One of the enduring images of the Beijing Olympics was the redemption of US snowboarder Lindsey Jacobellis. While on the homestretch of the inaugural snowboard cross race at the 2006 Olympics Jacobellis infamously began to celebrate only to fall and squander the gold. In the intervening years Jacobellis seemed snakebit, returning to the Olympics again and again but failing to win. That all changed in this year’s Games, as she finally took home that elusive gold medal.

Yet redemption was not Jacobellis’ goal In Beijing. “That was not in my mind. I wanted to just come here and compete,” said Jacobellis. “[Winning] would have been a nice, sweet thing, but I think if I had tried to spend time on the thought of redemption, then it’s taking away focus on the task at hand, and that’s not why I race.” 

Jacobellis’ words happen to echo the Olympics creed, which states, “The most important thing in the Olympic Games is not to win but to take part, just as the most important thing in life is not the triumph but the struggle.” The quote is by Baron de Coubertin, who is known as the father of the modern Olympics for helping to revive the competition and founding the International Olympics Committee.

The creed doesn’t quite speak to the intensity of the machine that churns out highly specified modern athletes engaging in the pressure cooker of the medal pursuit. As Derek Covington, the former Director of Performance for the Canadian Olympic Team and founder of First Water Performance, which trains athletes in mindfulness to help enhance performance, notes, de Coubertin’s words “feel a bit soft. We are not there to simply take part, but to win.”

But de Coubertin’s emphasis on embracing the struggle actually might be a key to making it to the podium. After all, there are no free rides to the Olympics, and hopeful athletes have to engage in a whole lot of struggle to even have a shot at taking part. It turns out how they relate to this struggle can be a key determining factor.

The ability to stay present to the process of training is not something that comes naturally to athletes when the stakes are so high. Researchers Alena Kröhler and Stefan Berti distinguish between action-oriented and state-oriented individuals: “Action-oriented individuals distinguish themselves through solving problems intuitively in adverse conditions (e.g., bad weather, broken equipment, and poor field or arena conditions), rapid acting without excessively thinking about the source or the person responsible, and developing different possibilities to act in demanding situations.” State-oriented individuals, on the other hand, are focused more on their own emotions and thoughts, and have difficulty refocusing on the task at hand.

Unsurprisingly, research has shown that in the context of competitive sports, state-oriented individuals are often at a disadvantage, taking longer to make decisions. “State-oriented athletes think a lot about their goals but fail to take immediate action,” wrote Kröhler and Berti.

Helping athletes become action-oriented is what coaches like Derek Covington do, and mindfulness is a key part of that training. “When I think of state-oriented, I think of a fixed mindset,” said Covington. “When I think of action-oriented, I think of a growth or challenge mindset.” The difference, explained Covington, is using that ultimate goal as a motivating force, but then being able to “unhook ourselves from the outcome and accept who we are in this moment.”

Despite the conception of Olympians as physical specimens, this shift requires more mental training than physical. “Our mindfulness practice can bring awareness to how we feel about our goals and the thoughts and stories that surround them,” said Covington. “Mindfulness is not going to win you the race. Your talent, wisdom, and execution will be either good enough, or not. But what mindfulness can help you with is believing in your talent and wisdom, so that you can execute your best performance, however the outcome may turn out.”

Campbell Thompson, a sports psychologist at High Performance Sport New Zealand—a national organization that works with the country’s highest-level athletes—uses mindfulness to help athletes tap into values-based motivations. This can create a useful uncoupling of the typical training-outcomes relationship, in which all action is in service of the desired goal, and failure to achieve that goal results in an athlete feeling like a failure. Reflecting on one’s journey and developing goals that are about the courage, resilience, and self-compassion one brings to the process can lead to what Thompson called “a more enlivening path within high-performance sport.” A path that can lead to gold but in which fulfillment doesn’t hinge upon it.

Thompson mentioned an athlete he’d worked with who qualified for an important event after a couple of setbacks. Leading up to the event the athlete meditated daily and embraced the process, but on the day of the final she found herself overwhelmed by the immense crowd and the TV cameras. She couldn’t focus on her breathing or get centered, and her inability to manage her stress only led to more stress. With nowhere to turn she realized that all she could do was accept the conditions. 

“It’s a moment of creative helplessness, as we call it,” said Thompson. “What am I going to do about it? Well, I may as well just focus as best I can and it might all go wrong, but even if it does, I’m going to be okay.”

The athlete’s ability to let go—even of the desire to feel mindful and in control—paradoxically allowed her to perform at her best and win the event. It is an ability she might not have been able to tap into had she allowed the immensity of the goal to overtake the flexibility of the moment.

“Mindfulness doesn’t always do what we want it to do,” explained Thompson. “It’s not a calming technique. But when we do it over and over again, it gives us that insight we need in those white hot moments. It helps us get in the zone. But it’s going to help us do what we need to do when we’re way out of the zone as well.”

When Baron de Coubertin proposed a revival of the Olympics in 1894, he probably didn’t envision performance coaches teaching athletes how to establish values-based motivations through mindful reflection, but then again he also probably didn’t envision the triple cork 1440. Yet one has to imagine he’d be pleased with both developments; the way athletes are constantly pushing the envelope, and the way they are learning to embrace the struggles and joys of that push without worrying too much about the triumph. 

“I’m encouraging athletes to connect to values,” explained Thompson. “To have a high level of acceptance toward the discomfort that can come as you devote yourself to being the best in the world at a physical discipline, and also a degree of self-compassion, so that you can accept your imperfections, and forge connections with other people that make it feel worthwhile, and make you feel like you’re doing it with and perhaps for other people as well.”

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During the winter of 2018-19, the American endurance athlete Colin O’Brady completed the first-ever solo, unsupported, unaided crossing of Antarctica. O’Brady traveled 932 miles in 54 days, dragging a 375-pound sled behind him in subzero conditions. A significant amount of physical training had gone into his preparations, as had a surprising amount of sitting still. To get accustomed to the intense isolation and to improve his mental well-being, O’Brady went on a ten-day Vipassana meditation retreat, as he has done every year since 2010.

Before going on his first retreat, O’Brady had been competing as a professional triathlete. His decision to embrace meditation was prompted by a simple question. At the end of a race a friend pulled O’Brady aside and said, “I don’t know much about sports, but I can tell you guys are some of the best athletes in the world, and it’s clearly all in your mind. So what are you doing to train your mind?”

“I was kind of embarrassed,” recalled O’Brady, “like I was caught with my pants down.” He asked for a recommendation, and the friend told him about meditation retreats. As a result, he said, “I went from never meditating to signing up for a ten-day silent Vipassana retreat.”

For athletes of O’Brady’s caliber, sitting still can provide a shocking dissonance. After all, they are used to the intense awareness predicated by dangerous environments. Sasha Dingle, the founder and director of Mountain Mind Project and an internationally competitive freeskier and mountain biker herself, explained that extreme athletes are primed for flow by the inherent risk and novelty of their trade. Assessing the snowpack, being attuned to the weather, and navigating dangerous elements all require embodied presence. Yet despite the allure of complete immersion, it is impossible to remain at the peak permanently. “I see in the mountain community a struggle to transition between that high-valence emotional experience and the blander day-to-day routines of life,” said Dingle. “We can end up chasing this elusive thing that we can’t sustain. You can’t always be charging up mountains.” Outside of the domain in which they achieve high-stakes mastery, high-endurance performers are forced to confront something that can be even more unsettling: the ordinary.

Pete Kirchmer, the program director of mPEAK (Mindful Performance Enhancement, Awareness, and Knowledge), a program for high performers developed in conjunction with the US Olympic BMX Cycling Team coaching staff, a team of UC San Diego neuroscientists, and leaders of the UC San Diego Center for Mindfulness, has seen how difficult the shift from extreme action to radical stillness can be. “I’ve worked with the [Navy] SEALs, and we talk about how jumping out of airplanes and holding one’s breath in freezing water is easier and even preferable for them than sitting with themselves and their emotions in stillness and silence,” said Kirchmer. To attune these gung-ho types to the subtleties of the challenge they are facing, Kirchmer employs a phrase that acts as a training mantra: “Vulnerability is the new hardcore.”

“If jumping out of an airplane doesn’t scare you, then you’re not courageous,” explained Kirchmer. “If you need a new thing to be courageous about, you have to find a new fear to conquer. So let’s work toward these inner fears.”

“In our culture there’s a hardcore, ‘I’m tough’ type of thing,” agreed O’Brady. “You think you’re tough? Sit in silence by yourself for ten days. It’s incredible how challenging that is emotionally and physically, particularly if your body and mind are oriented in a kinetic type of way.” But what exactly is it about sitting still and working with one’s mind that allows extreme athletes to excel kinetically? And what can it teach us run-of-the-mill meditators and weekend warriors about our own inner journeys?

In a 2017 Ted Talk, O’Brady spoke about the mindset required to persevere: “Achievement is not for the select few. Achievement is simply for those who never quit. It is for those who set goals. It is for those who put the most steps in front of the other. Achievement is for those who can overcome the greatest obstacle of all: their mind.”

Having goals is important. People climb to the tops of mountains because of the challenge they provide. It was the pioneering mountaineer George Leigh Mallory (born in 1886 and last seen alive in 1924 roughly 300 meters below the peak of Mount Everest, where his body was discovered in 1995) who responded to the question of why attempt such a preposterous feat with the response “Because it’s there.”

O’Brady noted that for most people, the goal of climbing Mount Everest can obscure the reality. “When people say ‘I want to stand on the top of this mountain,’ they are picturing the dinner party where people say, ‘Whoa, you climbed Mount Everest!’ They are trying to achieve something that isn’t the mountaintop. Their mind is focused not on the present but on the future.”

“Achievement is not for the select few. It is simply for those who never quit. Achievement is for those who can overcome the greatest obstacle of all: the mind.”

O’Brady, who climbed Everest in 2016 as part of his record-setting completion of the Three Poles Challenge (to climb Mount Everest as well as reach the North and South Poles), knows full well the fleeting nature of achievement. “I’ve been patted on the back and have attended the dinner parties, and I know what that feels like. But the true value is the depth of the experience itself. The summit or the mountaintop might be five minutes of a yearlong journey. I don’t ever think of summit day. I think of the process and the journey.”

Kirchmer describes this reorientation to process as setting goals on a shelf. “Rather than training athletes how to release goals, mPEAK teaches them how to relate to goals wisely,” explained Kirchmer. “Every athlete I’ve worked with ultimately comes to understand that the only thing they have agency over is how they respond to the present moment. As soon as they notice they’ve been caught up in over-rehearsing, strategizing, or focusing on a future outcome, they can bring themselves back into the moment by feeling their breath and body and allowing their years of training to come through them uninhibited.”

It can be difficult to keep coming back into the moment as long as lofty goals loom in the distance. Kirchmer calls this getting caught in the “performance story.” It is a trap that meditators know all too well. After all, a similar drive to achieve can start one on the path of contemplative practice. Were meditation merely an exercise in stillness, then the insight of the greatest couch potato might rival the insight of the greatest Buddhist master. But meditation is a process. We begin to practice meditation because we have a goal in mind that exists on some fabled internal peak. We want to be wiser, more compassionate, less anxious, or perhaps enlightened. Whatever our gateway to practice may be, we usually arrive there with a specific desire.

One of the insights of Buddhist practice is that such desires are the very source of suffering. The trick, then, is to practice letting go of desire, since it is this very grasping mechanism that causes suffering in the first place. Professor of religious studies Dale Wright wrote in his book Buddhism: What Everyone Needs to Know (2020), “If you eliminate or ameliorate the conditions that give rise to suffering, you will have eliminated or diminished that suffering.” Meditation can be a tool for bringing intentional presence to each moment and learning to let go of the Everests and Antarcticas of the mental landscape. “The deepest states of meditation are described as these experiences of ‘release’ and ‘letting go,’” wrote Wright. This doesn’t mean that one simply stops striving. Rather, one sees that fulfillment arises from mindful attunement to the process rather than in the achievement of specific outcomes.

This can be an especially hard lesson to grasp when specific outcomes pay the bills. For athletes competing to be the first or the fastest, their livelihood can depend on these exploits and the publicity and opportunities they bring. No one remembers the second person to climb Everest.

It is a tension that O’Brady is intimate with. “I’m continually working on and pondering it,” he admitted. When given the opportunity to ask a question at his first Vipassana retreat, O’Brady inquired about this tension between goals and process.

“I’m a very goal-oriented person, and I’m there to become a better professional athlete,” related O’Brady. “I’m hearing that all this meditation is about letting go of craving and letting go of aversion, with no relationship in my mind about how these sync up. Am I supposed to let go of my goals and dreams while I sit here? Every time I’ve gone back, I’ve asked the same question. And what I’ve been told, essentially, is that you have the answer.”

The answer, O’Brady found, involved being present for“the doing of the thing itself” and not the aftermath. “This is why we call it a practice,” said O’Brady. “I have achieved goals that are very ambitious by setting them and having a clear, linear purpose and direction, but then saying, ‘Forget about this. We’re on the path now.’

“When alone in Antarctica you think, ‘No one can ever walk that far.’ But I can be present for one hundred steps, or get to the next rock, or the next shadow, just as we do on the meditation cushion.” It was a feat that O’Brady accomplished step by single step—a journey that he now thinks of as “a 54-day silent walking meditation in Antarctica.”

On January 21, 2021, O’Brady put up an Instagram photo of himself meditating in Pakistan at the base camp of K2. Along with several others, he was hoping to achieve the first-ever winter ascent of the mountain (on January 16, 2021, a team of Nepali climbers completed the feat). While he waited for a clear weather window, O’Brady wrote under the Instagram photo, “It’s easy to get anxious in these moments of waiting and anticipation. But expending any extra energy right now is a waste. Instead, I turn to my meditation practice and the daily intention of finding calm, gratitude for my surroundings, and patience.”

In early February clear weather arrived and O’Brady made a push for the summit. On the way to Camp 2 at 22,000 feet, his climbing partner made the difficult decision to call off his summit push. O’Brady kept on, making it to Camp 3 on February 4. Then things quickly deteriorated. A miscommunication led to an abundance of climbers and a dearth of tents and other equipment, a potentially fatal situation.

“When sitting, you learn not to react but to listen and feel. That is the essence of Vipassana, and I think that trained me to be able to sit in stillness for a crucial period of time that possibly saved my life.”

“At 24,000 feet, in minus 50 degrees, when the circumstances were seven people in a three-person tent, the situation was devolving into a really bad one,” recalled O’Brady. In those dire circumstances, he had to figure out whether or not to keep going.

“My ego and achievement-oriented self wanted to do the climb. I had put so much energy and time into it and had so many people following it, and I felt that external pressure. But my practice allowed me to meditate in this crazy environment. I tried to take away the external circumstances and take a deeper look inside to make a critical decision. Without daily meditation practice I wouldn’t have been equipped with the tool to sit in stillness in this harsh environment, to close my eyes and breathe. I wouldn’t have had the awareness to listen to what was coming up for me internally, which ended up, to my surprise and especially to the surprise of my ego, being the decision that this was the moment to not go.”

O’Brady was able to descend safely. But tragically, over the next 24 hours four other climbers lost their lives. O’Brady didn’t reach the top of the mountain, but letting go of the goal was something he’d trained for. It required being vulnerable and open. It required stillness. “When sitting, the knees hurt and the back hurts and it’s hot and you have sweat coming down your cheek, and you learn not to react but to listen and feel. That is the essence of Vipassana, and I think that indirectly or directly trained me to be smashed in a tent with seven people and still be able to sit in stillness and listen for a crucial period of time that possibly saved my life.”

As far as I know, when asked why one sits on a meditation cushion, no one has ever responded, “Because it’s there.” But perhaps this would be the most appropriate answer. After all, sitting for the purpose of achieving a specific goal is a surefire way to create an obstacle, a gap between desire and achievement, a rift between the valley and the peak. Yet through meditation practice we can come to appreciate what Sasha Dingle of Mountain Mind Project describes as “the full spectrum of human experience.” This is how we bridge the gap. “I can still tap into these present-moment, awe-inducing experiences when I’m just doing work, or hanging out with other people,” explains Dingle. The ordinary can be quite extraordinary if we pay attention.

Perhaps this is why extreme sports can be such a compelling metaphor for practice. It’s not about the five minutes spent on the roof of the world on summit day but about all the moments of exertion and exuberance that are part of the process. When this becomes evident, the desire to get to the summit takes a back seat to the joyful grind and tender vulnerability of the present. “The path to liberation isn’t for the faint of heart; it requires the heart of a warrior,” said Kirchmer. “Athletes can be a powerful archetype for the kind of fierce energy required for daily commitment to practice.”

The application of this fierce energy can certainly be rewarding. Meditation has given O’Brady the mental edge he was seeking all those years ago when he first dove into the deep end of a ten-day silent retreat. Yet for all he has achieved, O’Brady doesn’t consider this edge the main draw of mindfulness: “That’s what brought me into practice, but it’s not at all near the top of the list of benefits from practice. It taught me to let go of my attachment to being a better athlete and to be more connected to family and life. I’m happy to know that more people are awakening to that reality, because it will lead not only to more incredible human performance and achievement but also to a more peaceful and interconnected community and world.”

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Then John “Mayor” Lindsey, wearing the uniform of the New Jersey Jackals, rose and addressed the Blessed One. “Lord, I was drafted in the thirteenth round by the Rockies and played A Ball for seven years for the Portland Rockies, the Asheville Tourists, and the Salem Red Sox. Then I was signed by the Mariners and played A Ball for the San Bernardino Stampede before ascending to Double-A, where I played for the San Antonio Missions. Then I descended to the Single-A Jupiter Hammerheads and then to the independent league New Jersey Jackals. Then I signed with the Dodgers and played for the Triple-A Las Vegas 51s and then for their Double-A affiliate, the Jacksonville Suns. Lord, you may know them as the Jacksonville Jumbo Shrimp. Then I signed with the Marlins and played for their Double-A New Orleans Zephyrs. Lord, you may know them as the New Orleans Baby Cakes. Then I signed with the Dodgers again and played for the Triple-A Albuquerque Isotopes of the Pacific Coast League. Lord, after sixteen years in the minors, I was called up by the Dodgers. I wore Dodger Blue for eleven games. I had one hit in twelve at bats before I was hit by a pitch and broke my hand. Later, I was signed by the Tigers and played for the Toledo Mud Hens. And then I was released.

“Blessed One, counting the Mexican League and winter ball, I played 2,277 games in the minors for twenty-five teams over twenty-one years. I drove for endless miles in old buses with bad air-conditioning. I ate countless bad meals of fried food with plastic forks. I loaded countless suitcases on and off buses. I slept in countless bad hotels with stained carpets, coin-operated Magic Fingers beds, and no Wi-Fi. I sat for endless hours on hard benches in concrete dugouts. I took countless showers in cinder-block clubhouses. I played on countless bad fields and played countless bad hops before tiny crowds. And yet my lifetime average in the majors was only .083.

“O Teacher of Players and Fans, taking off my first baseman’s mitt, I ask: Why did you make a game so filled with change?”

“O son of the A leagues, I made this game to teach the truth of impermanence, that all things are subject to change, that all things will one day fall apart. I teach that the hot streak leads to the slump, that .300 leads to the Mendoza Line, that the hundred-mile-per-hour heater leads to Tommy John surgery, that the perfect game through six leads to the loss after nine, that the big league contract leads to being designated for assignment.

“I teach the wandering between worlds, where the players in the heavens called the majors are blown by the winds of their statistics to the hells of the minors. I teach that the denizens of Triple A toil in game after game, meeting a god only when that god descends for a rehab assignment and pays for the spread. I teach that even for those who ascend, the time is short, able to wear the garments of the gods only in spring training before being returned to hell, the domain of demeaning team logos.

“I made this game not to make players suffer but to make players see that to be attached to luxury suites, private jets, and Gatorade commercials is only a source of suffering. I made this game to teach players to play without attachment.” Thus spoke the Buddha.

Commentary

We know from our own experience that our joys and sorrows, our physical sensations change constantly. What we don’t know is that those changes are the direct result of our past actions, seeds that can bear their fruit at any moment in a process that is completely beyond our control. This is the truth of impermanence, the first of what the Buddha called “the three marks.” The other two are suffering and no self. They are called marks because all things bear their imprint. We could also call them “the three strikes.” The Buddha invented the game called baseball to teach us about impermanence. As he said, “The end of fortune is decline. The end of rising is falling. The end of meeting is parting. The end of birth is death.”

The end of fortune is decline. The term translated as “fortune” here can mean wealth, but it can also mean fortune in a more metaphorical sense, that of being endowed with all manner of skills and powers. In baseball, one thinks immediately of the five-tool player, the position player with exceptional abilities to field, throw, run, hit, and hit with power. Even for the player of great natural ability, these skills are honed over thousands of hours of practice and in hundreds of games, beginning with playing catch with your father, to sandlot ball, to Little League, to high school baseball, and then to either college or the minors. And then, with much good fortune, to the majors, where the five-tool player is rewarded with riches, reaching his prime in his middle to late twenties, perhaps peaking around age twenty-nine, and remaining in his prime for a few more years. But the end of fortune is decline, and in the player’s thirties, the tools start to rust, beginning with speed, as the player “loses a step.” Bat speed will also decline, with the player no longer able to “catch up to the fastball.” Fielders begin to lose their range. Catchers’ knees start to go, so they are moved to first or to DH. Pitchers lose a few miles per hour off their fastball, having to learn to be “pitchers” rather than “throwers,” mastering and inventing all manner of novelty pitches. (One thinks of David Cone’s “Laredo slider.”) Eventually, the tools of the major league player will decline so much that he will be traded, or released if he wants to spare himself the indignity of being sent down. Unlike in other walks of life, when fortune ends in loss in baseball it is there for all to see, heartbreaking to the fan, as the decline of each skill is meticulously measured, charted, dissected, and discussed. It is a powerful lesson in impermanence.

The end of rising is falling. Every spring, after the Yankees lost their first game of the year, my father would call me and say, “There goes the undefeated season.” Given the length of the season and the remarkable range of variables in a given game—whether the pitcher has his “good stuff,” whether a batter is “seeing the ball well,” whether the manager calls in the right reliever at the right time—falling in the standings is an inevitable part of baseball, with players and fans alike carefully watching how far behind their team is, not in the win column but in the loss column, how many games out of the wild card they are. Almost every team goes on an inexplicable losing streak at some point every year, plummeting in the standings and often falling out of contention. Because bad teams beat good teams so regularly and because the season is so long, teams rise and fall in the standings more dramatically in baseball than in any other sport. It is a powerful lesson in impermanence.

♦

From Buddha Takes the Mound: Enlightenment in 9 Innings by Donald S. Lopez Jr. © 2020. Reprinted with permission of St. Martin’s Press.

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Today, the Chicago Cubs and Arizona Diamondbacks have meditation rooms. The Toronto Blue Jays have a “Mind Gym” program. But when Alan Jaeger was growing up, he was taught that baseball was physical, not mental.

Jaeger, now 55, excelled at sports from an early age. He grew up in California’s San Fernando Valley playing basketball, tennis, and baseball, and by college was pitching for Cal State Northridge. Then everything began to unravel.

“I felt shaky on the mound,” Jaeger recalled of the personal situation that left him unable to do the thing that came most easily to him. “I had to walk away from the team because I wasn’t able to function with clarity, and at the time I didn’t have any tools for dealing with that. I was blindsided.”

Not knowing where to turn, Jaeger sought answers in his studies and switched his major to psychology. One day during class, his professor told the classic Zen story about a student who, seeking answers, joins the master for tea. The master begins to pour the tea into the student’s cup, and as the student pontificates, the master keeps pouring until the cup is overflowing, much like the student’s mind. “Talk about getting hit in between the eyes with a lightning rod,” Jaeger said. “The story grabbed my attention, and I made the immediate connection with athletics. When an athlete is completely empty, there’s no thought. We’re trusting this spontaneous action to happen.”

What followed was three or four years of what Jaeger calls “constant engagement” through writing, reading, research, and meditation. In 1994 he published a book called Getting Focused, Staying Focused: A Far Eastern Approach to Sports and Life, which launched his career as a trainer who focused as much on mindfulness as on mechanics.

Jaeger’s methods resonated with players and coaches alike, and over the years he has worked with winners of the Cy Young Award (the top honor for Major League Baseball pitchers) as well as with College World Series winning teams. These days, Jaeger starts his morning with an hour of meditation and stretching before consulting with a coach or guiding a team in meditation via Facetime.  He also attends a weekly nonduality group in West Los Angeles.

Another spring has arrived and with it the familiar rites of baseball. As he has done for thirty years now, Jaeger will continue to teach and to train, encouraging others to look within.

“Meditation is the act of practice,” said Jaeger. “You’re learning to be in a space where you’re able to just be. Be through an at-bat, be through a game, be through the day. It’s really about life. You can only throw a fastball so hard.”

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In the beginning there was god-given brawn: Babe Ruth could go carousing until the sun came up and then smack a baseball beyond the horizon with a flick of his wrists. Or there was god-given talent: Ted Williams and his eyesight so perfect that when he enlisted in World War II, doctors were astounded by his 20-10 vision. The heroes of old, like all mythic characters, were born heroes. It’s hard to picture the Great Bambino lifting weights or the Splendid Splinter struggling with his swing. It’s even harder to picture them meditating.

But times have changed. The days of athletes inhaling pregame cheeseburgers and exhaling halftime cigarettes are long gone, and our understanding of performance has grown exponentially. In the arms race for an edge that is professional sports, teams and players have found ways, both legal and illegal, to optimize the body’s potential. But as anyone who has seen superstar quarterback Tom Brady’s surprisingly unimpressive draft photo knows, athleticism alone may not separate you from the pack at the upper echelon of sport.

“The last frontier now is the mental part of the game,” Bob Tewksbury, a major league pitcher for 13 seasons and the current mental skills coordinator for the Chicago Cubs, told me. “Everyone’s got a certain amount of talent to be a pro, but it’s the mental part that separates the good from the great.”

For Tewksbury and others in his field, incorporating mental skills is the next step in the evolution of athletics. 

“When I came up to the big leagues . . . you didn’t really lift weights. You ran, you played catch,” he said. But today, major-league teams have multiple strength and conditioning trainers and nutritionists on their payrolls, he said, and now many athletes are turning to mindfulness.

In locker rooms across the country, players are sitting and working with their minds, something once unheard of in a profession based on results. Still, many athletes and organizations have been reluctant. 

“I think there’s been a long-standing stigma with mental health in general going back to counseling and psychotherapy years ago,” said Tewksbury. “When you’re talking about a culture of alpha males, the last thing they want to be seen doing is talking to the mental skills guy.” 

But as we learn more about the power of the body and mind working in concert with one another, those walls are collapsing. As many of the trainers and mental skills coaches I spoke with explained, mindfulness isn’t what’s next; by definition, it’s what is happening right now.

♦

Patient zero of the mindfulness boom in sports, or at least in baseball, may have been Barry Zito. In 2006, after the San Francisco Giants awarded Zito what was at that time the largest contract in baseball history for a pitcher, the media began to take note of his idiosyncrasies, such as his tendency to take deep breaths on the mound before releasing his pitches. 

An article for the New York Times described his wacky methods under the guidance of trainer Alan Jaeger: “Jaeger’s regimen lasts five hours a day, and for the first four hours, no one touches a baseball. The pitchers meditate, stretch, listen to music, perform yoga poses, meditate again and listen to more music. They talk about dreams and visualize games.” All this time dedicated to activities that seemed at best tangentially related to baseball was written off as yet another example of pitchers being the oddest species of athlete.

Related: Are the Cubs America’s Buddhist Baseball Team?

Jaeger, who has worked with a number of professional athletes over the years, had been a pitcher in college but had to leave the team due to his own mental struggles. He discovered Zen practice and began to see similarities with the state meditation produced and the state every athlete seeks when competing. “Here’s a simple statement I make all the time to people when I try to help them understand how important and profound looking into the mental game is,” Jaeger explained. “Would you be a better player if you were more relaxed by 30 percent than you are now? Everybody right away says, ‘Of course.’”

But Jaeger’s initial ventures into the field of sports psychology were awkward. “When I first met with a junior college in 1990 they looked at me like I had seven eyes,” said Jaeger. “Even as recently as five years ago, people still associated mental training and sports psychology with, ‘You have to have a problem. You need to get fixed.’” 

Overcoming this stigma has been a major hurdle for mental skills coaches, especially those with a mindfulness bent. Dr. Gregory Cartin, a performance consultant, has had to use workarounds to getting athletes interested in meditation. 

“With mindfulness a lot of it’s about getting your foot in the door with the client, introducing it, having it take hold, and letting them see for themselves how powerful and beneficial it can be,” said Cartin. “I never introduce the word meditation or mindfulness until they start to ask for more. I get creative and find different ways to teach it.”

Cartin uses mindfulness to bring a player to a place of acceptance. He believes that understanding the inner workings of one’s mind is the first step toward learning how to compete regardless of whatever mental state is present at any given moment. Cartin is aware that looking inward can be an uncomfortable process, but becoming comfortable with discomfort is exactly the point.

“When someone tells you to calm down what do you do? You usually get more upset. The same idea applies in sports,” explained Cartin. “I’m helping athletes embrace difficult mental states instead of fighting them or blocking them or trying to do something with them. You can simply be with it. It’s a skill-access business. I tell my athletes all the time [that] I’m not trying to make them better athletes, I’m trying to help them compete with a sense of freedom and access the skills they’ve already developed.”

This concept, once seen as a fringe idea being taught by a few rogue trainers, is now being implemented by entire organizations. 

Ben Freakley, the head of mental performance for the Toronto Blue Jays, said, “For a long time we’ve heard terms like focus or calm down or relax . . .  but [mindfulness] is a way to help guys really tap into that.” 

In order to harness the power of mental skills the Blue Jays have developed what they call the “Mind Gym.” They’ve brought in mental-performance coaches like Rob DiBernardo to facilitate Mind Gym sessions. A typical session might involve a discussion of a key idea, a meditation, and an opportunity for a debrief and processing. The sessions are optional, but DiBernardo, in his first year with the team, has been encouraged by the response.

Related: The Gods of Baseball

“One of the neat things about [the Mind Gym] is it’s experiential, so a player gets to sample the merchandise, so to speak. There’s an opportunity for them to vote with their feet,” said DiBernardo, who is also the associate head coach at MIT. “I’ve been really impressed with how many people will show up to attend these sessions. Some mornings it’s cold outside and the guys are there and they’re ready to go.”

The players using mindfulness to seek a competitive edge have told DiBernardo that they are seeing results.

“Players often reference the ability to slow the game down,” he said. “The game may not change speed, but I think slowing themselves down with breathing could be one piece of the puzzle, and perhaps an important piece that enhances others.” 

But mindfulness training has another appeal: It doesn’t ask of players that they show no weakness and feel no pain, rather it tends to embrace the whole spectrum of their experience. Athletes have long been treated like pieces of equipment, specimens to be chewed up and spit out in service of the best outcome for the organization, their personal health be damned. For many players, the Mind Gym is a space where their own thoughts and feelings are not only welcomed but honored. 

“The practice has been around for a long time, but as a team we’re just scratching the surface of what we might be able to explore with our players,” said Freakley. “We feel it can help improve a player’s performance, but also his well-being—and we care a lot about both.” 

♦

Russ Rausch was once a successful businessman in Chicago. A small town kid from Kansas and the first in his family to go to college, he’d risen to a place of material comfort. He’d traveled the world, he owned a home, he even owned a vacation home. And yet Rausch found himself unfulfilled. 

“I’ve done all this stuff that really is beyond my dreams,” said Rausch, reflecting on that period. “And I’m having this feeling of, ‘Is this all there is?’ It felt like no matter what I did externally I ended up in the same place. I’d made friends with a couple of pro baseball players at that point and they felt the same way and that was shocking to me. I couldn’t see how that could even be possible.”

If professional athletes, making exorbitant sums of money and living out their childhood dreams, could also feel unfulfilled, something seemed amiss. Rausch spent years researching and soul-searching—studying neuroscience, psychology, and meditation. He said these disciplines changed his life, which led him to found Vision Pursue, a company that helps people develop a performance mindset that also enhances their personal well-being. Vision Pursue’s clients include the Atlanta Falcons, Miami Heat, and Seattle Mariners, as well as with a number of individual athletes. Rausch believes that if athletes learn to enjoy the process, the results will come.

“I think what we’re good at is taking some of these concepts and explaining them in ways that performers can understand,” explained Rausch. “We’re trying to let them keep their goals, keep the things that they want, but change the way they’re looking at them. When you start to realize that fulfillment is an internal thing you shift from [a] wanting-and-getting [mindset] to connecting, contributing, and creating. Not because someone told you to or it sounds good but because that’s what’s coming out of you.”

Rausch and his team have developed an app for Vision Pursue clients that features a daily mindfulness based activity. Through the app clients also report on their progress, and the results have been dramatic. After 60 days of using Vision Pursue clients show a 23 percent decrease in the amount of time during the day in which they feel stressed, bored, or a desire to escape their circumstances, and a corresponding 23 percent increase in the amount of time in which they feel good. But does this improvement in well-being translate into increased performance?

This is the million (or perhaps billion) dollar question of the mindfulness performance movement. Dr. Amy Baltzell, author of The Power of Mindfulness: Mindfulness Meditation Training in Sport, and a professor at Boston University, admitted that as of now the research has not proven anything significant. “There have been a couple of dozen studies around mindfulness and sport in some way,” said Baltzell, and indeed, several of these studies have established a correlation. “But most don’t have performance markers,” continued Baltzell. “It’s difficult to have enough controls to claim impact on performance.” 

“There’s not a groundswell of evidence,” agreed Coach DiBernardo. “There’s a few studies where there’s enhanced focus, there’s enhanced self-ratings of performance. There’s certainly some out there involving well-being and increased mindfulness, but there’s a lot more to be done there in the academic space.”

In the meantime, some teams, like the Blue Jays, are forging ahead under the assumption that mindful athletes perform best. And they say other teams are lagging behind. 

“Everybody’s kind of sticking their toe in the water,” said Rausch. “I’m old enough to remember when people didn’t lift weights for basketball. Now you couldn’t even imagine not doing it. I think that’s where mental training will be in five years. People will look back and say, ‘Can you believe we didn’t use to do this?’” 

According to Alan Jaeger, that time has already come, and any team that doesn’t meditate is making a huge mistake: “At the end of the day this game is 99 percent mental at the major league level,” he said. “Until a team not only brings in a meditation teacher for all of spring training but has a meditation teacher at every affiliate they’re kidding themselves.”

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Once a Maoist child soldier, Mira Rai, a young woman from rural Nepal, overcame the challenges of an impoverished upbringing to become an internationally recognized trail runner. Today, she inspires children in her home country and abroad to pursue their dreams. 

This film will be available for streaming until midnight on Saturday, March 2nd. 

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Age: 38
Profession: Investor and mountaineer
Location: Canterbury, United Kingdom

You broke world records in September 2017 for being the first bilateral above-the-knee amputee to summit a peak upward of 19,000 feet. You’ve also taken up ice and rock climbing, long-distance kayaking, cycling, and alpine skiing. How did you first get into adventure sports? I was born into a farming family in Mirul, a hillside village in western Nepal. Pushing physical boundaries was just a natural part of growing up in the Himalayas. There were no drivable roads, so every day we would make an arduous 45-minute trek barefoot to primary school. There wasn’t much opportunity for organized sports. We would stuff old clothes into socks and sew it all together to make a soccer ball. Mount Everest was always in partial sight, so climbing the world’s highest peak has been a dream of mine since childhood.

At the age of 19, you enlisted with the Royal Gurkha Riffles and served in the British Army for 15 years, which brought you on tours to North America, Europe, Africa, and Asia. Why did you decide to become a soldier? My father was an army man and always wanted one of his sons to be in the military. Becoming a Gurkha warrior is notoriously difficult. You’re one of 10,000 applicants competing for 120 to 150 seats, depending on that year’s vacancy. Nobody forced us to join—we were all volunteers and really motivated. Training may be grueling, but for the Nepalese, earning a spot is a national honor; it’s like winning a lottery ticket.

You must have had to face acute fear while in combat. What was your headspace like the day you lost both of your legs in Afghanistan? To be honest, I was prepared to die, not to get injured. About 30 of us were walking on the field that day doing routine drills. There were no enemies around, nobody was coming to kill us—it was just a bomb that went off. And bang, within seconds I lost my right leg from the knee down, and my left was badly damaged. I was completely conscious while my friends gave me first aid and called for a helicopter rescue.

Because I was one of the most senior Gurkhas in our 15-person squad, my immediate concern was What are my boys going to do? Then my worries extended to my family: What will happen to them? And finally, What am I going to do now?

Though it may be agonizing and require tremendous resolve, recovery can be transformative. Has yours been? After the explosion, I didn’t know what to do, how to live, or what would come next. When I was medically discharged and finished a military rehabilitation program, the first thing I did was jump out of an airplane from 15,000 feet. Half of my body was gone, and at that point I didn’t care if the other half went too. At the time I didn’t know how valuable the other half was.

I’ve since learned that capability is in my mind, not my legs. I still have a brain to think, hands and limbs to move, a mouth to speak, eyes to see, and ears to hear. I haven’t lost much. We create these limitations in our minds. Sure, I need bigger doors and bathrooms and have to rely on a wheelchair and handrails, but life is about adaptation. When something doesn’t work in the way we expect it to, we find different ways of doing things.

In March 2018, you were a driving force behind taking Nepal’s Ministry of Culture, Tourism and Civil Aviation to the Supreme Court for issuing a set of regulations barring visually impaired and double amputee climbers from attempting to scale Mount Everest. Now that you’ve helped overturn this legal roadblock, what’s next? With all the work I’ve poured into my training and sacrifices I’ve made to nance the expedition, I was disheartened by the December 2017 ban—a move that drew sharp criticism from disability and civil rights organizations worldwide. Discriminating against people on the basis of race, gender, religion, ethnicity, or ability is a violation of human rights, and, as proven in court, runs counter to Nepal’s constitution.

Our leaders are just beginning to rethink the way they measure and police who is fit to climb. And ultimately, as a global community, we need to address issues of accessibility and remove barriers, not build them. Today, disabled people in Nepal are confined to their homes and cannot move around freely. In Kathmandu, our capital city, you’ll be pressed to find a single wheelchair-accessible bathroom. We have to reshape these realities.

In what ways have these battles expanded your motivation and capacity to meet novel challenges with agility? In Buddhism, there are no devils or heroes—it’s all about your perception. As a Gurkha soldier, I have found mental discipline to be easy. As a Buddhist, I work on practicing flexibility of mind.

I am a soldier who has been trained to fight. In the past it was an enemy. Today I fight this injury and to reestablish my mental health. This is what I have always done. And now I’m fighting tirelessly to open up the minds of bureaucrats and government officials. Whichever route we end up taking to climb Everest next spring, I am working to undo people’s misconceptions about what “disabled” bodies can and cannot do. I owe it to my boys and wife, to military veterans and their families, and to my community.

Courtesy Susan Hale Thomas

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This excerpt from Tricycle’s features editor Andrew Cooper comes from his 1998 book Playing in the Zone: Exploring the Spiritual Dimensions of Sports. In it, he chronicles the role that mythology and fate played in the Cleveland Indians’ 1995 World Series appearance.

As we speak, it is late October 1995, World Series time, and this year marks the Cleveland Indians first appearance in the series since 1954. In their coverage, the sports media make frequent reference to a single play from that series forty-one years ago: Willie Mays’s over-the-shoulder catch of Vic Wertz’s mighty line drive. If ever a sports event glowed with numinous power, it was that catch, and Mays’s subsequent throw to the infield to hold the lead runner at third.

The 1954 Cleveland team had compiled the best regular-season record in modern Major League history, and they were heavily favored to beat Mays’s New York Giants. In the first game of the series, with the score tied at two, Wertz crushed a Don Liddle pitch 460 feet into the cavernous expanses of the Polo Grounds center field, the deepest in the game. At the crack of the bat, Mays took off, running full speed, his back to home plate. At the last moment, still at full speed, he bends his head back, extends his glove, and like a sparrow returning to its nest, the ball settles into Mays’s grasp. Then, just as remarkably, Mays spins on a dime and makes a perfect 300-foot throw to prevent even one run from scoring. What should have been a triple, or even an inside-the-park home run, is now just another out.

The Giants went on to win the game and eventually the series in a four-to-zero sweep. Had it turned out differently, the play could well have broken the Giants’ spirit. Instead, that was Cleveland’s fate. And not only for the series. With that play, Cleveland began a plunge into mediocrity that was to last for decades.

So now it is 1995, and in describing the Cleveland Indians’ return to World Series play, sports commentators can scarcely avoid discussing the aura of magic that still surrounds the event. Mays’s catch seemed to mark more than a shift in momentum; it seemed to occasion a shift of fate. That is what these mainstream commentators are talking about, and they are wondering whether things have finally shifted back in Cleveland’s favor. They might as well be speaking of the favor of the gods, for as Michael Novak writes, fate is “the unseen god of sports events,” presiding over sports as over life.

From one perspective this talk of fate is just an example of the necessary hyperbole of sports talk. If you were to ask, say, Bob Costas whether he believed that these events really represented the workings of fate or some supernatural agency, my guess is that he would say no. But whether or not one believes in such things, for those with faith in the game, fate feels like an actual presence.

The question of whether the transpersonal forces—fate, mana, God and gods, and so forth—are psychological projections or objective realities is a necessary question for the rational mind. But as the historian of religion Henri Frankfort and others have pointed out, such questions, based as they are on a detached distance from experience, on a series of sharp dichotomies—subject and object, inside and outside, reality and appearance—[ ] are foreign to the mythic mode of thought, in which either/or distinctions don’t apply. Or rather, they apply solely on a practical level. Mythic thought reflects an experience of continuity among all aspects of a single reality.

In Before Philosophy: The Intellectual Adventure of Early Man, Frankfort writes, “Whatever is capable of affecting mind, feeling, or will has thereby established its undaunted reality.” In the second world of sport, we can feel the presence of transpersonal agencies without the burden of assigning to such feelings theological or scientific justification. In a modern world that is otherwise hostile to its viewpoint, the mythic mind finds in sport room to play.

For us, as for the ancients, sport exists in the borderline realm between jest and earnest. But the nature of that “in-between” place is not stable. It changes in response to the variousness of cultural attitudes and worldviews. For us, the borderline realm is more reflective of a psychological perspective than a cosmological one. Its truths are more metaphoric than literal. The sacred experience it models is based not on theological belief in revealed truth but on faith in the truth revealed by fictions. Befitting post-modern society’s plurality of viewpoints, sport today is laced with a strong dose of irony. And although our world lacks the unifying vision and stability of premodern societies, the second world of sport provides a niche in which mythic consciousness can flourish, allowing us to feel a world graced with depth and meaning. It demonstrates, if not a synthesis of the mythic and rational modes of thought, then a form for their playful interaction. In so doing, sport penetrates our intellectual arrogance and reminds us that, in W. H. Auden’s words, “we are lived by powers we pretend to understand.” Finally, it teaches us, whether we know it or not, to view this very condition as an expression of the mystery of play. Or as the poet John Webster put it:

We are merely the stars’ tennis balls, struck and bandied
Which way please them.

♦

Excerpted from Playing in the Zone: Exploring the Spiritual Dimensions of Sports, Shambhala Publications, 1998.

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It’s time for another Buddha Buzz! We’re keeping it light today, though, so you may want to read our current meditation doctor’s tips on lightening up before you continue so that we’re all on the same page.

Feeling sufficiently lightened? Okay, let’s go.

Last week on Buddha Buzz we discussed the possibility that Bill Clinton may be Buddhist. This week we’ve got another famous convert: Olympic swimmer Anthony Ervin. The dude’s got a crazy life story. After winning a gold medal in the Sydney Olympics, he sold it on eBay for over $17,000, donating the money to Unicef. Then he became a drug addict and an alcoholic, tried to kill himself, and finally turned it all around by becoming a “committed Buddhist.” Now he’s back at the London Olympics, swimming in the 50m freestyle finals tonight. Good luck to him!

You may or may not have read “Buying Wisdom,” an article by Richard Eskow from our latest Tricycle issue. If you haven’t, it critiques the recent Wisdom 2.0 conference in Silicon Valley, which gathered together all the head honchos of the techie world to discuss things like the marketing together of spirituality and the ability to become a millionaire. Eskow left the event unimpressed. Still, the larger issue at hand—the emerging relationship between technology and wisdom—is an interesting one. Over at the Daily Beast, they think so too, judging by an article that appeared this week called “Dalai Lama, Twitter Rock Star: The Virtual Influence of His Holiness,” by Melinda Liu. With almost 5 million Twitter followers, the Dalai Lama has a social media team just like any other celebrity (the article compares him, Twitter-wise, to Deepak Chopra, Obama, and Lady Gaga). Spoiler alert: The Dalai Lama doesn’t write his own Tweets. Yeah, I’m sure that surprised absolutely nobody. Actually, there are two people working as the Dalai Lama’s full-time Tweeters. Judging by the article, they all seem to have their heads in the right places, and despite the Dalai Lama’s strong Internet presence, in reality he still does things the old-school way:

About 15 years ago, to capitalize on the release of two Hollywood films, Seven Years in Tibet starring Brad Pitt and Kundun directed by Martin Scorsese, consultant [Josh] Baran pulled together a 50-page PowerPoint-style presentation titled “Tibet 2000” proposing that the government-in-exile use conferences and celebrity endorsements to raise public awareness about Tibet.

“His people liked it and said, ‘Go present it to the Dalai Lama.’ I thought that meant sit down and walk him through the campaign,” Baran chuckled. “Instead I was hustled into the presence of the Dalai Lama, who flipped through pages for maybe 30 seconds. Then his people asked him to give his blessing. He laid his hand casually on the top page and literally blessed the PowerPoint.”

That campaign got the Dalai Lama’s message across so potently that, within a couple years, The New York Times was trumpeting “the powerful Tibet lobby.”

In an example of Buddhism and modernity not jibing quite as well, a Japanese video game company has released a game called Sutra Master that is generating considerable controversy in Japan. Instead of describing it, I’ll just show it to you:

What do you think? All I can think about it is…weird.

The post Buddha Buzz: Buddhist News from Around the World, Week of August 6 appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.