Mindfulness as flexibility
As I start piloting a program called Finding Mindfulness, I’m reflecting on what I think mindfulness is really about. Once again, I’m drawing on my experience getting physical therapy and massage to find a helpful analogy.
One time, my friend and gifted massage therapist Ron Aur Hod told me that my problem wasn’t so much knots in my muscles as adhesions – places where my muscles were sticking to my fascia. Fascia is connective tissue that creates a casing around muscles and other structures in the body. It’s supposed to slide past your muscles as they move. When it adheres or sticks to your muscles, you lose some of that freedom of movement, and develop pain.
Just as massage can un-stick fascia from muscles, I think mindfulness can un-stick layers of thought that are supposed to be able to move independently. It’s not that one kind of thought is good and the other is bad, just like it’s not that muscles are good and fascia is bad. It’s just that we need flexibility.
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