Jon Kabat-Zinn, renowned creator of the Stress Reduction Clinic and the Center for Mindfulness in Medicine, Health Care, and Society at the University of Massachusetts Medical School, and student and teacher of the benefits of mindfulness in our lives, says:
Concentration is a cornerstone of mindfulness practice. Your mindfulness will only be as robust as the capacity of your mind to be calm and stable.
I’ve long admired Kabat-Zinns’s work and have attended workshops held by one of his highly trained educators. He is so very right that mindfulness can help us cope with stress, anxiety, pain, and illness.
But there is one very important variable missing that I’ve not heard anyone point to since immersing myself in the world of meditation and “mindfulness based stress reduction” (MBSR), or any other form of meditation.
What if you can’t concentrate? What if inflammation in your body, which of course means inflammation in your brain too, since your brain is part of your body, has impacted your ability to concentrate?
Do you try to meditate, to no avail and feel yourself a failure? And what happens with these feelings of failure? Where do they go? Do they manifest in other areas of your life, along with your inability to focus and concentrate? Who do you think you are now that you can’t focus and concentrate? How does your inability to focus and concentrate manifest in your life, at your the job, in your relationships, in your ability to keep up and produce results?
Alas, I work to empower those committed to healing their bodies and leveling up in all areas of life precisely because of the sequence of responses that result from the questions raised above.
Chronic disease and the backlash of it’s effects are not necessarily the first problem I am concerned with, however, as an Executive Health and Life Coach.
I am concerned with your quality of life. I am concerned with who you think you are as a result of the myriad chronic symptoms you experience, the myriad chronic symptoms that you consider your new normal, the myriad chronic symptoms that you attribute to ‘getting older,’ the myriad chronic symptoms that you correlate with your chronic disease and how these symptoms effect you and your life.
Healing your body is paramount. Paramount. Healing your body is paramount for you to achieve all that you are capable of achieving. Healing your body is paramount for you to create. To innovate. To deliver. To defy. To surmount. Accomplish. Solve. Assert. Aspire. Triumph. Dream. Imagine. Argue. Discover. Negotiate. Help. Explore. Influence. Laugh … and love. Yes, and to love on the level that exceeds the superficial realms of fleeting bliss. And to focus and concentrate long enough to choose clearly what is best for you “in your one wild and precious life.”
