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Old 06-23-2014, 10:54 AM   #1
"ADHD Aikidoka"
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Anonymous User
ADHD and methods of training mental state

There are some great older posts by Erick Mead on ADHD, mushin, and fudoshin that track pretty closely my experience of ADHD, namely that ADHD minds tend to drive full-bore into one mode (pretty frequently mushin) without being able to access the other (usually fudoshin). It's struck me more than once that mushin was where a lot of ADHD folks spend too much of their time, stuck far too strongly in the moment, and later it occurred to me that the aikido training process is great mental training for people with ADHD because it's designed to happen with an in-the-moment state rather than hindered by it. It's experiential rather than consciously mediated, so, with practice, it shuts down or bypasses a lot of the noise of the conscious mind during training, and works with some of the attention/focus peculiarities of ADHD.

So I feel as though I've got two-thirds of a tool that works with what my mind does, and I'm missing the piece that starts to balance out the extremes of being in the moment. I'm trying to find a way to train fudoshin off the mat, and I'm having difficulty with it. I'm finding a little about how it's trained in a martial context, but my understanding isn't sophisticated enough to draw out the principles into something I can train throughout the day. I think a lot of meditation practices are aimed at developing mushin, though they rarely come out and say so, so it's quite possible I'm missing existing traditional forms of training because I don't recognize them. Or I may need a better understanding of the mindset, and perhaps what parts of the on-the-mat training experience are intended to encourage or support that mindset, to isolate the feeling and experiment a little. Has anyone got any thoughts or personal experience with something like this?
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