Really, a book called Yoga for Lawyers? Yes! At first it seemed odd. Isn’t yoga for everyone?
We’ve been asking this exact question. How do attorneys, and the support staff and law professors, and judges work day to day and how can yoga serve their particular needs? We’ve been working with law firms providing yoga classes, mindfulness and Live Great workshops and we’ve seen there are unique needs for the legal profession.
In Yoga for Lawyers, Hallie Love, one of the authors tells a powerful story about mindfulness and how a politician was unseated due to a meeting with a wealthy donor where he “fiddled” with his blackberry and was not paying attention. The story comes from an article in the University of Arkansas at Little Rock Law Review in 2014 entitled On Engagement: Learning to Pay Attention by Lisle Barker and Daniel P. Brown.
The abstract for the article summarizes why attention matters.
“In an age of electronic and mental distraction, the ability to pay attention is a fundamental legal skill increasingly important for law students and the lawyers and judges they will become, not only for professional effectiveness, but also to avoid error resulting from distraction. Far from being immutable, engaged attention can be learned.
More specifically, with an understanding of how the attention system of the brain works, carefully designed mental practice can over time enhance an individual’s capacity for focused attention, not only psychologically but also over time apparently altering the physical structure within the brain itself.
The result can be improved ability for law students to focus attention, to stay calmly on what is intended, without being distracted by irrelevant thought or sense experience, avoiding wasting scarce time and energy otherwise lost to internal or external distraction.
It seems no accident that the profession of law is called a practice and here the key to thriving in that practice is having a mental practice, of paying attention.”
Yoga and mindfulness are just that practice. The brain is a creature of habit. It likes patterns that repeat so it can conserve energy. Yet often the patterns and habits are not serving the task at hand. Paying attention to the breath, moment-to-moment is the way to mitigate the impact of our information ADD that electronics and 24/7 accessibility to information, and other people, had introduced into our modern lives.
For every moment you are paying attention, to your breath, to your body, to your emotions, you are strengthening the ability to pay attention. It’s a muscle…the more you use it, the stronger it gets.
Baker and Brown write…
“…a collateral benefit of this [mental] practice is also an enhanced ability to be self-aware, hopefully providing law students, lawyers and judges an increased capacity to respond, rather than just react, to legal problems and the human thoughts and emotions that come with them when they arise.”
Self-awareness just may be the best tool in anyone’s skills, and life, toolbox.
What do you think? We’d love to hear from you and we’re continuing to dig into this topic so we can better serve the legal profession.
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