Free Blog : Aidan Sheahan

    It has been proven time and time again that mindfulness has a positive effect on the mind as well as the body. So if mindfulness can be so beneficial, how can it work with sport athletes ? Can an athlete use mindfulness to his advantage and how can he do this ? In comes Aidan Sheahan, professional free ski athlete and mindfulness practitioner. In this blog I hope to explore Aidan and how he uses mindfulness as a benefit to help his skiing.

 From the Aspen area, Aidan has been a professional free-skier for much of his young life. Residing in Carbondale and skiing the slopes Aspen, Aidan has been praised on his "smooth" and "fluid" style which has earned him a spot in many skiing films. Aidan uses his summers and falls to work toward his degree, and uses his winters to practice his skiing. When not skiing Aidan enjoys: Skating, Slackening and creating music. In an interview with Freeskier Magazine, Aidan is quoted as saying "anything that uses creative power I find to be really fun." It is clear that he has found something through skiing in creative sports because he goes on to say in the interview "I think the same sort of creativity and style that is portrayed in skiing can be applied to many other activities, as well."
     Aidan is confident that our body follows our minds, and this is why he practices mindfulness. Aidan believes that mindfulness helps his skiing because "I can get centered and ski from a place of fun and inspiration and creativity, not bound to what I think other people want me to do. It’s way more practical than people think, it’s not weird crystal wearing craziness, but simply cultivating more creativity and freedom within yourself by becoming aware of external thoughts and motivations."
if you are not aware of the creativity and self awareness that free skiing requires, a sample of such can be seen in the short movie created by Aidan himself here :

 In this short film produced by Matt Hobbs Aidan talks about his mindfulness and how he implements it into his skiing, as well as his personal life. Because of mindfulness Aidan has been able to balance his skiing as well as his life and make it the way he wants it to be, mindfulness has taught him how to follow his thoughts and wants and it has led him to where he wants to go, which is something I  look to accomplish with my life. 

sources : youtube.com

Freeskier.com

   

Statistics blog

    In the Last decade mindfulness has been on the rise. Because of its growing magnitude and awareness more and more people have been practicing mindfulness. This is because of many reasons including : Major cooperation's using it, Increased Google search, and increased science backing for mindfulness.  According to a report done by a group of mindfulness practitioners in the UK,  that "86% of people agree that “people would be much happier and healthier if they knew how to slow down and live in the moment.”

    Because of the increased use of computer use in the common home, more and more people are connected everyday. At the touch of a button we have the worlds knowledge at our finger tips. Due to more people being able to connect to the internet, more and more people are able to gain access to the knowledge of mindfulness. As shown a graph created by Google shows the amount of people who have been goggling about mindfulness in the few years.                             A possible reason as to why people have been using Google at an increased rate may be because of increased corporation backing of mindfulness. More and more companies such as Forbes have done articles about the benefits of using mindfulness in life. The magazine described mindfulness as the "the antidote, say more and more practitioners, and an increasing number of scientific studies. The ages-old practice teaches a person to be more focused on the present moment, rather than caught up in thoughts about the past or worries about the future." If people are able to read positive things about mindfulness from a very highly read magazine such as Forbes, it is possible to guess that more and more people will be using Google to find more out about it. 

   The reason as to why more companies have been using mindfulness has come in the form of science. Since the 1970's scientist have been proving that mindfulness has a positive affect on the brain as well as the self being. Work done by Jon Kabat-Zinn a microbiology Ph.D. Proved that patients who used mindfulness had a tremendous reduction in chronic stress. Other positive affects have been found including  those found by Sara Lazar at the university of Massachusetts, who found that "people who have been mindfulness mediators for several decades have structural features in their brains that are proportional to their number of hours of practice." This relates back to the fact that mindfulness has a positive affect on the brain, and to why more and more companies have been backing the use of mindfulness. As more people find out about mindfulness, more and more attention will be drawn toward mindfulness in the future. 

Sources : 

"'60 Minutes' Explores The Rise Of Mindfulness, From Google To Congress."Forbes. Forbes Magazine, n.d. Web. 20 Feb. 2015.

The Science of Mindfulness. N.p., n.d. Web. 19 Feb. 2015.

Two Articles

First article : http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/is-mindfulness-good-medicine/

Second article : http://tinybuddha.com/blog/7-obstacles-to-mindfulness-and-how-to-overcome-them/

Because of the recent influx of people who have been practicing mindfulness in the last few years many people have begun to form their own opinions about the practice, and some may have even come to question how and why the practice should be used. Many people agree that the practice is beneficial, some doctors have come to use the practice to help patients medically, while other people use to just to add some "health" into their lives.

The first article I read was about mindfulness from a medical standpoint. Titled "Is mindfulness a good medicine ?" the article goes into depth talking about how the practice affects the brain. The article  is written by Hal Arkowitz,  and the main part of his article is about all the research of different programs that have to do with mindfulness from a medical standpoint. He talks about different programs including psychologist Scott Bishop, at the University of Toronto, Stefan Hofmann of Boston University and Bassam Khoury, at the University of Montreal. He studied how mindfulness affects the brain through these programs and almost all of these proved to be successful and positive on the brain.

The Second article I read was about mindfulness tips, from a practicing mindfulness everyday standpoint. The article delved into the practice of mindfulness and how people may have difficulties when starting out the practice. The author Henri Junttila begins the article by talking about his own experience with mindfulness, he emphasizes how at times you feel as if you have no where to go, the article talks about how you can get through a period like this. "Like with any worthwhile journey, you will feel like giving up and throwing in the towel multiple times."
It is very interesting to look at mindfulness from these two standpoints because its looking at it from a medical standpoint as well as a home practicing standpoint.

History

 Do you ever find yourself going about your day feeling as if you are on auto-pilot?  You're not really paying attention to what is going on around or fully aware of the process of what you are doing, just trying to make it through the class or the day. People can become depressed by living this way everyday. Living everyday "just to get through it." Many seek help if they feel this way and recently people have turned to a practice called Mindfulness to help improve and motivate daily life.

Mindfulness is founded upon The Buddhist practice of Sati which means moment to moment awareness of present events. In 1979 at the university of Massachusetts, Jon Kabat-Zinn founded a program called the Mindfulness-Stress Reduction program.  The program was designed to treat the chronically ill in a new, innovative way. This program is believed to be one of the very beginnings of mindfulness practice.
The purpose of mindfulness meditation is based off the buddhist search for the state of Nirvana. They believe that if you reach this state of mind that hatred, greed and jealousy all become absent from the mind. Many people believe that mindfulness is a practice of a state of being, and how life should be lived.

Intro

For My Blogger I have decided to do mindfulness and how to use mindfulness to better everyday life. Mindfulness is something that I try to use in my everyday life and it has helped improve my life greatly. When doing this blog I want to answer what exactly mindfulness is and how apply it to everyday life, also in this blog I will talk about my mindfulness experiences and techniques that can be used for mindfulness. The questions I will attempt to answer go as follows :

• What is mindfulness ?
• How can I use it in my everyday life ?
• How did Mindfulness come to be ?