Mindfulness: A Girls’ Best Friend
Mindfulness might sound like something only yogis should care about but that assumption is dead wrong.
Being mindful is the antidote to living on autopilot.
Our daily lives and general way of living have spun out of control with the never-ending improvements in technology that occur every second. We always have too much on our plates and constantly rush around striving to complete our “to do” lists. It’s not even worth describing this phenomenon because it’s so cliché at this point. You get it, right?
We survive this crazy pace through doing a lot things outside of our conscious awareness. We arrive to destinations without any memory of driving there. The phone rings as we are walking out the door, and without any intention of doing so we pick it up. In fact, there’s actually quite a bit of research showing that we mortals frequently make decisions, pursue goals, and live our lives unconsciously.
Our behavior follows our mind. So, if we want to change anything in our lives we have to start in our noggin.
Beliefs, attitudes, and things like cultural norms are invisible. We hold them in as thoughts, we know of them, yet we don’t really “see” them.
One Summer in the early 1990s, my graduate advisor Vic Katch helped a friend and I start an exercise “camp” for women only. We had use of a small exercise facility he had started on campus. The room played a recording that directed exercisers in a circuit, changing between 15-second bouts of aerobic movement and brief stints using hydraulic strength- training machines. This was the same as Curves, but one year before they had their first franchise. (Had I followed my intuition about this being a great set-up for women I’d be the multi-millionaire instead of Gary Heavin!)
One day a woman named Diane called to ask about our hours. From our conversation I learned that she was 43, married, and had a couple of young children. They had a sitter come daily to care for their children while they both worked. I could hear how excited she was to have discovered this novel exercise opportunity that was only for women. “I never workout anymore because I’m too embarrassed to show my body. This has been an issue for me ever since our youngest, Elaine, was born. I love the idea of this being for women only!”
“Well, you’ve come to the right place,” I said. “Let’s get you signed up to start this week.”
She asked about the hours. So I told Diane “We are only open from 6:30-9:00am during the week.”
“Oh no! I can’t come at that time.” She sounded so disappointed, just like a kid who found out their plans for the pool had been cancelled.
We wanted to accommodate women who worked. Most of the interested clientele had been thrilled with our early hours so I was surprised by her response. Diane didn’t hesitate to tell me why.
“I can’t come then, have to be home when the baby sitter arrives,” she told me.
What happened had a huge impact on my then 20-something mind. I asked her “Diane, could your husband wait for her two days a week so you can come workout with us?”
Dead silence.
Diane sputtered and then she exclaimed “Oh….my….I never thought of asking him!!” “For sure he’ll do it. Sign me up,” she said. The happy lilt I had first heard immediately returned to her voice.
As a naïve young woman who was passionate about helping women learn to take care of themselves through movement I was startled by her realization. I couldn’t imagine why asking her husband to help didn’t occur to her.
But that’s just it. Diane didn’t even think about asking her husband to help her because she wasn’t aware that she could.
She was so used to this responsibility that she was doing it on autopilot. So used to it, that she couldn’t even “see” a clearly excellent option that was staring her in the face. This experience was foundational to my thinking about what really gets in women’s way of taking care of themselves.
Living unconsciously may ease our cognitive load while living, but it is one of greatest blocks to our own self-care. Diane did ask her husband if he’d wait for the sitter and he was happy to do it. She regularly attended our camp from then on.
Becoming more mindful moved Diane forward, literally and figuratively. Now she that she was aware about this unconscious tendency should could preempt and address it. It was a gift that kept on giving.