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Make Every Move a Meditation: Mindful Movement for Mental Health, Well-Being, and Insight
Make Every Move a Meditation: Mindful Movement for Mental Health, Well-Being, and Insight
Make Every Move a Meditation: Mindful Movement for Mental Health, Well-Being, and Insight
Ebook277 pages3 hours

Make Every Move a Meditation: Mindful Movement for Mental Health, Well-Being, and Insight

By Nita Sweeney

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Discover the Benefits of Exercise as Meditation

“Let me say it simply. Someone should have written this book a long time ago.” —Shinzen Young, meditation teacher, neuroscience research consultant, founder of Unified Mindfulness, author of Meditation in the Zone and The Science of Enlightenment

Award-winning Finalist in the “Health: Diet & Exercise” category of the 2022 International Book Awards 
#1 New Release in Sports Health & Safety, Other Eastern Religions & Sacred Texts, Cycling, Sports Psychology, Walking, Theravada Buddhism, and Meditation

Transform movement and meditation into the powerful practice of mindful movement

Exercise can be meditation. What do you think of when you hear the word meditation? A quiet room filled with monks? An Instagram influencer? What about moving meditation? Yoga? Tai Chi? For too long, meditation in books has focused on specific periods of meditation, rather than mediation through fitness or daily activities. What if lifting weights, dancing with your love, or walking across a room counted? What if you could use exercise as meditation? What if you could make every move a meditation?

Let's combine the two. In Make Every Move a Meditation, award-winning author, meditation leader, and mental health advocate Nita Sweeney shows us fitness can be mindfulness. She teaches us how to bring meditation and mindfulness into any activity by incorporating centuries-old techniques. Studies show that both exercise and meditation reduce anxiety, stabilize blood pressure, improve mood and cognition, and lead to a deeper self-relationship and wisdom. Movement is medicine, and meditation is medicine.

Inside you’ll learn to:

  • Turn exercise into a meditation tool
  • Make any activity a mindful practice
  • Enjoy the benefits of meditation while getting fit

If you like meditation books and best sellers such as Think Like a Monk, Practicing Mindfulness, or Breath, you’ll love Make Every Move a Meditation.

LanguageEnglish
PublisherMango
Release dateSep 13, 2022
ISBN9781642509908
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Author

Nita Sweeney

Nita Sweeney’s articles, essays, and poems have appeared in Buddhist America, Dog World, Dog Fancy, Writer’s Journal, Country Living, Pitkin Review, Spring Street, WNBA-SF blog, and in several newspapers and newsletters. She writes the blog, BumGlue and publishes the monthly email, Write Now Newsletter. Her memoir, Depression Hates a Moving Target: How Running with My Dog Brought Me Back from the Brink, was short-listed for the 2018 William Faulkner – William Wisdom Creative Writing Competition Award. Nita earned a journalism degree from The E.W. Scripps School of Journalism at Ohio University, a law degree from The Ohio State University, and an M.F.A. in Creative Writing from Goddard College. For ten years, she studied with and assisted best-selling author Natalie Goldberg (Writing Down the Bones) at weeklong writing workshops teaching the “rules of writing practice” and leading participants in sitting and walking meditation. Goldberg authorized Nita to teach “writing practice” and Nita has taught for nearly twenty years. When she’s not writing and teaching, Nita runs. She has completed three full marathons, twenty-six half marathons (in eighteen states), and more than sixty shorter races. Nita lives in central Ohio with her husband and biggest fan, Ed, and her yellow Labrador running partner, Scarlet (aka #ninetyninepercentgooddog).

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    Book preview

    Make Every Move a Meditation - Nita Sweeney

    Copyright © 2022 by Nita Sweeney.

    Published by Mango Publishing, a division of Mango Publishing Group, Inc.

    Cover Design: Morgane Leoni

    Cover Illustration: Liliia/Adobe Stock

    Layout & Design: Katia Mena

    Mango is an active supporter of authors’ rights to free speech and artistic expression in their books. The purpose of copyright is to encourage authors to produce exceptional works that enrich our culture and our open society.

    Uploading or distributing photos, scans or any content from this book without prior permission is theft of the author’s intellectual property. Please honor the author’s work as you would your own. Thank you in advance for respecting our author’s rights.

    For permission requests, please contact the publisher at:

    Mango Publishing Group

    2850 S Douglas Road, 4th Floor

    Coral Gables, FL 33134 USA

    info@mango.bz

    For special orders, quantity sales, course adoptions and corporate sales, please email the publisher at sales@mango.bz. For trade and wholesale sales, please contact Ingram Publisher Services at customer.service@ingramcontent.com or +1.800.509.4887.

    Make Every Move a Meditation: Mindful Movement for Mental Health, Well-Being, and Insight

    Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication number: 2022937304

    ISBN: (print) 978-1-64250-989-2 , (ebook) 978-1-64250-990-8

    BISAC category code REL007040, RELIGION / Buddhism / Theravada

    Printed in the United States of America

    To my many teachers, including:

    Natalie Goldberg

    Shinzen Young

    Bhante Gunaratana

    Sean Tetsudo Murphy, Sensei

    Lama Jacqueline Mandell

    Marcia Rose

    Katherine and Danny Dreyer

    And my first teacher, Ed,

    who advised, Try not to fidget.

    Contents

    Introduction

    Chapter 1

    Why Bother?

    Chapter 2

    How to Meditate

    While You Move

    Chapter 3

    Why I Bother

    Chapter 4

    Splendid Body:

    Sense Gates

    Chapter 5

    Tricky Mind: Working with Thoughts

    Chapter 6

    Advanced Awareness Techniques

    Chapter 7

    Tangles of Emotion

    Chapter 8

    How to Grow Through Pain

    (and Joy)

    Chapter 9

    Cultivating Mind States

    Chapter 10

    Struggling? Check the Hindrances

    Chapter 11

    Variations on a Theme

    Chapter 12

    Whose Idea Was This?

    Chapter 13

    More About Forms

    of Movement

    Chapter 14

    Make It Yours

    Chapter 15

    Taking It on the Road

    Chapter 16

    Who’s Meditating?

    Chapter 17

    Why Therapists Have Therapists and Teachers Have Teachers

    Chapter 18

    You Might Already

    Be Doing It

    Chapter 19

    Find Your Fellowship

    Chapter 20

    Illness, Injury,

    and Bad Workouts

    Chapter 21

    Performance

    Chapter 22

    See You on the Path

    An Invitation

    and a Request

    Resources

    Acknowledgments

    About the Author

    References

    Introduction

    On a bright Saturday morning, as I ran along the Olentangy Trail with three other members of our pace group, the conversation turned to meditation. It might as easily have turned to which central Ohio restaurant we would go to for breakfast, upcoming races, or last week’s Buckeye football game. Instead, a woman asked how I practice.

    "I do sitting meditation, I said. But I also meditate while I run. I was meditating just now."

    That’s a thing? another woman asked.

    It is for me. I explained.

    Today, I’m noticing my left foot. When my mind wanders, I gently bring it back.

    The whole run?

    Most of it.

    How long can you think about your foot? Isn’t that boring?

    "I don’t think about my foot. I experience it. I notice the sensation of my foot hitting the ground and observe any changes. I pay attention to how my foot feels in my shoe. I sense if it hits harder than my right. When my mind wanders, I count my footfalls. When I pay close attention, it’s not boring at all."

    Silence.

    Eventually, someone brought up breakfast.

    But a few weeks later, the woman who initially asked approached me. I tried your left foot meditation. It’s interesting. I rarely pay attention to my feet. Since I tried it, I feel more relaxed when I run. She thanked me.

    That brief conversation led to this book. The woman, like many other people I’ve talked to, found the notion of movement meditation odd but also appealing. Movement meditation was worth exploring and explaining. Of course, I didn’t create movement meditation; centuries-old traditions embrace it. But for that woman, it was new.

    What I didn’t tell my sister runner was that this path of noticing—whether it be her left foot, her breath, or her thinking—is about much more than physical activity.

    Meditation might make her a better runner, or make someone else a better golfer, tennis player, dancer, gymnast, or weight lifter, but more importantly, consistent practice could lead her to insight—the kind that can enhance daily life. It might even free her from suffering, a pain she might not even know she has. If one person finds that, it will be worth any effort.