Issue #59: Mindsculpting & Self Ignorance
Weekly curated resources for movers, creatives, and coaches.
What price do we pay for self-ignorance?
All of the unexamined feelings and desires that linger in the mind just beneath our conscious minds, start to inform the rest of the body. That energy gets distributed through to the rest of our body, collecting tension and developing tics - clenched jaws, “resting-bitch-face,” impotence, uncontrollable twitches. Of course, this all creates a feedback loop where physiology informs the psyche informs physiology informs the psyche as if there ever really was a difference between “psyche” and “physiology.”
Take the word introspection for example, it means “the examination or observation of one's own mental and emotional processes.”
But if we look at the etymology of the word: from the Latin root intro meaning "in, on the inside, within, to the inside." And spek from the Proto-Indo-European root meaning "to observe." Nothing about the word introspection excludes matters of the body.
I was inspired by a passage in a book from the School Of Life
We suffer because there is no easy route to introspection. We cannot open a hatch and locate "ourselves." We are not a fixed destination, but an eternally mobile, boundless, unfocused, vaporous specter whose full nature can only be retrospectively deduced from painfully recollected glimpses and opaque hints. There is no time or vantage point from which to securely decode our archives of experi-ence. There is too much data entering us at every moment for us to easily sift and arrange our sensations with the care and logic they deserve.
The body can be a great starting point on the introspective journey.
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READ, WATCH, LISTEN ⤵
Watch: Relaxation Technique for the Jaw and Facial Musculature
(Length: 2 minutes)
I found this little gem of a technique a few months ago and it’s really helped when I find myself clenching my jaw.
Sponsor: This week’s newsletter is brought to you by Wildfitness. 🤸♂️
Wildfitness hosts movement retreats all around the world. Registration for their next retreat in Menorca, Spain for April is now open. Readers get a 10% discount - just email info@wildfitness.com to book or enquire with ‘motusmade’ in the subject of the email.
Watch: Perspectives on Goals & “Progress”
(Length: 11 minutes)
I really like Jason’s perspective on “de-ambitioning” goals.
“You have to practice frustration management through things such as de-ambition and detachment from some goal that you have. But of course, this then requires us to overcome a seeming contradiction between having a goal that we're going towards but then not investing in it. So what this means is that we need to be able to view our goals and our ambitions as directions with the full knowledge that this direction might change.”
Aesthetically Pleasing Tiny Insight 👀
A wonder visual from a post by Olivier Goetgeluck
Mind Sculpting 🆚 Mind Setting…
I prefer to use a verb, when it comes to the mind, that signals a sense of agency.
Sculpting to me embodies more a possibility of change and transformation than “setting” 🪨
To me the word “set”, that is often used in talk of mind, gives an impression of something that’s set in stone, it has a hardness - almost fixedness - to it.
It gives off a sense of laissez-faire... 🤷
With sculpting a sense of possibility opens of
✔️ deciding which ways of thinking, behaviours, intentions to create
✔️ which to cultivate, refine further
✔️ which negative ones you decide to stop sculpting or ‘dis-energise’
👉 Working with the body, moving and exploring it and your relation to it in new ways, is one way of re-enforcing the sculpture you want to create on the ‘mental plane.’
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To Mindsculpting,
Galo Alfredo Naranjo
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