PNTV: Body Mind Mastery by Dan Millman (#32)

Hi, this is Brian. Welcome to Philosopher's Notes tv. Today we're going to do a great book, Body, Mind Mastery by Dan Millman. As always, great book. Six page Philosopher's Notes PDF with about ten of my favorite big ideas. I'm excited to cover a few of them with you right now. First, Dan Millman. He rocks. He's one of the first authors who I studied in depth. I think I've read all of his books and just fell in love with him. He's an amazing blend of east and West. Super practical, yet really inspiring. Just a good guy. I've also gotten to know him a bit over the last several years. He's just a grounded, good human being and he lives what he talks about, so I love that. And you might know him from his classic book Way of the Peaceful Warrior, which was a semi autobiographical book about his life as a gymnast at Berkeley, meeting an extraordinary teacher. Fun book. If you haven't read that yet, check it out. So there we go. Awesome guy, good book. Body, Mind Mastery. So the idea here is we want to integrate our bodies, our minds and our spirits. Pretty straightforward stuff. He's got awesome big ideas on how to do it. So let's jump into a few of my favorites. One, he's got a great idea here that he talks about how funny it is that when people drive to the gym and they drive around and around and around in a parking lot looking for the best spot, it's just insane. So they can go walk for three miles or jog or whatever. His idea is integrate movement, integrate vitality, integrate vigor into your life throughout your day to day existence. So don't just preserve it for those mile or two or three that you walk or run a day. See how much you can move during the day, park as far away as you can and walk to the grocery store, the that kind of thing. I love the playfulness of that. He talks about failure as well and that we need to really redefine our relationship to failure. He has a great way of describing it that body mind masters have learned to embrace failure and they actually see it like a good friend playing a practical joke on them. Life happens, you know, things don't go the way we want them to go. We don't need to get stressed about it, embrace it, laugh about it. That's a body mind master. He's got some great ideas on how to learn how to train our bodies. And one of his ideas that I just love is this idea of looking at how babies learn. And he says that if we had the same consciousness that we have right now. If we had that consciousness when we were babies, none of us would learn to walk. Why? Because we'd be sitting there analyzing everything. The. The baby is just joyfully experiencing every new little gain they make. And they're just playing at their edge and learning and falling down and laughing. They have support from their parents and loved ones who are cheering. The smallest little improvement isn't that amazing. Yet when we grow up, we can't ever fall down. We can't ever make even the smallest mistake. And those around us who supposedly love us are criticizing us when we make a small mistake instead of recognizing the huge gains we're making in our lives. So he has this idea of embracing the kind of baby style, the baby essence of how we learned when we were just little ones, before we had the self consciousness come in. Really, really cool idea. So see how you can be more playful in whatever it is you're learning in your life right now and imagine you were just a little baby learning it. And then how can you support loved ones in your life and see the tiny improvement they made that they just crawled a little bit, or they just sat up, or they just took their first step and pay more attention to that small improvement than the failure or the mistake or the falling down or whatever it is that we tend to pay more attention to. So that's an awesome idea. I love that one. He's got an awesome idea. A set of ideas here around focus and how important it is that as mind, body athletes and just as effective human beings, that it's not enough to have a strong body, we've got to have a strong mind. And he makes the point that an Olympic weightlifter, not only is the Olympic weightlifter incredibly strong physically, they're incredibly strong mentally. They're strong enough to show up in their training day by day by day by day, and they're strong enough to block out all distractions in the moment of performance. But it's both, it's all of that that goes into developing the level of strength that they show off in the Olympics. So pretty cool stuff. And he says a great line here. Freedom from mental distraction equals power. So freedom from mental distraction equals power. We talk about this again and again and again and again. The first principle of my evolving philosophy is optimism is this idea of being able to shape the contents of our mind. If we can't do that, then none of this other stuff matters. So power comes when we can free ourselves from mental distractions, negative voices, fear, Anxiety, all that stuff. So that's pretty cool. He's got a great idea here that when we fail, when we have mistakes in our life and rather than see them as kind of falling backwards, think about it as if we're getting a running start, we're taking a couple steps back so we can get a running start and really rock it. I love that he talks about the importance of staying relaxed and that our physical stature and the way we're holding ourselves, whether we're breathing deeply or not, is going to influence our emotions. And it's much easier to control our physical posture and, and whether we're exercising, eating well and all those things than it is to whether we're breathing deeply in this moment than it is to control our emotions. We can control our physical behaviors much more easily than we can our emotions or our thoughts. What's cool is that as we shift our physical being, that translates into more effective emotions, etc. We're going to talk about that more when we do the note on Everyday Enlightenment. He's got some awesome ideas here and we're going to do that soon. I've got an idea here on Instant Satori. We'll talk about maybe if we have time, otherwise we'll leave it for later. The other big idea that I love is this idea of the law of accommodation. It's also called the training effect. So one of the things that I'm passionate about is my own physical vitality and having optimal energy. And I actually just took a hike here just before I sat down to do this. And the idea of the training effect or the law of accommodation is huge. And I actually, when I was sitting out 10 years ago and dedicating my life to this kind of stuff, I realized that I was going to have a hard time reaching my potential if I had a hard time getting out of bed. And so I actually studied and became a personal trainer just so I can understand how exercise physiology works, how my body works, how nutrition is affecting my overall well being, and studied that stuff. And one of the ideas I fell in love with was this idea of training effect. And what they basically taught us was that the way that anything happens in life in terms of growth, whether it's our physical body or emotions, they taught us our physical bodies. And it obviously applies to our emotional well being, our psychological well being, etc. Is this idea that what we want to do is we want to push ourselves a little bit beyond our current comfort zone. And I'll step back a little bit and give it a Little more context. Basically, your body is going to adapt. It's going to accommodate itself to whatever stresses and whatever lifestyles you give it. So if you sit on a couch for a month, two months, three months, four months, six months, a year, two, five, ten years, your body is going to be perfectly adapted for sitting on the couch. If you train and you run five, ten miles a day, or you do triathlon or whatever you do, your body is going to be shaped in, in a way such that you're a triathlete or you're an athlete. So your body is going to accommodate to whatever you ask of it. And again, this is a training effect. And the idea here is we need to consistently push ourselves a little bit past our current comfort zone. That's called overloading our bodies. And as we overload our body, our body is really smart and it says, wow, you want me to be able to perform that? No problem, I'll fix myself, I'll adapt myself so that I do that really well, so the next time you push me, I won't be as sore. So we overload and then our body responds by overcompensating, right? It overcompensates and it creates more strength in order to deal with that overload challenge, because it doesn't want it to be a constant overload. So that's amazing when we think about it. And what we want to do when we go out there and we train is we want to consistently, as I say all the time, diligently, patiently, persistently and playfully, but consistently move ourselves a little bit beyond our comfort zone and allow our body to accommodate to that new level of stress. We don't want to go gonzo and go too far and injure ourselves just a little bit consistently is going to allow us to do some extraordinary things. So I love that idea and the whole idea of consistency over intensity. That's one of my favorite ideas I got from that training. And Robin Sharma, as I mentioned in the note, talks about greatness, is, is all about consistency on the fundamentals. We need to identify what it is that are our fundamentals to be a great parent or a great entrepreneur or a great artist or whatever. And then what are those fundamentals that we need to master consistently? It's awesome stuff. We talk about habits in the note as well, which is tied to the law of accommodation. Consistently doing different things. Good stuff. And then the final big idea here is the idea that Masters shine everywhere. Experts might be good at this thing or that thing, but ex Masters shine everywhere, we make our lives, a piece of art and an opportunity for mastery. In this case, body, mind, mastery. So that's a quick look at Dan Millman's great book. Highly recommend it. Hope you enjoyed. Look forward to sharing more with you soon. See ya.