Mental Discipline:: Attention Training

[Explor­ing Life]In How To Get Unstuck From (almost) Any­thing, Joseph Cardillo pro­vides six learn­ing strate­gies designed to help us break out of con­fin­ing pat­terns of thought and behav­ior through the art of being new, a phrase that orig­i­nates in core mar­tial arts train­ing. Joseph is an expert mar­tial arts prac­ti­tioner and the author of three books: Be Like Water–Practical Wis­dom from the Mar­tial Arts; Bow to Life–365 Secrets from the Mar­tial Arts for Daily Life; and his most recent pub­li­ca­tion Can I Have Your Atten­tion? He is cur­rently a pro­fes­sor of Eng­lish and Cre­ative Writ­ing at Hud­son Val­ley Com­mu­nity Col­lege of the State Uni­ver­sity of New York.

Six Learn­ing Strate­gies for Being New

Prac­tice Empty Mind: Mar­tial arts tra­di­tions insists on the devel­op­ment of an empty mind. This is rem­i­nis­cent of non-conceptual aware­ness, mind­ful learn­ing, as well as the restraint of men­tal mod­i­fi­ca­tion in Yoga. One of the most com­mon prob­lems we face is an over­loaded mind in which thoughts and per­cep­tions seems to hijack our abil­ity to be in the present moment — a state of con­stant vir­tual real­ity within the con­fines of our own mind. This state of mind is known as dis­trac­tion, or an inabil­ity to focus and con­cen­trate. Unless a men­tal foun­da­tion is cre­ated that facil­i­tates con­cen­tra­tion and focused think­ing, we remain vic­tim to the work­ings of our own mind.

Pay Atten­tion to the Way You Are Breath­ing: Breath­ing is an essen­tial pre­req­ui­site to the attain­ment of men­tal clar­ity and focus (see the Opti­mal Breath­ing theme).

Body­mind Exer­cise: Mind and body can­not be sep­a­rated; they are a unity. Cardillo points out a learn­ing strat­egy that I believe is immensely valu­able yet con­stantly overlooked:

A mar­tial mas­ter once told me that you could prac­tice Tai Chi by sim­ply walk­ing down the street. He was seri­ous. Your job was to empty your mind and syn­chro­nize your move­ment and breath­ing. With every step, you had to put your atten­tion on the feel­ing of leav­ing one space and enter­ing the next, of giv­ing some­thing (in this case phys­i­cal) up with every gain. Your job was also to get lost, so to speak, in the feel­ing. The experience—the feeling—is every­thing. Once you can do that, you enter a state of flow. And once there, the point is to lux­u­ri­ate in this feel­ing of good­ness. You can employ any phys­i­cal activ­ity from walk­ing, jog­ging, sport, to house­work, gar­den­ing, and so on.

With much day-to-day rep­e­ti­tion, you will lit­er­ally feel your body chem­istry, moods, and over­all dis­po­si­tion chang­ing. This change will affect your thoughts, mem­o­ries, and every­thing you do. It will put these more in touch with immi­nent goals. Mar­tial arts believe that the total effect will then become syn­er­gis­tic: the more you tone each of these sep­a­rate areas, the more you strengthen the oth­ers until your whole sys­tem becomes stronger and more unified.

But much rep­e­ti­tion is key. This is because you are work­ing on rais­ing your actions (and feel­ings) to the level and speed of habit. The hope is that such a mind­set will trans­fer from the realm of sim­ple phys­i­cal move­ment to more com­plex areas of your life. Accord­ing to mar­tial Way, this will hap­pen nat­u­rally and effortlessly.

This inte­gra­tion of body­mind exer­cise into the fab­ric of our every­day life is essen­tial in cre­at­ing sus­tain­able, durable and per­ma­nent change in our pat­terns of thought, emo­tion, and behavior.

Use the Body’s Reward Sys­tem: Essen­tially, engage is a con­sis­tent prac­tice of pos­i­tive self-reinforcement and reward.

Learn to See Fail­ure as Oppor­tu­nity:

There is an ancient mar­tial tenet that involves being in flow. The idea is that every move­ment con­tains some­where within it oppor­tu­nity. You just have to locate it. Once you tar­get it, you use a pro­ce­dure (action) that will nail it.

Visu­al­ize and Pre­pare for Obsta­cle in Advance:

Keep­ing your atten­tion focused through more delib­er­ate, con­scious activ­i­ties will help trans­fer this mind­set and the reward mech­a­nism you have estab­lished for it to other areas of your life.

Sum­mary

The six strate­gies described by Cardillo are dis­tinctly focused on cre­at­ing, design­ing, and main­tain­ing a phys­i­cal, men­tal and emo­tional envi­ron­ment for learn­ing. Rather than being focused on the acqui­si­tion of infor­ma­tion as we would tend to be in an edu­ca­tional envi­ron­ment, the learn­ing envi­ron­ment is dis­tinctly the inte­rior world of the learner and the strate­gies are specif­i­cally designed as ways to inter­act and engage with that envi­ron­ment in ways that help us to under­stand and evolve it. There is no spe­cific scope and sequence of infor­ma­tion to be acquired. The con­cept of the pre­req­ui­site is replaced by the allure­ment of mystery.

A learn­ing prac­tice must also be inte­grated through­out the fab­ric of our every­day life, rather than being some­thing we attend at spe­cific times. All of our thoughts, emo­tions, feel­ing. moods, sit­u­a­tion, cir­cum­stances — the entire sur­round of our expe­ri­ence — is always the “class­room.” While a teacher or men­tor may not be able to see this inte­rior world of their stu­dents, they can help to pro­vide tech­niques, meth­ods and strate­gies that facil­i­tate engage­ment and awareness.

Learn­ing, in this sense, is com­pletely inte­grated with the skills of appre­hen­sion, inten­tion, per­cep­tual acu­ity, pro­pri­o­cep­tion, com­pre­hen­sion, as well as the cre­ation of mean­ing and purpose.