By: Caroline Tierney
When we think of sports, meditation, staying active, and the like, we tend to think of our mind and body working in tandem. In sports, I can always recall coaches advising my teammates and I to actively think about the action we were about to take, “Think about where you are throwing the ball!”, in order to establish a better mind, body connection. While I absolutely believe the mind and body work together in many cases, I also find it important to recognize how our mind can work against our body.
For anyone that has ever taken a psychology class, we often learn about topics like fear in the unconscious. Fear is a mechanism that our unconscious mind uses to protect ourselves from getting hurt, or worse. What’s interesting though, is how we use our conscious mind and our surroundings to influence that unconscious fear. Think about it, your unconscious mind inherently can not perceive reality, that’s why we have our conscious mind. So when you are about to send a double backflip off a jump on skis, your unconscious mind, without perception of reality, screams at you not to. But the reason you feel like you want to at least try to land the double backflip, is because your conscious mind can perceive reality, and a part of you believes you can do it. Your unconscious mind is working against your body in this scenario, trying to protect you, yet in reality you know your body is capable.
The reason I bring up these differences is because we can use our conscious mind to control our unconscious fears, of any level, by separating how we treat our mind and body. For example, one of my favorite hobbies is surfing. The sport of surfing comes with a lot of dangers, especially being tossed under water for a long period of time with only one breath. I recently came back from a 5 day surf camp in the lovely Pacific waters of Costa Rica. Included in the camp was a series of workshops from meditation and stretching, to underwater weight lifting, and my personal favorite, apnea breathwork. Imagine the Costa Rica Men’s Surf National Champion saying that you are about to be held down at the bottom of a pool by weights, and required to hold your breath for 2 minutes straight. You can probably understand the shock on my face when he told me this was going to happen, I thought for sure I couldn’t hold my breath for any longer than a minute. Prior to this exercise, we spent a lot of time separating our mind from our body, and overcoming the physical feelings of fear by controlling our mind. As the two minutes were ticking, instead of focusing on the tight feelings in my chest and head under water, I focused on imagining a series of numbers in my head. It may sound strange, but it truly distracted me for most of the time. I thought about the selection of numbers I envisioned, the size of the font, color, how they were presented, like in a box or underlined, and what the numbers meant. Before I knew it, 2 minutes passed, and I came to the surface gasping for air indeed.
While this experience may sound extreme, and candidly it was quite intense, there are some broader lessons to be learned. Again, fear is a mechanism our minds enforce to protect ourselves from the “bad” in our environment. But by breaking down the connection between your mind and body, you will start to realize that fear is entirely controllable, and you can quite literally accomplish anything you desire by treating your mind and body as two separate entities.