Awareness is passive. You are aware of the sensation of the chair you’re sitting in. However, your attention is on this screen and the words of this text. Attention is active. You choose where to place it. In exercise, people can be more or less aware of their bodies. In a past meditation workshop, I asked the students to describe their experience of a meditation on bodily sensation. A man said that he imagined his arm and then he imagined sensing it. This was a big problem! He was interacting with his imagination rather than the body. There is nothing closer and more immediate to us than the sensations of the body. However, our modern, counter-natural lifestyle often puts us more in our minds than our bodies. Your arm is always there and it is always sending sensations to the brain, but are you paying attention to them? Consider the opposite end of the spectrum of attention in the body relative to the man lost in his imagination - the wild animal. The wild animal is always acutely aware of its environment and its body within it. It must be so in order to survive. You can see this in the way that an animal rapidly reacts in response to a sound or scent. For all of the power of the human mind, it is usually limited in the scope and strength of its awareness.
Meditation is the act of intentionally directing your attention toward some object, which results in the adaptation of awareness. I describe awareness as passive and attention as intentional, directed. We can cultivate attention through mental training, which is commonly called meditation. In physical training, you can seek cardiovascular capability through running, strength through weightlifting, and flexibility through yoga. Mental training is similar in that different methods create different adaptations of the mind and brain. The adaptation I want you to create is to increase attention in the body. In this pursuit, the object of meditation is your own body. Your goal is to become more aware of your sensations and thus be able to more skillfully direct the body's movement. Your performance of yoga will rapidly improve with the application of attention and resulting growth of bodily awareness. This is expressed organically as improved function of the cerebellum, the nervous system, and the muscular system.
In a 2015 interview with Tim Ferris, Arnold Schwarzenegger described his use of meditation in strength training.
I also figured out that I could use my workouts as a form of meditation because I concentrate so much on the muscle and I have my mind inside the bicep when I do my curls. I have my mind inside the pectoral muscles when I do my bench press. So I’m really inside and it’s like I gain a form of meditation because you have no chance of thinking or concentrating on anything else at that time, but just that training that you do. So there’s many ways of meditation and I benefit from all of those. Today I’m much calmer because of that and much more organized and much more tranquil because of that.
There are three efforts needed to achieve mastery of the mind in the body. The first effort is to cultivate more attention in the body and to be able to relax it at will. The second effort is to study anatomy so that you know what structures you are sensing and using. The third effort is to activate the muscle as fully as possible and in coordination with other muscles in exercise, whether it be yoga or another modality.
