How to create a high impact in your day to day through the practice of Mindfulness and other techniques derived from and maintaining a close relationship with yourself? With the experiment of High Impact Mindfulness. That was what I thought, prepared and carried out until yesterday for 31 days. As I was saying, the delimited period for the High Impact Mindfulness experiment ended yesterday. Below you can find the steps I followed in these last 15 days to achieve better performance and fluidity in the four dimensions of a human being: the intellectual, physical, emotional and spiritual.
High Impact Mindfulness goals
The reason for this “test” was to create new modifications (“hacks“) that allow to enhance the lifestyle and better optimize your resources personally and professionally. Other reasons, at least for me, were:
- Gain control of the body, get to feel better and not so independent of the mind.
- Greater awareness
- Acquire the habit of micro-meditations (conscious pause).
- Discover the benefits of practices like Bikram yoga for 31 days without rest.
- See if the body can resist including one more practice of Power Yoga and another of Vinyasa Flow Yoga per day and see the results.
- Sensations by increasing the time of morning meditations.
- Test the Wim Hof breathing method for 31 days and see if it works.
- Results of the continued practice of Power Yoga + Vinyasa Flow Yoga.
- Discover if I could apply all of these techniques at once and for a continuous period.
And the results
- Goal 1: achieved. The repeated practice has made me pay attention to movements I hadn’t seen before. Discover sensations in the fingers, abdomen, shoulders or back, that
- previously I hadn’t ever felt. When you think of something, then you can analyze it to know what state it is in, it will be the next step.
- Goal 2: achieved. By managing to stop the day almost invariably (between 8 to 12 times), it is easier to be present at the moment.
- Goal 3: acquired. I’m starting to do it unconsciously, although there are days that I have to remind myself through the system where it seems written. There are times when it is divided throughout the day, like today. On more intense days, I do them in large blocks more closely together.
- Goal 4: discovered, not only benefits but also damages, which there have been. Your body becomes considerably more flexible, conscious and fluid. However, if forces you more than average, your muscles and joints will suffer, despite having experience in this discipline (I had around 170 classes before I started the High Impact Mindfulness experiment.
- Goal 5: checked. Yes, you can resist, but be pushing the physical part of your body too far. So much, at least in my case, that the day I was 31 I had to take a mandatory rest all day. That happened after visiting one of the physiotherapists who treat me occasionally, Dani de La Sella (Denia).
- Goal 6: I have concluded that the more we increase the time of meditation, the more difficult it is not to be attacked with more thoughts. However, you have more time to realize what you are thinking about and then return to the starting point.
- Goal 7: it works. When I wake up every morning is when I have been integrating this practice, the results have been vigor, relaxation, and concentration. Each week I have been increasing a series of 40 breaths, going from 1 to 4 series. So powerful that I have decided to adopt it as a super-habit.
- Goal 8: results achieved. You gain in elasticity, in strength, inattention, and in disconnection, in addition to growing, because you work – in a rather intense way – for yourself during more time a day. However, the load may be too large, as in my case the last week of the experiment.
- Goal 9: discovered. The grouping of all these techniques has allowed me to improve, grow and learn. While it is true, the demand has been higher than I expected. At certain times it might not have been as advantageous as I would have liked it have been.
It is the final dashboard with all the quantitative and qualitative results that I have considered significant.
Advantages/disadvantages + details
These are the advantages, disadvantages, lessons, mistakes, and anecdotes of the experiment.
End of the High Impact Mindfulness experiment
Although it is a test more oriented to the last three dimensions (emotional, spiritual and physical), being almost all connected, the intellectual part has also won. Being in a more peaceful emotional way helps you to flow in work and mental burdens. Being physically stronger, controlled, balanced and flexible, allows you to increase your concentration, memorization and contribution capabilities. And being more spiritually present, more connected with yourself and more focused, that gets you to think and decide more clearly and quickly.