to explore what is it like to actually bring our attention back and develop that mental muscle. So framing this practice as a form of mental fitness can make those moments where the mind seems all over the place as opportunities to develop this internal, mental fitness. The kind of fitness that we didn't often get the opportunity to develop while we were growing up, but we can now.

So try taking this perspective in your meditation practice and also throughout your day. We'll talk more about it in a meditation and I'll talk to you there. Until then, take care.