Speaker 1
It's totally up to you. But my own practice and my own journey with meditation came through physical movement, yoga. And if you've ever done a yoga practice, if you've ever gone through a whole practice, there's a moment at the end called savasana where you lie, you relax, and you sort of recover from the practice and you spend a moment to really work internally and scan the body, see the changes that come about in the body. And that's a hugely mindful practice in itself, and a body scan is a mindful practice as well. But that journey and starting from a physical practice was what I wanted. I wanted to move my body. I wanted to fix my broken body at the time, and getting through that practice and then just adding it on at the end and having this meditative and mindful practice at the end, I was already there. I was already lying down, so I just added it in anyway. It was really, really easy to start. But from that, I then built the idea and started to build the awareness around not only my body, but also the impact that that practice was having on my body. And then once I had that impact on my body and I was feeling better and my aches and pains were going, but I had a better understanding of how my body moved, how my body felt on certain days. And then I could correlate that with my mindset and where my mind was at, was I agitated, was I relaxed, was I calm, was I focused, and it gave me such a great awareness of where my mind was at. And I saw the value that just this mindful practice, just at the time, just a simple mindful practice of scanning my body after every yoga practice had had on my mindset and the way I managed my mind in sport. And like any of this, I will kind of put a disclaimer in that I was not perfect and still I'm not perfect in what I do. And perfection isn't really what you're chasing. You're chasing the awareness to know that you can improve every time you do one of these practices. So I think it's worth just knowing that first that you don't have to be perfect in your routine, your mindfulness to start with, you're never going to be perfect.