Month / July 2022

by Karen Twinem

Christian Mindfulness in Exercise

Research shows that people who focus on the sensations of exercise and on their surroundings enjoy the experience more. Christian mindfulness can support our exercise program, and the exercise program can build our Christian mindfulness.

How can we do it?

  1. Pray before your exercise, offering thanks for the body you have been given.
  2. Unplug. Exercise without music or other input so you can focus on the experience.
  3. Pay attention to the changes you feel as you exercise: changes and strains in your muscles, your mood and emotions, your breathing and all else you experience.
  4. Notice pain and decide what to do about it. Be nice to yourself.
  5. Observe the surroundings, whether they are nature or the walls of a room.
  6. Listen to your thoughts. Are you in dread? Watching the clock? Feeling competitive with others around you?
  7. As you cool down, offer gratitude for your body, inside and out.

Exercise can be many things, ranging from an addiction to an experience to avoid as much as possible. Bringing Christian mindfulness into the activity can add some calm and clarity to it.

a passageway in a beautiful stone monastery
by Karen Twinem

Prayerfulness as Christian Mindfulness

Christian mindfulness is a relatively new term for an ancient practice. One of my favorite spiritual teachers, Sr. Joan Chittister, OSB, writes about it in “The Breath of the Soul.” She calls the practice “prayerfulness.”

Prayerfulness, on the other hand, is the capacity to walk in touch with God through everything in life. It is the internal awareness that God is with me — now, here, in this, always. It is an awareness of the continuing presence of God.

Sr. Joan Chittister, “The Breath of the Soul”

That definition absolutely aligns with mine for Christian mindfulness: living in the present moment with the presence of God.

Sr. Joan has been a huge influence on me since 1990, when I read “Wisdom Distilled from the Daily: Living the Rule of St. Benedict Today.” At the time she wrote that book, she was prioress at the Benedictine Sisters of Erie in Erie, Pennsylvania. Now she is known internationally as an important spiritual writer, with dozens of books to her credit.

So I am not surprised that we arrived on the same path with different terminology.

Sr. Joan writes that prayerfulness is her inner dialogue with the living God who inhabits her spirit and mind. Not only does prayerfulness allow us to see and talk with God everywhere, it lets us to submit the present moment, with all its uncertainty and anxiety, to God.

As Sr. Joan puts it, “It trusts that no matter how malevolent the situation may be, I can walk through it unharmed because God is with me.”

Sr. Joan shares her spiritual practices through her website here. You can subscribe to her monthly newsletter, “The Monastic Way,” on the site. You also get free webinars and Zoom calls with Sr. Joan and her group, an online movement called Monasteries of the Heart.