Mindfullness

Several years ago, I believe in 1999, I wrote an article entitled "Be Mindful of your Exercise". It was a promotional article for an exercise video we had produced entitled "Cardio Karaticise".

At the time there was really nothing on the internet about the concept of Mindfulness and exercise. I tried to research it before writing the article and found nothing. Obviously the internet was a smaller place at the time but the fact that there was zero was astounding. Today doing a search on the title brings up 1780 results. Mostly reprints of the article. Further research will find that many others are talking about the subject. Whether it's something that people have recently realized is important or just hadn't hit the internet yet. I don't know. But what is obvious is that many are becoming aware of the importance of learning to control mind and body and unite the two.

In my experience Shou' Shu' is an incredible tool for creating mindfulness. I've experienced others which are great also. But I wouldn't leave Shou' Shu' out of my mindfulness toolbox.

Back when I wrote the article I was barely touching on my realizations of the importance of body awareness. I had looked around at different forms of aerobics and came to the conclusion that what we had was different because of it. In my research I had observed a variety of exercise and coming from my Shou' Shu' background I quickly realized that most forms of exercise were completely mindless. It was quite a shock to me at the time since my experience had all been with exercise which required absolute concentration.