Shortly before the Seattle Seahawks won the Super Bowl, I read that several of their players practiced meditation. I’ve taught meditation on and off since 1976 and graduated from Cold Spring Harbor High School, with our sports teams named “Seahawks.” I watched the game. Seattle won well. In fact, a Broncos fan friend of mine said he wanted their DNA tested to see if they were human. I have to add that I’ve followed Peyton Manning for years and believe that he is an amazing athlete.
I decided to research more about their meditation practices and sure enough, head coach Pete Carroll promotes meditation and 20 players practice meditating several times a week. Michael Gervais is a high-performance sports psychologist who has been Seattle’s team consultant since 2012. He states that Carroll “recognizes that quality of thought translates into quality of movement.”
That means that when the mind is working well, the body will also work well. Chaos in the mind leads to more unfocused movements. Think of a big cat about to catch its dinner. It is 100 percent focused on the animal and the body follows the mind’s focus with grace, speed and strength.
The team also incorporates yoga into its regular strength-training sessions. Yoga is mindful stretching and movement, holding poses that improve balance and flexibility.
Gervais acknowledges that football is a pretty physical game, but also that “mental muscles also flex pretty hard during a game. Learning to slow down and calm down is so important, because it teaches players to fine-tune their focus, attention and attitude … Simply put, mindfulness occurs when you become more aware of your thoughts.”
Science is finding that mindfulness techniques including meditation help many people reduce stress and feel calmer in a world that is constantly being bombarded by high-tech stimulation. The average teen receives about 3,000 texts a month!
“Google has an in-house mindfulness program called Search Inside Yourself. It’s a seven-week course offered four times a year right at their campus. Thousands of Googlers have learned attention-focusing techniques, meant to help them free up mental space for creativity and big thinking.”
“Steve Jobs said his meditation practice was directly responsible for his ability to concentrate and ignore distractions.” — Feb. 3, 2014 issue of “Time” by Kate Pickert, entitled “The Art of Being Mindful.”
The article continues to describe how MIT grad Jon Kabat-Zinn, teacher of anatomy and cell biology to medical students, was at a meditation retreat in 1979 and had a revelation that he might be able to help chronic pain patients reduce their overall suffering by using mindfulness training.
He and three physicians did a pilot study and found that pain levels diminished for some of their subjects while others were better able to handle the stress of living with illness. He has gone on to develop a curriculum called, “Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction.” Now, there are nearly 1,000 certified MBSR instructors teaching these techniques, including meditation in nearly every state and in more that 30 countries.
Fortune 500 companies and even Chase Bank encourage their clients to give their attention fully to what they are doing. Politicians, athletes, movie stars and more are discovering the calming, creative benefits of focusing on one thing at a time. In fact, the National Institute of Health reported that Americans spent about $4 billion on mindfulness-related alternative medicine in 2007.
Georgetown University Professor Elizabeth Stanley teamed up with Amishi Jha, a neuroscientist at the University of Miami, to research whether a mindfulness program could “make Marines more resilient in stressful combat situations. The findings were so promising … that the Department of Defense awarded them two $1 million grants to investigate further … they then awarded them $3.4 million to study how mindfulness training affects stress among other populations.” (Time article)
When I was a teen, I’d escape the chaos in my life by walking down to our beach and watching the ocean waves just roll in, one after the other. I’d find that I’d relax and my mind would calm down. It was a gift to myself to discover that and probably many of you readers have discovered it. Just watch them with no judgment about their size, beauty or surfability! Be your own scientist. How does it make you feel? You might want to try it more than once if you’ve developed a habit of non-stop mind chatter. You don’t have to pay for this. It is important that we all learn to give our minds a break from thinking.
Next week, I’ll cover some mindful meditation techniques. Happy, creative, peaceful thinking to you.
Hale `Opio Kaua’i convened a support group of adults in our Kaua’i community to “step into the corner” for our teens. Please email your questions to Annaleah Atkinson at aatkinson@haleopio.org.
