Suddenly there's more to know about practicing focus and concentration for mountain biking
Just when I think I'm up-to-date, The Huberman Lab and The Art of Manliness prod me to dig deeper
I was working on the ending of my recent post titled, Is how you approach mountain biking different from how you approach the rest of your life? when two episodes appeared in my ‘new releases’ podcast feed:
Huberman Lab podcast, Sept. 5 episode titled:
Art of Manliness podcast, Sept. 7 episode titled:
The Power of Unwavering Focus (interview with Dandapani, the book’s author by the same name.)
Of interest to me is that there seems to be some disagreement.
Huberman contends that “short behavioral practices, such as meditation and visual gaze training, will benefit your ability to focus over the long term.”
Whereas, Dandapani asserts that short daily meditation sessions for practicing focus aren’t enough to counter the pattern of thousands of daily distractions as we go about our day. He thinks we need to practice concentration by making each of our daily activities a focused practice.
I can’t imagine making such a drastic change as Dandapani suggests. I plan to experiment with Huberman’s tools.
Griff.......you really are going at this fiercely. You are accesssing some impressive sources.
Maybe what going on here is the basic idea that modern living tends to make us "habituated" to a complex program. We tend to start doing things without really examining the implications or even the purpose.
In order to be able to examine our actions more carefully we have to learn a new way to use our minds, to cogitate. Like any new skill, this takes a while and needs commitment and practice. One starts with simple exercises and builds up. As one becomes more expert, one tends to act more intuitively and not to need the discipline of the original exercise structure.
Maybe this is what they mean by training for constant Mindfulness by using periods of "meditation".
The master lives a life of constant integrated mindfulness while the acolyte still needs to "practice" it.
Before we start going round in circles, we might consider that most "masters" will go off and get on with their lives.......as soldiers, farmers, downhill MTB racers, whatever, while only a very few will go on to teach the state of Mindfulness as a discrete skill.
I would think the trick is to do what Bruce Lee recommended: take from each discipline what you judge to be most useful to enhance your own needs, while not worrying too much about where that particular discipline leads.
Griff do you think Dandapani is alluding to our tendency to multitask throughout the day? That used to be such a bragging right that someone was quite capable of multitasking, but as I’ve gotten older I realize now that you just do a bunch of things not very well. I have a little mantra in my head that says to me “OK we’re just doing this right now, nothing else just this.