If you were to think of exercise, like most people you would probably imagine some physical activity.
And with that perhaps a sport or definitely some exertion on the body.
Very few would ever first link to exercise with the mind. Nor would they ever believe that the best exercise we could do for ourselves isn’t physical, it’s mental. And yet, developing the mind is the prime way to begin powering up almost every area of your life. One day it could serve you very well indeed.
Hugh Glass needed an incredibly fit mind. Why? Because his body was almost totally out of action.
Glass was a frontiersman and trapper working on a trail up the Missouri River in 1823. One day when scouting for game near where the Grand River forked he surprised a mother grizzly bear with her cubs. Protecting her brood the bear attacked and mutilated Glass so badly internal body parts and bone were visible. His fellow trappers eventually left him for dead believing it was impossible for him to survive even for a short time.
But what the body is incapable of, the mind can be alive as ever and incredibly capable. Waking from unconsciousness with no weapons or equipment he realised he was abandoned in the freezing wilderness. Plus he could hardly move.
Death seemed inevitable.
The mind can go far.
Glass knew his only hope was to crawl and keep crawling. For all the extreme pain that flooded his body, he set his mind at making it back to civilisation and life. And that he did. He famously crawled inch by aching inch some 200 miles and even crafted a makeshift raft so he could float downstream to Fort Kiowa.
Six weeks after his seemingly fatal attack, Hugh Glass reached the fort and a place in the history books. It’s also the story behind the Hollywood Oscar winning movie, The Revenant, starring Leonardo DiCaprio.
This story typifies that physical effort was not enough. Pure mental fortitude and willpower was required to have any chance at all. Luckily that is what he possessed in bucket loads. How many people today could honestly be able to achieve the same feat with their minds???
One type of person in modern life can experience such mental toughness. The ultramarathon runner. They can typically run hundreds of miles in events on all types of terrain and face every type of weather. The Moab 240, for example, is a 240 mile (386km) ultra event with over 31,000 ft of elevation through the baking heat of Utah where daytime temperatures can hit over 100 degrees and with night time drops to below freezing and even snow.
How do runners cope with such punishment?
Champion ultra runner Courtney Dauwalter has developed a mental exercise called her ‘pain cave’ to push through immense exhaustion and various bodily ailments in her 100+ mile runs. When she can’t physically take another step she goes to a space in her head and makes that space bigger in her vision. This space is where she has the determination to keep going.
It works because this one time biology teacher when she started ultra running has won pretty much every prestigious ultra race there is and set course records everywhere in doing so.
Which leads me to this question.
Do you exercise your mind….at all?
I would wager two truths now.
- That virtually everyone will say, ‘No’.
- That virtually everyone will say, ‘I don’t know how’!
It’s common as I’ve already noted that exercise = physical movement in some form to the majority of us. Trouble is that some of the best and highest achievers of all time haven’t been Olympian athletes except in their mental work. And you can join them starting NOW! Here’s how with a mini starter list on how to exercise your mind –
a) Read more. Not social media posts but plain old books. This will cause your mind to start whirring into action imagining the scenes, the characters, the plot and what can happen etc. It’s the first great place to start mental movement.
b) Read more mental books. Follow on from that by reading books on the mind by the best writers. Not meditation books but ones on better thinking, greater focus, developing ideas etc. Check on that genre on Amazon or in your local bookstore. There’s plenty their to feed your mind.
c) And rather than include a slew of other suggestions I’ll simply add the following – practice imagining better for yourself, push yourself to learn a new skill, make your future plans and create ways to develop them, try crosswords in the paper, commit to one hour in the morning and one in the evening dedicated to progressive thinking and positive expectation as but a few.
The world has gotten very comfortable with making physical exercise an integral part of its daily lives. But it plainly fails in the mental department when that very effort to develop the mind shifts life in major style.
That’s not the bear on the trail, it’s the elephant in the room. We need to be fit and strong in the head not purely for good mental health, but for the sheer power it injects into our life to improve ourselves, believe better and higher, and to generate new possibilities. The mind is the seed and our life is was it feeds.
So start your mental exercise regime today.
Then you will lose the weight off your mind and be dripping in mental muscle that will wow everyone.
References – www.brittanica.com – Hugh Glass.
Wikipedia – Hugh Glass.
www.bbc.com – Courtney Dauwalter – Step inside the pain cave.
www.destinationtrailrun.com – Moab 240.