While a good number of my colleagues and friends will likely disagree with Ronald Purser (especially the ones profiting from the “Mindfulness Revolution”), he certainly makes a strong case for employing some critical thinking before indulging in a series of mindfulness classes, a wellness retreat or any number of offerings from the self-help world.  It’s high time to be (politically) mindful of mindfulness.

Bill “Superfoot” Wallace demonstrates how using constraints such as those imposed by a major knee injury can lead to learning and even mastery.

“It was absolutely impossible to play it at the age of twelve… because I didn’t know what to do with this half-page.”

-Valentina Igoshina

Noam Chomsky gives a fascinating and important talk entitled “Education For Whom and For What” about two major possibilities for education.  For a funny and illuminating personal anecdote, go to minute 29-31.

Charles Eisenstein‘s seminal work, Sacred Economics, played a pivotal role in inspiring my latest book, The Mass Psychology of Fittism. In the following video by Ian McKenzie, Charles talks about the role that a debt-based money economy has played in fundamentally promoting political oppression, poverty, inequality, war, environmental destruction, anomie, and the severing of deep social ties.

Changing perspectives through an imaginative use of constraints is what leads to learning and breakthroughs–whether in the world of dance, martial arts, sports, mathematics, philosophy, cabinet making, or indeed any field you can imagine.  Architect and professor, Hajime Narukawa has created the world’s most remarkable map–one which allows you to change perspective and thereby alter your concept of up, down, right, left, center, East, West, North, and South.  This is exactly the map–or perhaps more accurately stated, these are precisely the mapping possibilities, that I have been searching for for almost 20 years.

“I could say that when I was a young man, an adolescent, and I hungered for a voice, I studied the English poets, and I knew their work well and I copied their styles, but I could not find a voice. It was only when I read—even in translation—the works of Lorca, that I understood that there was a voice. It is not that I copied his voice—I would not dare—but he gave me permission to find a voice, to locate a voice, that is, to locate a self—a self that is not fixed, a self that struggles for its own existence. And as I grew older, I understood that instructions came with this voice. What were these instructions? The instructions were never to lament casually. And if one is to express the great inevitable defeat that awaits us all, it must be done within the strict confines of dignity and beauty.”

-Leonard Cohen

“It’s better to do something simple, which is real… something you can build on because you know what you’re doing…. Over a long period of time you have to be aware of what is really accurate and what is not.”

                                                                                                          -Bill Evans

Legendary jazz pianist Bill Evans, revolutionary trumpeter Miles Davis and boxing great Floyd Mayweather are all known to be masters of improvisation. Many think of improvisation as being an easy, stream-of-consciousness type of outpouring that requires little in the way of preparation. Yet, just as with producing superior works of art, dance, architecture, literature, science, engineering, or social science, producing a good improvisational piece requires thousands of hours of painstaking attention to the bare fundamentals–fundamentals that once better understood or even mastered, allow the artist/athlete to move in unexpected directions. Perhaps it’s no accident that boxing is called, “the sweet science.”

Watch this video by Steve Cutts for tragic and hilarious insight into our culture–one of rampant consumerism and degraded sense-abilities.

Look for the metatarsal-tibia-femur connection as well as the metacarpal-ulna-humerus connection in the super slow motion sequences (5:50-6:00 and 11:50 to 12:24). Both connections work in spirals. Also listen to the role of emotions, trying too hard and the resultant “co-contractions” (or what Feldenkrais would call, “parasitic contractions”) in Asafa Powell’s defeat to Tyson Gay  (35:26 to 26:15)

“Here is natural instinct, and here is control; you have to combine the two in harmony. If you have one to the extreme you will be very unscientific. If you have the other to extreme you will become a mechanical man–no longer a human being.”

-Bruce Lee