Tab G (The Arts & Athletics)

Summon The Magic
How To Use Your Mind to be a better Athlete
(or anything else you want to be)
The Arts and Athletics: Using All Your Common Senses
(Tab G)
compiled and edited by Ed Jewett
June 2005
Tab G The Arts and Athletics: Using All Your Common Senses
G-1 Why Do You Play?: Uniquely Personal Rewards G-1 The Spirit in the Details
G-2 Breakthrough Performance G-2 Sports as an Art Form
G-2 thru G-5 The Gift of the Arts G-6 Art is a Verb G-7 Yearning and Wonder
G-8 Awareness Exercises G-9 The Skills of the Everyday Artist
G-10 The PREP Tool G-10 WorldReading G-10 Your Artistic Amateur at Work
G-10 The Mindset of the Energized Zero G-11 Scanning Your World Intuitively
G-12 Awareness Skills G-12 Increasing Awareness of Bodily Movement
G-14 Observational Exercises G-15 Awareness: Journal Exercises
G-16 and G-17 Attention as Psychic Energy G-18 A Nifty Little Trick
G-18 Awareness in Motion G-19 Concentration, Awareness and Attention
G-20 The Four Levels of Concentration; Keeping Your Inner Eye on the Ball
G-21 and G-22 Attentional Skills G-23 The Three Stages of Attention in Athletics
G-24 Sustained and Focused Attention; Awareness of Self in Environment
G-25 and G-26 Concentration Exercises
G-26 The Essence of Brain Power in Sports
G-27 The Touchy-Feelies in Sports, Music, Art and Life
G-27 thru G-30 Creative Concentration and Mastery Rehearsal
G-30 Is Imagery Rehearsal Proven and Effective?
G-31 thru G-34 Four Different Ways of Paying Attention
G-35 Unconscious Perception G-36 and G-37 The Process of Sensory Experience
G-38 and G-39 Perception, and Altered Perception in Sports
G-98 thru G-42 Proprioception, Visual Tracking, Motor Skill Performance
G-43 Visual Tracking and Depth Perception Training for Baseball Hitters
G-44 Why You Should Smile at Your Opponent G-44 The Attitude of the Dojo
G-45 thru G-48 Mindfulness and Mindful Walking
G-47 The Physiological Benefits of Meditation in Action
G-48 A Mindful Movement/Exercise G-49 Focusing on Process
G-50 Be Present and Notice What Is G-52 The Climactic Moment
G-52 Where Is The Music? G-53 and G-54 Flow Power versus Muscle Power
G-54 thru G-56 Proprioception and Eurhythmics G-56 and G-57 Rhythm
G-58 The Rhythms and Melodies of Your Body; Toning Up for Performance
G-60 Sound has Power G-60 Music in Pre-Game Rituals
G-59 and G-61 Improvisation G-62 Music: The Magic Within Us
G-64 Kinesthetic Anticipation G-64 and G-65 Listening and Hearing
G-64 Music and the Athletic Body G-65 Tempo and Rhythm in Athletics
G-67 The Music of the Spheres G-67 thru G-68 The Sweet Spot in Time
G-69 Pleasure, Music and the Body G-70 Fine-tuning Rhythm and Consistency
G-70 Using Rhythm To Improve Athletic Technique G-72 Entrainment and
Resonance: How Sound Affects the Body G-73 The Effect of Music on Mood
G-74 Brain Waves: Entraining States of Mind G-76 It's Not Only Mozart
G-65 thru G-79 Bodily Feedback, Movement and Kinesthetic Imagery
G-80 Multitasking G-81 Mental Imagery and also G-83 Mental Imagery
G-82 and G-83 Visualization, Mental Imagery and Mental Rehearsal
G-85 Raising Awareness G-86 Are You Dancing Through Your Sport?
G-86 Relaxed Concentration G-87 Watch Out for Times of Transition
G-88 Bringing It All Together as One G-89 Synchronizing Body and Mind
G-90 Journal Writing G-90 Distilling Your Athletic Experience
G-91 Exercise for Reflection
G-1
Why Do You Play?.... Uniquely Personal Rewards 1
In sports, where success and failure are so clearly defined, the rules are simple,
the time span is short, and physical or mental discomfort can determine the
outcome, self-motivation is not hard to evoke. The media would have us believe
that fame and fortune are the dream of every sports performer, and sometimes
they accrue. But the majority of athletes are aiming for less tangible goals like
identity, self-esteem, the joy of participation, the personal challenges of
competition, excellence and peak experience -- uniquely personal rewards
experienced only by the performer. If you really know what your unique rewards
are and why they spur you on, then you will likely get more of them. Get pen and
paper answer these questions:
What kinds of rewards are you after? Describe them in as much rich and
personal detail as you can. Give examples from your past.
What is your experience with those rewards now? Who else is involved?
What is happening internally? What is happening externally? What kinds of
feelings do you experience when these rewards occur? How do these rewards and
the feelings in you that they generate play out in other parts of your life? How can
you measure and track these rewards and the feelings and benefits they generate?
How can you capture or encapsulate those feelings and use them as tools toward
further joy of participation, accomplishment, satisfaction, renewal of effort,
intensification of interest, etc.? Are there other ways through which you can
receive similar rewards? What are they? How do those rewards compare?
What can you do to increase the frequency, intensity or likelihood of these
rewards, whatever their source? When and how will you do that? What are the
major constraints to finding a way forward? How will you overcome those
constraints or obstacles?
Performance cannot be sustained where there is no learning or enjoyment.
The Spirit of the Thing is in the Details 2
The more a person learns to love the details of the sport, the more easily he or she
will get absorbed in the task. Even lacing one's athletic shoes, if done as a personal
ritual, can help focus one's mind on what is to come. The sights, smells and the
textures .. any and all of the sensory information related to a sport, hundreds of little
elements -- will help the athlete concentrate his or her mind, will help them initiate
the process of physical and mental preparation, will bring their attention to the
activity, and jump-start the absorption that leads to a flow state.
G-2
Breakthrough Performance 3
Athletic performance is a question of learning what your capacities are;
of learning how to develop them to the maximum, and doing so; of learning how to
gain control of them, and then to control their expenditure more sharply and
elegantly; and finally, of learning to make more accurate judgments about the
rate of expenditure of these capacities.
Athletes report that, in the middle of a breakthrough performance, they aren't
usually conscious of great effort but of the opposite -- an easy naturalness, a sense
that something is a little strange and that things are going more smoothly than
they are supposed to. The extraordinary part of the breakthrough performance
seems not to come in the grunting efforts required in training, but in the control,
the relaxation, the calm center from which the performer is able to command and
apply maximum effort. Maximum, but not an iota more.
Sports as an Art Form 4
For now, there is only the language of the arts -- of music and dance and poetry -to remind us of what we know but cannot say about the athletic experience.
The rhythm of the samba, according to some observers, dominated the play of the
great Pele and the Brazilian soccer team; its members took drums with them
wherever they traveled and played them uninhibitedly on the bus before every
game.
Billie Jean King practiced tennis on her own court with rock music blasting from
loudspeakers. Her movements during the workouts are an exuberant dance.
Bill Russell, the great Celtic, sees athletics as an art form. "As a fan, I watch in
the same way that I imagine an art connoisseur studies a painting."
Stirling Moss, British Formula One racing champion: "I believe that driving as
practiced by some very few people in the world is an art form, and is related to
ballet... Ballet is movement, isn't it, rhythmic and disciplined movement,
gracefully performed?"
When words are no longer adequate, when our passion is greater
than we are able to express in a usual manner, people turn to art.
5
Some people go to the canvas and paint; some people
get up and dance.
But we all go beyond our normal means of communicating, and this is
the common human experience for all people.
G-3
You make new worlds and create art when:
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-- you create an original image or metaphor, even in casual conversation;
-- when you tell a joke, make a pun, or point out the absurdity of a situation;
-- when you grab a pen and paper napkin to sketch out an idea you have;
-- when you try to find an image or description of
a religious or mystical experience you have had;
-- when you teach well;
-- when you put together an outfit you will wear to a particular event;
-- when you fully celebrate holidays;
-- when you write a thoughtful sympathy letter;
-- when you make a special gift for someone;
-- when you seriously answer a child's serious question;
-- when you notice a recurrent pattern in your life;
-- when you make a prepared speech;
-- when you think about the significance of a coincidence;
-- when you imagine what it would be like to live in a particular home,
to have a particular life-style, or play on a particular sports team;
-- when you notice you have been humming the same tune all day, and
begin to think about what that means;
-- when you find yourself pondering an image from a dream;
-- when you make a choice based on your aesthetic sense;
-- when you keep a journal, especially when you reflect on your previous entries.
Where do you create new worlds and make art?
G-4
The final goal of any learning experience
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should be the creation of meaning.
Real knowledge occurs as we take in our rich sensory experience and piece it
together in our own unique way to give us a picture of the world. This becomes
our reality. Each new experience refers to it, and each new experience re-orders
it and expands it.
Skills manifest as conscious physical responses demonstrating knowledge
acquisition. Thinking itself is actually a skill dependent upon a wholly-integrated
mind/body system which must be active in order to take in information, select
what is important about that information, integrate it with existing patterns and,
finally, to anchor it with movement. Thinking and learning is anchored by
movement. Doodling, dextrous finger movement, eye movement, speaking aloud
to oneself or to others, writing things down, or using specific muscle movement in
conjunction with thought or image are all familiar movements that can occur
during thinking. Movement aids conscious thought. The final outcome of this
process is meaning. Real learning -- the kind that establishes meaningful
connections for the learner -- is not complete until there is some type of output,
some physical, personal expression of thought.
Whether in speaking, writing, math, the sciences, computing, drawing, art,
playing music, singing, or moving gracefully and/or effectively in dance and
sport, the development of our knowledge goes hand in hand with the development
of the skills that support and express that knowledge. As we build these skills,
we use muscles of the body, establishing neuromuscular routes as well as ties to
cognitive routes. Learning is not all in your head. We tend to relegate muscles to
the domain of the body, not the mind, but it is through expression that we advance
and solidify our understanding.
Drama integrates words, visual elements, bodily demonstration and perhaps
music. Artistic expression in music, dance, visual arts and literature represent
highly skilled use and integration of body, thought and emotion. Artistic
expression is immensely valuable to overall personal development and cognitive
understanding. Athletic activities integrate many different kinds of knowledge
with skilled muscular coordination -- knowledge about space, time, human and
other dynamics, teamwork, motivation and goal seeking. All of these can also
provide a platform for building connections to others, and to one's society, as well
as for some form of expression of the spirit. Educators should not lose sight of
these values. Arts and athletics are not frills. They constitute powerful ways of
thinking, and skilled ways of communicating. They deserve a greater, not lesser,
portion of school time and budgets.
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The urge to create -- to use our minds, hearts and hands in unison; to work with
some malleable material; to express ourselves and our observations, our deepest
longings, our greatest aspirations, our joys and our sorrows -- is one of the basic
human impulses.... The creative act is an encounter -- with the material and the
medium, with our world, with an idea or inner vision, with the mystery, with our
own quality of engagement. 8
G-5
The Gifts of The Arts 9
While the arts can be seen as technologies for increasing creativity, they also foster a
healthy balance between the logical and creative functions of the brain. The gift of
arts experiences is that they build the mental qualities or life skills of creative
thinking, problem solving, self-reflection, perspective taking, empathy, resilience,
effective communication, teamwork and healthy risk taking. Each artistic technology
is like a culture, complete with its own rich history, language and syntax. Like
regions and dialects within the same country, a variety of artistic traditions and
forms exist within a larger domain, including:
Writing/poetry -- fiction, nonfiction, stories, essays, journals, interviews, dramatic
scripts, song lyrics, rap, word art, and therapy through written word expression.
Drama/theater -- live theater in any setting, puppetry, circus, magic, traditional
repertory, avant-garde, abstract and experimental theater, and drama therapy.
Dance/movement - - traditional forms of classical ballet; modern, theatrical, jazz,
tap, character, hip-hop, ballroom and ethnic dance; pantomime, martial arts,
creative movement, and movement as therapy. Music/sound -- classical European,
"world music", American folk, bluegrass, blues, jazz, pop, hip-hop, spoken word,
instrumental/vocal/percussion and body percussion, and music as therapy.
Visual arts -- painting, drawing, sculpture, pottery, scenery, architecture, film/video,
photography, computer graphics, glassblowing, metal work, jewelry, costume and
clothes design, and visual art therapy. Multi-media arts - - a wide range of platforms
and devices bring together multiple art forms or media.
Two questions: 1) How can you use one of these art forms as a means of
capturing, abstracting or communicating something about your particular athletic (or
other) endeavors, interests, joys or passions? 2) Why isn't athletics on this list?
Perhaps it rests partially in movement, with a spillover into drama, but athletics also
has its own culture, its own language and dialects, its own traditions and forms, and
numerous outlets for self-expression.
There is a way of beholding that is a form of prayer. 10 The great
lesson from the mystics is that the sacred is in the ordinary, that it is
to be found in one's daily life, in one's neighbors, friends and family, in
one's back yard, and that travel may actually be a flight from
confronting the sacred -- this lesson cannot be easily lost.
To be looking everywhere for miracles is to me
a sure sign of ignorance that everything is miraculous.
(Abraham Maslow, Religions, Values and Peak Experiences)
G-6
Art is a Verb 11
Art is not apart. It is a continuum within which all participate. We all function
in art, use the skills of art, and engage in the actions of artists every day.... Our
unheralded everyday actions of art comprise one end of the human spectrum of
artistry... newlyweds setting the table for their first Thanksgiving dinner on one
extreme, and DaVinci's The Last Supper on the other; a businesswoman shifting
the sequence of slides in her presentation on one extreme, and Sam Shephard
transposing the order of scenes during rehearsals of True West on the other....
If we can acknowledge and honor the skills of art we use daily, if we can borrow
appropriate and useful trade secrets from the experts and exemplars [among
artists], we can dramatically enrich the quality of our daily life... [and learn to
give our hearts to engage and our minds to extend].
The main artistic media (music, theater, dance, the visual and literary arts [and
athletics]) have survived because we thrill to witness what humans can accomplish,
what the body can express, what the human voice can do at its best -- what subtle
truths people can communicate.
Masterworks in art invite and reward our best attention; they also enable us to
extend the range of our own overlooked artistic competencies. You are aware, I'm
sure, of the choreography in the world on the street, on the playing field. You get
annoyed when someone bungles their role on the dance floor or the sidewalk, or at
the reception hail by stealing your spotlight, or on the football field by missing a
block. You appreciate the ballet-like steps of the furniture movers. You say of the
Japanese chef or the cabinetmaker "It's a work of art.”
All artists want you as a peer. Here is the secret truth they might not tell you -Artists really seek colleagues, and settle for admirers.
The message of The Everyday Work of Art is this:
1) You do the same kinds of work the masters do.
2) You need to set things apart from the commonplace
to attend to them in a special way.
There are three basic actions in a work of art:
1) making things with meaning;
2) exploring the things others have made; and
3) encountering daily life with the work-of-art attitude.
All of us, even these of us who would derisively snort if they were called artists,
engage in the actions of art. We commonly call it doing our best" or "getting lost
in our work". It might also be described as absorption in a process, as "flow”, as
"being in the zone”. We move toward this condition in a three-part
infrastructure of excellence: world-making, world-exploring and
world-reading.
>>>>
G-7
In world-making, our work of art lives in our experience, the journey within the
process, not in the result. When we explore our world, we out-quire our way into
an idiosyncratic exploratory journey to find meaning in things others have made.
Our active perceiving begins with an attraction: whatever catches our interest
becomes a possible point of entry. When exploring in an unpredictable way,
we create connections of many kinds, and retain them through various media....
When curiosity is alive, we are attracted to many things; we discover many
worlds. With practice, we become adept at selecting the particular worlds that
hold the best payoffs for us. In reading the world, we encounter the ordinary
pieces of our life as if they were full of meaning. When this perspective becomes a
habit, we see that your life is indeed full of extraordinary commonplaces, rich
symbols, waiting to reveal themselves to you. This Lewis-and-Clarking of our
own frontiers is a way of looking at things in a way that refuses to house "art"
only in special buildings and is the alchemy by which ordinary life experiences
are turned to gold. We are able to read the world when we attend, when we
stretch out of ourself... we can achieve ecstasy (the original meaning from the
Greek word root means "standing outside" of yourself)... by becoming absorbed
in detail. These three kinds of world-work do not function apart, discretely; they
feed and flow in and out of one another. Practice in one develops the skills for all
three. Together, they develop the attitude and habits that change the content of so
many little moments that they transform the experience of a day.
Artists make sense of their lives through the serious interplay of life and work, by
asking, attending and making connections, by developing greater skills of awareness,
by paying attention to detail, and thereby learn to recognize excellence wherever it
appears, and to take something away from that experience, that awareness, and put
it back into their lives in other ways. Want to make a difference in life? Make
worlds, make them often, and make them a regular part of your life. Don't leave it to
the artists; don't leave it to some other time. But remember that engagement in the
process is the whole enchilada. Within every committed world-maker works a happy
optimist doing his damnedest to make stuff that is as good as it can be to contribute
to us all.
You can observe a lot just by watching.
–-Yogi Berra
Yearning and Wonder
Yearning is the basic human instinct for more satisfaction, more understanding,
an enhanced feeling of being alive, better answers to better questions. Biology
calls it tropism. Plants seek light; roots seek water. Yearning keeps us growing
up and down. It fuels curiosity and persistence. If we fail to heed our yearning,
we go dead in some part of our lives. To love and be loved deeply, to have a more
visceral experience of being alive, to connect palpably with the divine, to realize
one's potential. No practice is more encompassing, powerful, effective or flexibly
responsive to your needs in supporting our tropisms than finding the art in
whatever you chose to pursue. Our yearning is alive in direct proportion to our
capacity for wonder. Wonder requires a condition of innocence and releases
wholehearted, unsophisticated, pure joy. "Every seat is the best seat in the
house." We expand our known world through wonder by participating in something
larger than ourselves. Wonder is pure participation, devoid of the need to possess.
G-8
Create awareness exercises for yourself.
12
When you open the kitchen cabinet door for a cup, count the number of cups and
saucers in the instant before you close the door. When the pitcher is pitching to
you, how is the second baseman moving? When you glance across the room at a
friend, what's the color of her shoes? When the lineman across from you moves
when the ball is hiked, what is the pattern of his footwork? Just before he moved,
what sound did he make? When you are driving down the street and a car zips by
you, name the make, model, color and license plate. Which shoulder dips first
when the basketball forward drives to the right? What were the distinguishing
facial characteristics of the cashier at the convenience store this morning?
You're a baseball catcher and the righty at the plate always ends up with his left
foot outside the batter's box; what pitch should you call for? Find a scarf at the
mall tonight with the color of this morning's sunrise. When you did really well in
the game yesterday, what was your mental attitude at that precise moment?
Pay attention. Observe. Focus. Experience the moment. Absorb using all of your
senses. You can't experience something if you are busy judging it.
Learn to observe non-judgmentally, to "notice clean", through:
precision of observation; detachment from assumptions;
extraction of significant, subtle linkages; use of intuition;
identification of key elements; and precise phrasing of inquiry.
Anticipation is judgmental (How does this apply to your sport?). Have the self-discipline
to attend moment-to-moment without zooming off into the past or the future.
Experience everything as if it were for the first time.
The more we can learn to hold off interpretation and judgment, control our gestalt
default (our internal "snap-to-guidelines" like those in Pagemaker software),
tolerate the uncertainty, and openly explore what we encounter, the more we
expand our capacity to grow with new connections and find our delight in our
surroundings. The gold lies in-between.
The difference between ordinary and extraordinary results
lies in the quality of the process of the work.
Play always begins at the spot where what you know meets what you
do not know.
When play finds its way into the work of art, it may be called
imagination, invention, improvisation, innovation, getting into a
groove, or good collaboration. Play is one of the universal ways in
which we test what we know. As Carl Jung said in Psychological
Types, "The creation of something new is not accomplished by
the intellect but by the play instinct acting from inner
necessity. The creative mind plays with the objects it loves."
G-9
The Skills of an Everyday Artist 13
Artists have such skills that they can transform, redirect, understand, use and
extract value from the sequence of opportunities called daily life.
Artists are exemplary connectors: 1) they keep their renewable supply of
yearning fuel fully-charged, so they are poised, ready to make connections;
2) their skills of noticing feed them many specific and interesting opportunities, so
they have an abundance of raw material to deal with: 3) their life-work is to make
things that hold their best connections, so it is a top-of-the-mind priority in their
daily lives; 4) they are dedicated to making things that share their efforts with
others, hoping to spark worthwhile connections for many, so they are
quintessentially generous.
Artists become adept at managing time, asking good questions, pursuing quality,
employing multiple perspectives, making choices, using intuition, handling the
all-over-the-place feeling of process, and dealing with waste and constructive
selfishness.
Artists manage their progress by navigating as straight a course as possible
between the polarities of feeling close to fruition and far away, exhilaration and
despair, joy and rage, freedom and restriction, of unlimited energy and
exhaustion, hope and hopelessness, timidity and audacity, being satiated and
starving, solitude and unity, being jaded and being awestruck. Other poles: form
and content; the process and the product; archetypes and icons; dualism and
holism; logos and eros; Dionysian and Appollonian impulses, logic and analogic,
the ordinary and the extraordinary, the edges and the center, the part and the
whole, the form and the content, the horizontal and the vertical, the yin and the
yang, the individual and the universal, heaven and earth, the shadow on the wall
and the real thing, the concrete and the abstract, the telephoto and the wideangle, the urge to create for yourself and the urge to communicate with others,
passivity and activity, intuition and research, ecstasy in the process and the wish
that you were some place else.
The PREP Tool 14
For the mind to go to work, the heart must listen first. We enter a work of art,
and the world, through a specific entry point, a personally relevant entry point.
The PREP can be anything, and need not be an "important" aspect; what counts is
the strength by which it grabs us.
If something is interesting enough to grab us, it is important enough to pursue.
At their deepest levels, world-making and world-exploring become almost
indistinguishable, supporting one another in active synergy. Perhaps the only
fundamental distinction between the two is the direction of the energy: Making
things has an outward energy, while the perceiving energy goes inward. These
two feed on one another get out of the way, and they spring from one another.
G-10
The founder of Aikido told an actor: 15
"Create your own universe and bring everything into your own sphere."
Artists live in endless interaction with attractive things.
We are what we are attracted to and become what we yearn toward.
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Follow your attraction through the spectrum of curiosity, interest,
admiration, concern, connection, resonance and change, and then
bounce on to something else.
World-Reading
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What do you do to read the world? To read the world, you put on an
attitude, a mindset, like a set of eyeglasses. You can switch to this
perspective in a flash, just by choosing to. This practice of reading your world
means ready access to experiencing your day as if it were intentionally
packed with attractive objects and surprising opportunities. It really works.
Change the way you attend to objects, people and opportunities, and they
change before your very eyes. Use a different perspective, and you see
more. Adopt the attitude, and discover a more satisfying world. Your
yearning must be active, prompting you to engage, then to inquire, and then
to bounce into related action. World-reading requires a habit of readiness to
follow attractions as they fleetingly appear, of sensing which grains of sand
may offer universes.
Finding Out Where Your Artistic Amateur Appears to Work
1)
2)
3)
4)
5)
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What part of your world do you find yourself telling others about in an
excited way?
Name some success you enthusiastically told a friend about; is there
something unique to you that could grow into fuller expression? Where might
it go if it grew?
If you met someone famous and felt the need to exaggerate a little about
what you do, what would you exaggerate about?
Imagine you are sitting by a fire with native people from a remote, preindustrial village who miraculously speak English. They ask you to tell them
who you are, what you do and why it is important. What would you say?
What do you do that makes the world a slightly better place?
(Hint: Drop the "slightly" and get going.)
The mindset of the energized zero is that state of a few seconds
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when the performer closes their eyes, remains still, breathes deeply,
and sets aside the extraneous intrusions of life (fears, worry, physical ailments) and
becomes ready, open to possibilities.
G-11
Scanning Your World Intuitively
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Intuitive information, like all information, comes to us through our five senses.
Intuitive insights most commonly show up via three modes: vision, voice and
vibration.
Insight through vision comes, most simply, through observation, but it can also
include dreams, fantasy, meditation, a flashing mental image, or artistic
expression through paper, paint, sculpture, etc. Name some examples of special
insight that has occurred to you recently.
Awareness through voice often means your inner voice, the one that tells you
you've forgotten to bring something important, or that you'll want to avoid that
person or situation. It can be the tension in someone else's voice, or the song that
you've just realized you've been humming all day. Engineers can hear the
rhythms of machinery at levels and ways that the rest of us are unaware of.
Find some examples of the subtle under-voices in your world today.
Perception through vibration can include the internal tactile and bodily
sensations we use subconsciously to interpret our world. Have you ever felt cold
and clammy when entering a strange house? Do certain people make you angry
or nervous before they even say a word?
We have a scanning mechanism that is intuitively driven and speaks to us in
sensory language. Have you ever smelled trouble before it happened? Ever had a
delicious idea? Can you sense the textures of energy around other people? What
are some of things your scanner has told you today?
From an athletic standpoint, what are some of the things you can tell your
scanner to be on the alert for? What about in terms of your non-athletic interests
and goals?
See http://viscog.beckman.uiuc.edu/grafs/demos/15.html for a simple test
of visual cognition. For further explanation and exploration of this subject, please see
http://www.viscog.com/media.html.
The ability to see with our eyes is a physiological issue,
but what we look at and how we look at it
is affected by our mental state.
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What is "going on" internally
affects our ability
to properly see and interpret the external world.
G-12
Awareness Skills 22
The essence of awareness skills is learning to see things as they are.
If you see your performance as "good" or "bad", you will not have a clear and
complete picture of how it is. Awareness never judges. Negative judgment will tend
to obscure your vision of what you wish wasn't there, and to cause doubt and
tightening. Positive judgment will tend to make you feel that it's unnecessary to
see details, and you will become too casual. True awareness is like a flawless
mirror. Awareness is a step towards a solution only when there is no judgment
and, if combined with purpose, will lead to effective action and learning.
To a certain extent, excellence in athletics is a function of how aware you are of
your body as you perform specific maneuvers. "Muscle memory" is derived from
neuro-muscular experiences. To control movement effectively, you have to feel it.
You can see the results of a given maneuver and then guess what happened to
produce that outcome. If you can learn to feel the differences in outcomes, it then
becomes much easier to control those differences and produce more consistent
and improved outcomes. Furthermore, you can't keep that feel unless you keep
feeling that feeling. That's why you practice. That's why your practices are
repetitive. That's why "perfect practice makes perfect". That's why visualization
and enhanced kinesthetic awareness and attention used during practice will lead
to significant improvement.
Increasing Your Awareness of Bodily Movement 23
The best way to learn to increase awareness of bodily movement is to focus attention
on ordinary movements that you make automatically and unconsciously during the
day. Attending to certain actions, not for the purpose of improving them but merely
for the sake of experiencing them, is a skill that will enhance performance and
enjoyment when applied to your athletic experiences.
You can pay attention to your movements while walking up and down stairs,
driving a car, brushing your teeth, etc. Notice how complex some of these skills
are, and yet how effortlessly and un-self-consciously you perform them.
Attending to movements without trying to control them is a primary goal
of Inner Game learning and is much easier to practice with movements that
don't challenge your competence. You can move from the basic touch, control
and movement of your everyday life into your athletic world by beginning with
simple exercises that involve basic athletic movement.
For example, try walking on a thin, slightly raised object to begin to experience
your feet, ankles, knees and so on as you maintain your balance. Do some simple
calisthenics. Try some basic stances and movements from your sport. Pay
attention to your ankles, knees, hips, elbows, wrists, shoulders and head
movement. Try some of these things with your eyes closed, or with a blindfold.
Do them in super-slow-motion.
>>>>
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As you practice within your sport, start to pay attention to your footwork, and to
grips and hand placements. See how much you can increase your feel for muscular
tension and relaxation, pressure points on your feet and hands, sensation of position,
and your breathing.
Become aware of your center of gravity, learning to keep it under control.
Become aware of centering and grounding yourself.
Remember that the focus here is keeping your mind receptive and focused, not on
getting some specific result or outcome.
(See the sections on proprioceptors, and mindful walking.)
If you have ever played any stick-and-ball games, you are familiar with
the wonderful sensation of hitting the sweet spot. The ball simply takes off:
a remarkably smooth, easy, yet forceful result. There's a distinctive sound.
A clear signal comes from the information you get through the implement;
there is no vibration or shock coming back to your hands. Hitting the sweet spot is
such a compelling sensation that a major reason we play the games comes from
wanting to re-experience the almost-mystical experience of it. But there is
nothing unreal going on here. It is all easily explained in terms of biomechanics,
of the instrument, the ball and your body. And it can be re-created.
All athletic movement -- all human movement -- is generated by muscles pulling
across joints to make limbs move. Each segment of a motion is an arc working off
an arc; each is carefully timed to start as the previous arc reaches the best
possible point. A superior athlete is one who, in effect, reaches the sweet spot of
the arc for each segment of his or her athletic motion. Every good athletic motion
has a crack-the-whip aspect to it, a chain of accelerating arcs, each taking the
motion at the maximum from the previous arc and using that speed to multiply
its own acceleration. (Perhaps the given skill selects the best point for force, or
accuracy, or some other objective.)
The good athlete must be able to damp out the assorted wobbles and wasted
motions and other excursions of the muscle, joint and bone systems.
The better athlete learns to initiate movement with considerably more accuracy or
efficiency or force than the lesser athlete.
The superior athlete learns how to link and control these movements through his
nervous system to his mind, his eye and other sensory organs.
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Observational Exercises
Create your own observational exercises to develop your sensory acuity.
Have someone conceal natural or artificial objects under a dark cloth for you
to "observe" and identify by touch alone. Blindfolded, you can find out about
things by feeling and smelling them. Just like you do with birthday gifts, you
can guess the identity of objects by their weight in a closed box, they way
they roll or slide or bounce in the box, or what they sound like when shaken.
Work in this way with tree bark, seeds and nuts, feathers, seashells,
buttons… there are dozens of common objects in or around your house.
Close your eyes and construct what is going on around you through sounds
alone. Walk around in the dark, or with a blindfold, to hone your sense of
space and touch. Listen to TV without looking at it, or watch with the sound
turned off.
Collect all of your attention and zero in on a single object: Notice its form, its
lines, its colors, its sounds, its tactile characteristics, its smell, even its taste.
Then, later, recall the details one at a time, as many as possible.
Sit on the sidelines of your sport and watch with your eyes closed. Practice
a simple athletic maneuver wearing a blindfold, or in the dark. Develop a
more acute sense of touch with the implements and tools of your sport...
gloves, balls, bats, poles, shoes, playing surfaces.
Many basketball players are forever dribbling a ball, in order to refine their
feel for it, the way it bounces, and their control. A basketball center will
continuously refine the movement of feet within the limited space around the
lane and the blocks, finding the rhythm, commanding the space, varying the
timing, refining the moves.
Many baseball pitchers carry a ball with them at all times in order to finetune their sense of touch, to differentiate the feel of different hides and
seams, even the minute variations in its diameter and circumference, and to
practice changing grips. A baseball hitter will work with the bat, to truly come
to know its weight, heft, length and the feel of the grip, so that it becomes
an extension of their hands and arms. A pole vaulter will work with the pole's
weight, grip and tensile feel. A good golfer becomes an expert in grass. A
volleyball player senses different air pressures in the ball.
How can you develop a better feel for your sport?
G-15
Awareness and Journal Exercises 24
As life takes you on its merry way, you will get around to different places, like
your friend's garage, or a porch, or a new restaurant, or a new teacher in a new
classroom, or a new ballpark. As you encounter new environments, ask yourself:
What do I know about this place? What kind of thoughts are here?
What kind of consciousness, mood, attitude, action or awareness does this place
naturally facilitate? What happened here before I showed up? Does the energy
in this place need to be rearranged, changed? Do I feel safe here?
Do I feel richly alert and alive here?
Is there an energy source here I can tap into?
What energy can I add to the place and the events taking place in it?
Find a quiet time and place to work with your journal. Do some form of brief
meditation before you begin to answer one or more of these questions. [You can
choose to focus on the athletic or the non-athletic elements of these questions.]:
Pick a new sensation or insight of which you've become aware. Describe it.
Explore it. As you go deeper, what do you become aware of? If you continue to
follow your attention, what do you discover?
Write for ten minutes, without actually looking, about what's behind you (or to the
left of you, or to the right of you, or in front of you). Keep going further and further
through space/and or time. [As an athletically-oriented exercise, simply do the
same thing but place yourself in an athletic situation. Who's around you? Who's
behind you, aside of you? What are they doing thinking looking for? What
happened previously? What's going to happen next? etc. etc.]
Write a paragraph or two on these topics:
1)
2)
3)
4)
5)
6)
The
The
The
The
The
The
smallest, most beautiful thing I’ve seen is...
most grandiose beautiful thing I've seen is...
most interesting thing I discovered recently was..
most fascinating experience I had recently was...
most beautiful thing about my physical body is...
most beautiful thing I've seen someone else do recently is...
7) The most creative or difficult or fascinating or inspiring athletic move
I've seen recently is....
8) As your body speaking, describe its experiences... during pre-event
anticipation, warm-ups, workouts, competition, specific athletic maneuvers,
and post-competition. Describe the emotions and mental states that are
related to these times.
Cynicism and boredom results from the refusal of artists to do their art.
-- Aquinas
25
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Attention as Psychic Energy
26
Information enters consciousness either because we intend to focus attention on it,
or as the result of attentional habits based on biological or social instructions.
For instance, when driving down the highway, we pass hundreds of cars without
actually being aware of them. Their shape and color might register for a fraction of a
second, and then they are immediately forgotten. But occasionally we notice a
particular vehicle; perhaps it is swerving unsteadily, or has an unusual appearance.
This image then enters the focus of consciousness, and we become aware of it. In
the mind, the information about the car ("it is swerving”) gets related to information
about other swerving cars stored in memory, to determine the category into which
the current circumstance fits. Is it an inexperienced driver? A drunken driver? A
momentarily distracted but competent driver? As soon as the event is matched to a
known class of events, it is recognized. Now it must be evaluated. Is it something to
worry about? If the answer is yes, then we must decide on an appropriate course of
action. Should we speed up, slow down, change lanes, stop, alert the State Police?
[Compare this with the image of a runner rounding third base..., or other athletic maneuvers.]
All of these complex mental operations must be completed in a few seconds,
sometimes in a fraction of a second. While forming such a judgment seems to be
a lightning-fast reaction, it does take place in real time. And it does not happen
automatically there is a distinct process that makes such reactions possible, a
process called attention. It is attention that seeks relevant bits of information
from the potential millions of bits available. It takes attention to retrieve the
appropriate references from memory, to evaluate the event, and then to choose the
right thing to do.
Despite its great powers, attention cannot step beyond the limits already described.
It cannot notice or hold in focus more information than can be processed
simultaneously. Retrieving information from memory storage and bringing it into the
focus of awareness, comparing information, evaluating, deciding -- all make
demands on the mind's limited processing capacity.
Some people learn to use the priceless resources of awareness, attention and focus
efficiently, while others waste it.
The mark of a person who is in control of consciousness is the ability to
focus attention at will, to be oblivious to distractions, to concentrate for as
long as it takes to achieve a goal, and not longer. And the person who can do
this usually enjoys the normal course of everyday life.
Each person allocates his or her limited attention by either focusing it intentionally
like a beam of energy, or by diffusing it in desultory, random movements.
The shape and content of life depend on how attention is used.
Entirely different realities will emerge depending on how it is invested.
>>>
G-17
The flexibility of attentional structures is even more obvious when they are compared
across cultural or occupational classes.
Eskimo hunters are trained to discriminate between dozens of types of snows, and
are always aware of the speed and direction of the wind.
Traditional Melanesian sailors can be taken blindfolded to any point of the ocean
within a radius of several hundred miles from their island home, and if allowed
to float for a few minutes in the sea, are able to recognize the spot by the feel of the
currents on their bodies.
A musician structures her attention so as to focus on nuances of sound that ordinary
people are not aware of.
A stockbroker focuses on tiny changes in the market that others do not register.
A good clinical diagnostician has an uncanny eye for symptoms.
They all trained their attention to process signals that
otherwise would pass unnoticed.
Because attention determines what will or will not appear in consciousness, and
because it is also required to make any other mental events -- such as
remembering, thinking, feeling, and making decisions -- happen there, it is
useful to think of it as psychic energy. Attention is like energy in that, without it,
no work can be done, and in doing work, it is dissipated.
We create ourselves by how we invest this energy. Memories, thoughts and
feelings are all shaped by how we use it. And it is an energy under our control, to
do with as we please; hence, attention is our most important tool in the task of
improving the quality of experience.
Situations in which attention can be freely invested to achieve a person's goals,
when there is no disorder to straighten out, no threat to the sense of self against
which you must defend, is a flow experience. Those who learn to attain it develop
a stronger, more confident self, because more of their psychic energy has been
invested successfully in goals they themselves had chosen to pursue.
When a person is able to organize his or her consciousness so as to experience
flow as often as possible, the quality of life is inevitably going to improve. In flow,
we are in control of our psychic energy, and everything we do adds order to
consciousness. Says the rock-climber, "It's exhilarating to come closer and closer
to self-discipline. You make your body go and everything hurts; then you look
back in awe at what you've done. It leads to self-fulfillment. If you win these
battles enough, that battle against yourself, at least for a moment, it becomes
easier to win battles throughout your life." That battle is the struggle to establish
control over attention. The struggle does not necessarily have to be physical. But
anyone who has experienced flow, who has been "in the zone", knows that the deep
enjoyment it provides requires an equal degree of disciplined concentration.
G-18
A Nifty Little Trick 27
Martial arts guru Bruce Lee had a nifty little trick to hone his focusing abilities
for competition. Each day, while going through his normal daily routine, he'd
suddenly stop what he was doing and concentrate very intensely on something
completely unrelated to what he had been doing, perhaps a butterfly which has
just landed on a leaf, or the postman delivering a letter to his home. For a few
seconds, he would completely lose himself in this, absorbing everything. Then,
presto, he'd snap out of it and resume his routine.
Focus is largely disciplining yourself to keep attention on what's important.
Awareness in Motion 28
Broadcaster Charlie Jones tells the story of the time he decided to test the reality
about elite athletes being just so much better than the rest of us. He was going to
broadcast a dirt track auto race in Reading, Pennsylvania on the 4th of July for
NBC Sports, and so he hopped a ride to the track in a rental car with the great
Indy race car driver Johnny Rutherford. On the way, Jones ventured the question:
"Johnny, are race car drivers really better drivers than the rest of us?"
Jones, you see, fancied himself a pretty good driver.
Rutherford answered, "Oh yes, there's a big difference." Taking the bait, he
continued. "Notice that there are eight cars behind us on the freeway. They are
all going about 65 mph, the same speed as us, except for that red Buick, which is
closing fast on the left. In front of us are four cars, and the black one on the left is
getting ready to change lanes. Coming in the opposite direction on the turnpike
are five cars, and a semi-tractor-trailer that's experiencing some problems; the
big rig is slowing down and pulling over to the right. About a quarter-mile away
is the on-ramp, and there are three cars that will merge by the time we get there.
I’m concerned about the third one, the white Ford. The driver has a herky-jerky
motion, and I’ll be keeping my eye on it."
When we bring a high quality of attention 29 to both ourselves and to the
activity at hand, something begins to open... a fluidity emerges, and a deepening
connection to the process begins to take place. We are vitalized with a sharp inner
clarity, a vibrant inner stream which widens its course. To avoid dispersal of these
energies, we must contain them, nurture them, and focus them. The pay-off of
entering "the zone", the flow, can only take place through energies that are
concentrated in a desired direction.
To stay in the flow, we must go deep, remaining open and receptive while we dive
into the unknown where the boundaries between self and the work dissolve and
become seamless. To find passion, all we really need to do is to observe. Passion
is synonymous with our capacity to deeply commit our interests and our energies
in a desired direction. To be bored is to be without attention, without the capacity
for observation.
G-19
Concentration, Awareness and Attention 30
Concentration is the most important skill for both outer and inner games.
Nothing of excellence is achieved without it. It is the primary ingredient of the
learning process and the foundation of all true enjoyment. Concentration is the
flow of conscious energy that make it possible to be aware of what is going on
around you. Awareness is the internal energy that makes it possible to see
through our eyes, hear through our ears, feel our feelings, think our thoughts
and understand what we understand. It is like a light that makes our experience
knowable. To some extent, we have control over our focus of awareness through a
function called attention, a primary tool of learning.
Imagine a light in a dark forest that illumines equally all objects within its range.
If, by use of reflectors, that light is focused into a beam, the objects in the line of
that beam will be seen in much sharper detail that previously, while those lying
outside it will become less distinct. The relationship between awareness and
attention is analogous. You more readily and fully understand whatever you
experience by the manner and depth of your awareness, and your awareness is
heightened selectively by the choices you make in focusing your attention.
If we want to know something more closely -- because we want to gain a greater
measure of control or simply to appreciate it more -- we need to shed more light on
it by focusing our attention. Concentration is nothing more than focusing our
complete and undivided attention upon the objects of our choice. We shine more
light on some objects in order to see them better, simultaneously blocking out less
relevant details and events.
At this point we might question how much control we actually have over our
attention. Can we keep our awareness focused when we want to? Pick anything
in your present experience and concentrate your attention on it: the feeling of
your body against the chair, your breath going in and out, anything within your
sight that you find interesting. Let your attention make as full contact as is
possible. See to what extent you can attend to this experience and nothing else.
How long is it before your attention shifts because you get tired or bored?
It's impossible to learn about concentration without practicing it, and it is not
until you start practicing it that you become aware of what it is, what its benefits
are, and perhaps how unconcentrated you have been. Control over one's attention
is a fundamental freedom. The extent to which you discover how and where to
focus your awareness will make the difference in the quality, depth,
richness and success of your life. Some people associate the word concentration
with strain, as in "trying to concentrate" for an exam. But trying can’t produce
concentration. When a student is told to concentrate in class, he seldom does, and is
often accused of not trying, or not being able to. Examples of concentration
might include a baby fascinated with a multi-colored mobile, a cat playing with a ball
of string, a dog gnawing on a bone, a hawk flying over hills watching for a field
mouse, or a kid playing with an electronic toy. Concentration is natural; you
can't make it happen any more than you can make sleep happen. Concentration
occurs when you allow -- not force -- yourself to become interested in something.
G-20
The Four Levels of Concentration
Here's one way to improve your concentration skills: Learn to be aware of what
you're paying attention to, then learn to shift your attention from one subject to
another, then to learn to place it where you want it, and then finally to learn how
to keep your concentration zeroed in. In this way, you build the component of
discipline into your concentration. A simple exercise: bounce a ball against a
wall from a distance of 15 feet or so (or play tennis off a wall or with a partner).
Keep eye contact with the ball at all times. Say "bounce" when the ball bounces on
the floor or ground, "hit" when it hits the wall, and "catch" when you catch it.
Saying this as accurately as possible will force you to focus on the here and now.
Concentration reaches a deeper level when the mind becomes interested in its
focus. It is difficult to keep your attention on something in which there is little
interest. When there is discipline but no interest, it takes so much effort just to
keep the mind still that concentration is superficial and of short duration. But
interest increases as you get into subtleties; details are always more interesting.
The path to this state of interest is to become receptive to experience and to sustain
your effort to try to make some contact with what you are focusing on.
A third level of concentration is absorption, or a deepening of interest to the point
where you begin to lose yourself in what you are attending to. When you are
absorbed, you cannot be easily distracted. This level of concentration is pleasurable
as well as conducive to excellence. You leave worries, doubts and troubles behind.
Most great athletic performances are accomplished in this state; even the most
strenuous action seems effortless. There is no room for anxiety because your mind is
so concentrated that you do not hear doubt knocking at your door. You experience an
intensified contact with reality. Relevant details are seen more clearly. The subject of
your focus seems larger. Actions flow with little consciousness or thought. You seem
to know more often and more accurately the correct thing to do with each change of
situation.
There is a fourth level of concentration that is only rarely experienced, but it
occurs when you have given yourself totally over to the experience. Gallwey
describes it as "oneness". You might think of it as unity. [Three books noted in
the Bibliography describe a wide variety of these fourth level experiences;
see Deep Play, Flow and In The Zone.]
Keeping Your Inner Eye on the Ball 31
Imagine a ball. Make the image of it as vivid as you can. When anything intrudes
upon the image, let it pass. If the ball disappears, imagine it again. If it wavers,
make it steady. Doing this, you can practice keeping your eye on the ball. You can
practice this anywhere, at any time.
If you cannot keep something out of your mind, get to know the intrusion.
What does this intrusion show you about yourself and your situation in the world?
Exploring this invader can be helpful to your game.
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Attentional Skills 32
Knowing what to pay attention to, how to shift attention as needed, and how to
intensify attention, or concentration, are skills essential to optimal performance.
Superior performance occurs when athletes are in the optimal energy zone,
characterized by attention being directed totally at the process of performance and
nothing else. When attention is riveted on the activity and positive psychic energy is
high, it is possible that time will seem to slow down or even stand still, and
movements seem to happen in slow motion.
An essential attentional skill is the ability to select the correct or critical stimuli or
cues to which you must pay attention from among countless other competing and
irrelevant cues or stimuli. For a runner in football to be able to take the ball from the
quarterback, watch the blocking develop, determine if the planned hole is open, see
all the opposing tacklers, keep the ball protected and make all the right moves to
"run to daylight" is an extraordinary feat in attention-selecting skills.
[Find a similar example in your sport.]
How do athletes learn to do this? Good old fashioned trial and error, and countless
repetitions, will program the "supercomputer" right brain and groove the neural
pathways. But you can shorten the time necessary to learn attentional skills. There
are four elements in our internal selectivity of attention: our built-in orienting
response; the degree of interest; our mind set; and our ability to screen out
irrelevant stimuli.
Many of our brain/body systems run on automatic. We are not required to pay
constant attention to our breathing, our heart rate, our vision and other senses, or
the rest of our bones and flesh in order for them to work. [You can pay attention to
them, but it's not required.] In automatic mode, we all have a built-in orienting
response. Its basic function is to let you know if there is anything unusual or
different in your environment, alerting you to potential danger. The orienting
response is an internal automatic scanning of your senses that yells "Hey, you..!"
when there is a sudden noise or a flash of light, if there is something very large or of
unusual shape, when there is a change in the rhythm of the ordinary and ongoing, or
when there is movement. Even slight movement detected in your peripheral vision
will attract your attention.
The problem is that, sometimes, you have to override the orienting response to
prevent constant distraction. Your attention will tend to follow and stay with your
interests. Interest is closely related to motivation. You can intensify and
strengthen your interest in a given area if you ask why? a lot.., if you move towards
a better understanding of how something fits into the whole picture... when the
benefits become more clear to you. Another factor in attention is your mind set.
When a football coach instructs a linebacker to observe when the quarterback drops
back, the coach is creating a mind set. The infielder watches the batter's feet to have
some idea where the ball might be hit. When a mother puts her baby down for a
nap, she develops a mind set that allows her to be alert to the child crying.
You can learn to set your mind like an alarm clock
to trigger any number of responses. >>>>
G-22
Your coach can help you identify the things to watch for, and
the responses to them.
You can watch others play or practice, or watch videos, or work with imagery and
role-playing techniques or other forms of simulation.
Be careful, though, because there are plusses and minuses to paying attention to
cues in order to anticipate. Watching your opponent's eyes in basketball may tip
you to the direction of his next pass, but he may be using that same cue to fool you
as he looks left and goes right. There are times to narrow your attention, guess,
anticipate or try to out-think your opponent, and there are times to widen your
attention and just remain open to whatever is happening.
Review the section on the dimensions of attention (Tab C, pages 4ff).
BROAD
Assess
Analyze
EXTERNAL
INTERNAL
Act
Rehearse
NARROW
Ask a coach or an older athlete about the attentional styles that are
appropriate to your sport.
Simply imagine your athletic activity and think about where your attention tends
to be at any given moment, and where it needs to be.
When you watch others play your sport in practice, when you are on the bench,
as a spectator, or on television, focus on the individual playing your position and
think about what he's paying attention, where his focus is, and how, when and
why it shifts.
Many errors of attention occur because an athlete shifts too slowly or too rapidly
from one focus to another. One example of shifting too slowly from an internal
focus to an external one is the second baseman who, thinking about why he
missed a ground ball, fails to move to the outfield to take the cutoff throw from
right field. An example of shifting too quickly from one stimulus or cue to
another is the shortstop who, just as he fields the ball, lifts his head to look at his
throwing target.
G-23
The Three Stages of Attention in Athletics
33
Attention to any one thing comes at a cost of attention to other things. Research on
cognitive processes has clearly demonstrated that people make choices about the
features of the outside world on which they will focus, and these choices determine
what information they will collect. Many great athletes have attributed their
successes, and failures, to their powers of concentration. Psychologist William James
assumed that genius led to great powers of attention, but it would seem that the
converse could also be true: Superior attention enables people to focus more on their
skill, digging deeper, refining, honing the art that is the object of their desire. Tiger
Woods, son of a Buddhist mother and soldier father, displays a dramatic ability to
focus on the business of the moment. Mother taught him to meditate, and father
recognized his natural ability to focus… Research studies support the idea that the
best athletes in any field often possess the best attentive skills. For instance, novice
pistol shooters were found to be better at a dual task of responding to a sound with a
manual response while preparing to shoot. For the experts, however, as their focus
on the primary task of shooting narrowed, the secondary task was relegated to such
low status that at times it was ignored. Like Woods, they were able to clear the
mechanism to narrow their attention as the moment of action approached. Is this
because, as James would argue, their genius was so complex that the contents of
their mind would catch anyone's attention? Or did the facility of their attention allow
their genius to prosper?
Recent research demonstrates that emotion may play a role in narrowing attention
even further. When the importance of an event increases, the amount of information
that can be absorbed lessens. Some athletes are able to utilize this process to their
advantage, while others become crippled by it. Since pressure and, frequently,
anxiety result in attention becoming more narrow and internal, an athlete may fail to
broaden her attention externally when the situation calls for it. In the final seconds
of a close game, a very nervous point guard may only be able to carry out her
coach's diagrammed play, missing her teammate wide open under the basket. A
psyched-up quarterback with narrowed peripheral vision may be so focused on one
receiver that he cannot see another streaking alone toward the end zone. The trick is
to pay attention to what matters, and ignore what doesn't matter. But few athletes
and coaches understand that the development of this attention takes practice.
William James was pessimistic that sustained attention could ever be improved, but a
wealth of research studies have suggested that he was wrong. Neuroscientists such
as Michael Posner have described the stages of attention that can be achieved with
practice. The first is the cognitive stage, during which we figure out how to do
something, like swing a golf club. The next is the associative stage, during which
we engrain the act through practice, and develop mental associations between the
complex activity and simpler thoughts. The notion of a swing thought is based upon
this type of practice. We have dozens of things to think about in the golf swing, but
consolidating our mental plans into a single thought is much more efficient, reduces
the mental energy devoted to planning, and lets us do. Last is the autonomous
stage, during which our activity becomes less directly subject to cognitive control.
Since the motor activity is automatic, it becomes less subject to interference from
other ongoing activities or distracting influences. We are at our best when what we
are thinking converges with what we are doing. Not that we think about what we are
doing –- but that the thinking and the doing are the same. G-24
Sustained and Focused Attention 34
Every sport requires concentration, freedom from distraction, and sustained
alertness. Athletic skill depends on one's ability to focus unbroken attention on
the space, objects and other people involved, and on one's own kinesthetic sense of
the body. A wandering mind diminishes athletic ability... The greatest athletes
are legendary for their powers of concentration. The literature and gossip of every
sport is filled with tales about the playing trances of its stars.
Four levels of attention are described in yoga. The first is the deliberate withdrawal of
attention from external objects, drawing the senses with it (like the tennis player
who blocks everything but the ball from her focus). At the second level, the
practitioner holds his mind steady upon a center of consciousness within the mind or
body or upon an external object (like a runner focusing on his stride, or a golfer
concentrating on the ball). The third level is "an unbroken flow of attention toward
the object of contemplation", an effortless absorption. [Find yourself a good example
here.] At the fourth level, "the true nature of the object held in contemplation shines
forth, undistorted by the mind of the perceiver". Here, there is perfect clarity and an
effortless sense of unity with whatever is perceived. The flow of the mind during this
level brings a person into contact with the essence and core of his being. One is both
humbled and uplifted."
Many experiences described by athletes share these qualities. The withdrawal of
attention from distractions, the deliberate holding of a constant focus, the effortless
absorption, the sense of unity and rightness of movement are not unlike these
stages of yogic meditation, although they may lack the stability, penetration
and pervasiveness of spiritual contemplation.
Another way to characterize the deepening levels of concentration is by the
amount of time the mind can remain undisturbed. If the mind can be made to
flow uninterruptedly toward the same object for twelve seconds, this may be called
the first level of concentration. If the mind can continue in that concentration for
twelve times twelve seconds (two minutes, 24 seconds), this may be called
meditation. If the mind can continue in that meditation for twelve times longer
(28 minutes, 48 seconds), then the third' level is achieved. And if that can be
maintained for twelve times longer (five hours, 45 minutes), this will lead to the
most profound state of ecstasy.
Like yoga, sport invites and reinforces an ever-deepening attention to the task at
hand. The thousands of miles a distance runner covers, all the shots a hoopster
makes in practice, the hours each day a gymnast spends on each maneuver lead
to moments that begin to resemble religious ecstasy. Why does focusing our mind
and energies do this? The yogis tell us that ignorance and suffering come from a
false identification with the passing objects of experience, through a distraction
from our deepest source. By quieting the surface mind, by withdrawing our
assent to the world's random turning, we can perceive our true identity with
spirit. This identity transcends naming. It is something we intuitively recognize,
even if we don't have words or concepts for it.
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Becoming Aware of Self in Environment
35
Your body constantly picks up data from the environment and reacts unconsciously
to it. This is the essential design of the mind that helps protect you against threats.
However, if you do not answer its alarm bells, your body/mind will continue to send
your neural net, your muscles and your immune system a stream of continuous
messages. We tend to ignore these messages; we determine in milliseconds that the
threat is not immediate, but we forget to respond to our mind or fail to act to
remove the stimulus, and so the messages continue to build up. The result is stress,
muscular tension, a gnawing and annoying internal discomfort of some kind, a mildly
or greatly deflated performance, and, in the long run, some emotional symptoms and
a degraded immune system.
Your scanner antennae feed you all sorts of information. For example, you can
discern something about the emotional states of the people driving near you on the
freeway which may tell you something about their intent, degree of control or
distraction, etc. But if you are listening intently to the radio talk show, your mind
is elsewhere, but you can still tell that you are getting repeated messages from
somewhere else because your shoulders are becoming tense. Later, your body
again sends signals to you about the persistent, high-pitched screaming that is
pouring out of those fluorescent lights: you've got a nasty headache and you're in
a foul mood. Your immediate environment has all sorts of stress-inducing stimuli, in
temperature, noise, background music, lighting, seating, the arrangement of things
around you, etc. Add to this your own internal status of hunger, thirst, discomfort,
and so on. Your own physical body creates internal signals that demand attention.
Only when you control, to the extent possible, those internal and external things that
demand your attention can you free your mind to be attentive to other things that
are of interest and importance.
Your intuitive capabilities and the ability of your body/mind to perceive the subtle
but important signals in your world depend on your mind being free of distractions
and annoyances.
And, if you cannot control everything, as you surely cannot, then you simply have
to identify it, give it a name, and respond to your mind/body signals.
You can do something, like shift your position, do a relaxation stretch, shut off the
light that bothers you, change the radio station, or otherwise respond to the need
that seems to be so pressing. Often this is the kind of precisely the kind of
response we should make. But if you are in the middle of something very
important, some activity that prevents you from anything but a momentary action
response like being in the middle of an SAT exam, an important athletic
competition, a high-pressure audition or interview, then you can respond to your
mind/body with a thought that goes something like this: "It's okay, I’m aware of
the thing that you're telling me about, and I will take care of it as soon as I am
able", you can then consciously re-center yourself on the task at hand.
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Concentration Exercises 36
CONCENTRATION IS PRE-POTENT. IT IS FIRST AND MOST POWERFUL AS A PERFORMER'S SKILL.
Be an observer. Notice everything, especially details. This will bring you to be
attentive to things you've never paid attention to. It is a constant exercise in
disciplining your mind and your eyes.
Look at pictures hanging on the wall, or a billboard in the distance. Start by
taking in the entire image, then keep narrowing your focus until you're centered
on a very particular part of the picture. See it completely, noticing every detail.
Stay on it with your eyes until you have committed the details to memory.
Take the numbers from 2 to 10 from one suit of a deck of playing cards. Shuffle
them and place them face down in random order. Turn them over and view them
quickly, then turn them face down again. Distract yourself for a minute, and
then go back and turn them over in order. Keep at this until you become better
and better at it. Then add more numbers, and then add a second suit of numbers,
so that you'll have to turn over two 2's and so on. Be patient with yourself.
You'll get better if your discipline is stronger than your frustration (and that
should be one of your goals...!)
[Try the games at http://www.bodymindandmodem.com.]
Find the appropriate images in your sport. When you practice, when you watch
TV games, from the bench.., watch closely and don't let your attention waver.
Focus your attention on the numerous aspects of the player who is doing what you
do, or the opponent opposite. Watch for detail.
Make up some exercises of your own, if you wish. Be diligent.
THOSE WHO PERSIST IN ATTENDING TO TASK CAN DEVELOP AN INTENSITY OF CONCENTRATION
THAT HAS "A HUNGER TO IT".
The Essence of Brain Power in Sports 37
As you perceive some physical situation for the first time, your eyes feed their
retinal images to your brain, with their aspects of shape, brightness, color,
motion and so on. Your ears feed in whatever they receive at the moment, your
nose provides olfactory inputs, your skin and other tactile sensors send their data,
and even the taste information from your mouth goes to the brain. In addition to
these well-known sense inputs, your whole-body kinesthetic sensation -"your feelings" if you like to simplify the term -- goes to your brain.
The current status of your feeling response as well as the details of the sensory
data from a complete "package" of data, which your brain receives and puts
together in a whole pattern.
If the scene you are perceiving has a high level of meaning for you, then
you will tend to imprint it more intensively and, later, you will be able to recall
many of the features of the situation.
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The Touchy-Feely Side of Sports, Music Art and Life
38
We can apply an augmented capacity for sensation to all incoming information
and impressions. Within ourselves, we have the potential to see worlds in our
imaginations and to hear whole symphonies in our heads. Without the fibers
pressing against our skin, we can perceive the touch of silk; our memories let us
feel it. We can "touch" the coldness and weight of steel through the proprioceptive
memories of our fingers and our shoulders. We can "smell" the chicken roasting
on the grill without the odors actually being in the air around us. By focusing on
these internal body sensations, we can greatly enrich our sensory consciousness.
When we can arouse sensations by an internal command, we are no longer
dependent upon external stimulation. We are ready to play with images in our
head, forming new associations with other memories, enlarging some aspects
and diminishing others. This is the creative process underlying the imagination.
Creative Concentration 39
Concentration is the focus of attention. It can be directed internally or
externally. A high jumper can concentrate on the high bar, the runway, the wind
direction, the crowd or the opponent, all external factors. On the other hand, the
athlete can be concentrating on a cue thought or trigger, a feeling inside, a strategy,
a past performance, or a future performance, all internal thoughts. One can
concentrate on external factors or internal factors, a single object, or several things
at once. There are two techniques that employ all phases of concentration:
mental routines and mental rehearsal. Mastery and effective uses of these
techniques will significantly improve the athlete's chances of success.
Concentration during competition is critical. The athlete must be able to attend to
various internal and external cues. Pressure, unforeseen occurrences and a
variety of other factors can break an athlete's concentration. Mental and physical
routines can help an athlete maintain concentration.
The use of physical and mental routines, or systematic rituals, can set the athlete
up for success. The athlete is better able to focus and control distractions if these
routines are adhered to. There will be less chance for self-doubt or stressproducing though; there will be less chance for a wandering mind. A routine is
built upon appropriate physical and mental sequencing.
Are routines the same as superstitions, like wearing the same pair of socks or the
same shirt, or eating the same pre-game meal? Superstitions begin when an
athlete inadvertently makes an association between a positive experience in sport
and an unrelated source. Superstitions can enhance confidence, but they will
generally not hold up over time, because they are based on irrational associations.
However, when properly done, physical and mental routines can help build
lasting confidence and consistent performance. When a physical routine is done
without appropriate and related mental thoughts, it becomes a case of "going
through the motions". Having the ability to concentrate, although a basic
building block, is not the key. Consciously directing the focus in the right
direction is the key.
>>>>
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There are four steps or phases to mental routines which give meaning to the
word concentration. Each phase is equally important to a successful performance.
The first phase is observation, in which the athletes takes notice of the
surroundings and observes the external information associated with the field of play,
absorbing anything that is pertinent. The second phase is strategy, in which the
external information is digested and a plan of action is adopted. This is where
adjustments to wind, playing surface, etc. are made. The third phase is
visualization and sensory imaging, in which the athlete fixes his gaze on the
suitable place in the field of play and his kinesthetic senses in the appropriate way
and envisions the forthcoming event in a positive, realistic, detailed manner. The
fourth phase is the belief cue, in which the athlete activates a cue word or phrase
which will draw out the desired proper technique and mental set. The athlete's mind
is fixed on this trigger, which allows the body to flow without mental interference.
Each step of your routine will ready you to react with trust and confidence,
promote systematic and thorough concentration, and minimize extraneous
mental interference. It is mental interference which diverts the messages sent
from the brain to the muscles. By consciously going through the four steps, the
athlete will systematically build a disciplined thought process and program his
mind for success. The process becomes habitual; the mind has no time to wander
or become distracted.
Cook’s Model of Concentration
Observe
Confidence
Confidence
Strategy
Confidence
Confidence
Confidence
Confidence
See / Feel
Trust
Confidence
Confidence
Performance
Map It | Plan It | See It | Feel It | Trust It
Confidence is a Consequence of Concentration
Concentration for hours and even days before an event is as important to success
as concentration during the event. Pre-event concentration is usually described
with words like imagery, mental practice, mental rehearsal or visualization. It
has been said that "we cannot become what we cannot see ourselves becoming."
The way in which an athlete thinks about an upcoming event
can be vitally important to his or her success.
G-29
The effective use of positive and constructive images before an event is the creation
of the event in the mind. Mental rehearsal is a concentrated effort to establish a
positive yet realistic picture of an upcoming event using thoughts, feelings and
actions. This sort of concentration must be nurtured -- it does not just happen.
In fact, images of failure tend to occupy the minds of most people because of our
fear of failure, and because our society is full of people, media, things and events
which tend to suggest that we will or even should fail.
Positive mental rehearsal allows the athlete to deal with an upcoming event and
the challenges associated with it ahead of time. This increases the athlete's
confidence level because it promotes a feeling of being prepared and in control.
Mental rehearsal techniques also help athletes to learn new skills more quickly
and more thoroughly.
Mental rehearsal works because the body reacts to what it perceives.
The physiological system cannot differentiate between real and imagined stimuli.
We do react to unconscious thoughts: when you wake up from a nightmare,
you're perspiring and the heart is racing. Mental rehearsal allows the athlete to
simulate a positive performance over and over so that the mind/body connections
are conditioned to react to the real event as it would to the imagined event.
There are two proven types of mental rehearsal strategies: mastery rehearsal,
and mental toughness rehearsal. These are distinctly different in their purpose.
Mastery rehearsal occurs when the athlete practices mastering an event. he
perfect performance is created in the mind and mentally experienced over and
over again. his rehearsal includes skills, movements, strategies, environment,
physical feelings and sensory input, and emotions.
To develop the skill of mastery rehearsal, the athlete must first develop an
outline and then a brief script for the perfect and yet realistic performance she hopes
to achieve. It may be helpful to write out the script at the beginning; as you use it
more and more, you can reduce it to a mental map or checklist. With experience,
each key element can be reduced to a simple trigger word or phase that will allow
the whole of it to unfold.
The script is a scenario that may include activities which take place throughout
the day -- waking up, eating breakfast, etc. -- and should include things like travel
to the competition, the stretching and warming-up phases, the phase at the event
for coach/team interaction, the phase for personal pro-event routines, the
competitive event itself, and the immediate post-competition experience.
[For an example of the effective use of scripting the event itself, see page P-2 for a
description of a technique developed to prepare individuals for performance in the
West Point Sandhurst competition, a team competition involving complex, difficult,
interactive and time-sensitive skill performance stations performed at numerous
places in the middle of a rugged cross-terrain run.]
G-30
In developing a script, each of the senses should be incorporated as the athlete
attempts to pre-create the sights, sounds, smells of the event, the feel of the
competition surface, the grip on the ball or athletic tool, and so on. Make it as
detailed and rich as possible. Make sure you see yourself in the picture. Build in
positive affirmations, in the first person and positive tense, such as "I am relaxed
and ready to complete" or "I feel energized and confident." Build the script
around technique, skill and movement you have focused on in practice. Build into
the script critical elements dealing with visual or mental focus. Build in critical
communications steps or signals between coaches and/or other competitiors.
Build the script with affirmations developed to deal with particular areas of
performance, concentration, emotion or attitude you are having difficulty with.
Build in trust and self-belief. Continue to refine the script to winnow out
unimportant detail. Record a 3-5 minute version of it in your own voice to jumpstart the process of positive self-talk. Add music that reflects the sport and your
own personality. The highly-personalized tape then becomes a powerful tool you
can use at almost any time, anywhere. With a Walkman, this becomes
convenient and private. It should be listened to at least 3 or 4 times a day. The
most effective times are when you first wake up, just before going to sleep, and on
the way to practices and events. But don't just listen to it. Whether you use a tape
or your own mental video, the key to its proper use is to fully experience it with as
much sensory and mental power as possible.
Mental toughness rehearsal is discussed under Tab H. See also Q-2.
Taken as a whole, experimental studies do not provide evidence for 40
the effectiveness of imagery rehearsal in sports that are as convincing
as the testimony of the athletes themselves.
Experiments on athletic mental practice have limitations, in part because the
research subjects rarely practice long enough to achieve dramatic improvement,
unlike athletes with long-term time investment and emotional commitment.
Nevertheless, when 25 studies of mental practice for motor skills were reviewed in
1967 by psychologist Alan Richardson, 11 were found to have statistically
significant results and 7 more produced positive though statistically insignificant
results. A deeper review in the 1980's by Richard Suinn done on studies
conducted earlier by Oxendine, Corbin and Nideffer concluded that:
•
•
people with experience in a task may profit more from mental practice than
novices;
beginners seem to profit more from physical practice;
•
simple motor tasks may be more readily enhanced through mental practice
than complex ones; and
•
if the subject is experienced or trained in a complex task, mental practice can
contribute further improvements in performance.
G-31
Four Different Ways of Paying Attention 41
One day a man of the people said to the Zen master Ikkyu: "Master,
will you please write for me some maxims of the highest wisdom?"
Ikkyu immediately took his calligraphy brush and wrote the word Attention.
"Is that all?" asked the man. "Will you not add something more?"
Ikkyu then wrote Attention Attention. "Well", remarked the man
rather irritably, "I really don't see much depth or subtlety in what you
have just written." Ikkyu then wrote Attention Attention Attention.
Half-angered, the man demanded "What does the word `Attention'
mean anyway?" Ikkyu answered gently: "Attention means attention."
In our Western, default-mode approach to thinking, perception is diagnostic. Its
role is to sample the information that is arriving through the senses until it can
recognize, categorize and label what is `out there' or `in here'. Once perception
has come up with its diagnosis, its label, its job is done. Interest shifts
downstream to what is inferred about it, to what might be done about it. If our
snap perception is accurate and adequate, then further thought builds on a firm
foundation. But there is always the risk that a skimpy approach to perception
may neglect some piece of information that does not, on first sight, seem
significant but which, had attention been less precipitate, might have
revealed its relevance and worth.
Logical thinking determines the way in which attention is to be deployed, and it is
not always the best way. If we get stuck in this d-mode, we may prematurely and
unwittingly discard just what we need. Sometimes a slower, more meticulous
approach to perception can lead to a richer mental image of what is happening,
and hence to a better way of knowing. Sometimes we need to switch from the
high-speed scanning of d-mode into a contemplative perceptual stance in which
the world is allowed to speak more fully for itself. This section explores four
different ways of paying attention, or `slow seeing": detection, focusing on inner
states, poetic sensibility and mindfulness.
Detection: The habit of attending closely and paying attention to the evidence,
even and sometimes especially to tiny, insignificant-looking shreds of evidence, is
characteristic of skilled practitioners of a variety of arts, crafts and professions.
Take the hunter tracking his prey, for example: the expert can determine the age
and state of health of the animal he is tracking by allowing collected bits of
information to resonate in a leisurely and largely unconscious way with his
mental collection of experience, knowledge and anecdote. Each detail forms a
nucleus around which association and connotation gather to create a detailed and
coherent picture. Alert to the presence of meaning in the trivia and margins of
things, we all execute many similar feats of natural and informal mastery every
day when we sense the impending storm on the wind, or when we forecast a
change in behavior in another person. We perform this act of high intelligence
without deliberate thought.
There is the story of the old man who was called in to fix an old factory boiler. He
wandered around the pipework, occasionally putting his ear to a valve or joint. Finally,
he pulled out a hammer and tapped it sharply on one small obscure corner, and the boiler
rumbled back to life. When the owner asked him to explain and itemize his bill for $1,000,
the old man wrote: For tapping with hammer: $25. For knowing where to tap: $975.
G-32
This kind of detection comes into its own under certain conditions: It needs a
problem that can be clearly stated but for which the answer is not obvious. It
requires clues, pieces of information whose significance, or even presence, is not
immediately apparent. It works best within a mind that has accumulated a rich
data base of potentially relevant information, much of which is experiential. And
it works best when a mental mode is used that allows the mind to dwell on the
problem until significant meanings or connections come into focus.
Focusing on Inner States: There is a second fruitful way of paying attention; it is
similar to the first, except that, in this method, awareness is directed inward
towards the subtle activities, feelings and promptings of one's own body.
The ability to listen to the body is very useful in gaining insight into a whole variety
of puzzles and predicaments. We're not speaking here of observing a string of
thoughts, images or feelings, or the experience of an emotion or feeling. We are
talking about a process though which you stop thinking and stop moving long
enough to acquire a "felt sense". Sometimes in our haste in looking for answers,
we lack the patience to allow things to unfold; sometimes in our rush to label
everything and see the world as only ‘out there’, we fail to simply look inside. The
`felt sense' forms somewhere in the center of the body. It is not an aha! When it
has formed and been recognized and given a voice or an image, there is a
corresponding sense of release and relaxation, enabling you to take a step toward
resolution, change or forward movement in your life. You can simply ask
yourself "What is this whole thing about?”, and then shut up. By holding
awareness within your body for even as little as 30 seconds, the answer begins to
formulate itself. By continuing to shut up, you avoid leaping to conclusions. If
you wonder if you are doing it right because no immediate answer is forthcoming,
then you are -- because you are listening to that part of you which does not have a
voice and cannot articulate what is there. Your body is wiser than all of our
concepts about it because it totals them, and all the circumstances we sense.
This inarticulate part of you, once found, can be revisited for further exploration
and progress, to unfold the matter a little more. It takes time and practice to
learn to ‘see’ what is there, and it often comes in the form of a short image or
phrase. The Japanese call this "thinking with the abdomen", and it can give rise
to your independent inner voice. [Hara!]
Poetic Sensibility: With the first two methods, an agenda already exists; you start
with a problem to solve or clarify. But the third method has an ability to reset or
create the agenda, to uncover issues and reveal concerns, sometimes in
unexpected ways. By allowing ourselves to become absorbed in some present
experience without any sense of seeking or grasping, we can be reminded of some
aspects of life that had been eclipsed by the usual pressing and urgent details and
process of our existence. Sometimes when we gaze out to sea or listen to a piece of
music, we may discover a facet of our own nature that had been neglected.
When we lose ourselves in the present, we do just that: we lose our selves.
As the linguist and philosopher Ernst Cassirer put it, the mind ‘comes to rest in the
immediate experience’. The ego is spending all its energy in this single object,
lives in it, loses itself in it. One slips away from self-concern and preoccupation
into the sheer presence of the thing, the scene, the sound itself. Sometimes
everything fades away in the presence of the here-and-now, the immediate
experience. When your immediate interest is commanded so completely, to the
G-33
exclusion of everything else, you can arrive at a quiet transformation or glimpse a
knowledge or truth, arriving at an indirect knowing which resists explication but
hints and evokes, which is intimated but not revealed.
The ego or self is a network of preoccupations, a set of priorities that must be
attended to in the interests of our survival, our comfort and a dozen things we
have given credence to. When we are lost in the present, those graduallyconditioned preoccupations fall away and our anxious strivings are replaced by
refreshing new perceptions.
By its very nature, this more dispassionate, yet more intimate, way of knowing
cannot be brought about by an effort of will. It arises, if it does at all,
spontaneously. Poetic sensibility cannot be commanded, but it can be encouraged
by cultivating the ability to wait -- to remain attentive in the face of
incomprehension. To wait in this way requires a kind of inner security, the
confidence that one may lose clarity and control without losing one's self.
Normally when we wait, we wait for something which interest us, or
can provide us with what we want. When we wait in this human way,
waiting involves our desires, goals and needs. But waiting need not be
so definitely colored by our nature. There is a sense in which we can wait
without knowing for what we wait. We may wait, in this sense, without
waiting for anything; for anything, that is, which could be grasped and
expressed in subjective human terms. In this sense we simply wait,
and waiting may come to have a reference beyond [ourselves].
Martin Heidegger, Discourse on Thinking
Poetic sensibility is available to everyone. It is not the special preserve of Poets
with a capital P, or people who write poems. But the Poet achieves effect by doing
two things at once: by painting a picture that invites our interest, our engagement
and our identification, and by using language that hampers our usual way of
construing. One must not so much search for meaning in the poem as marinate
ourselves in it and let meaning come.
Mindfulness: The fourth manner of paying attention is a way of seeing through
one's own perceptual assumptions. Mindfulness involves observing one's own
experience carefully enough to be able to spot misconceptions that may have
inadvertently crept in. There are a number of ways in which this quality of
mindfulness towards our mental activity can be cultivated, though all involve
slowing down the onrush of mental activity and trying to focus conscious
awareness on the world of sensations, rather than jumping off on the first
interpretation that comes along and racing away through decision and action.
Mindfulness can be taught directly, as a form of secular meditation;
Jon Kabat-Zinn, M.D., Director of the Stress Reduction Program at the
University of Massachusetts Medical Center, gives a clear idea of what is involved:
"The essence of the state is to ‘be' fully in the present moment, without judging or
evaluating it, without reflecting backwards on past memories, without looking
forward to anticipate the future, as in anxious worry, and without attempting to
‘problem-solve’ or otherwise avoid any unpleasant aspects of the immediate
G-34
situation. In this state, one is highly aware and focused on the reality of the
moment ‘as it is', accepting and acknowledging it in its full `reality' without
immediately engaging in discursive thought about it, without trying to work out
how to change it, and without drifting off into a state of diffuse thinking focused
on somewhere else or some other time... The mindful state is associated with a
lack of elaborative processing involving thoughts that are essentially about the
currently experienced, its simplifications, further meanings, or the need for
related action. Rather, mindfulness involves direct and immediate experience of
the present situation."
The cultivation of mindfulness does not requite instruction in any kind of formal
meditation, though it may help. Our own culture possesses many kinds of
venerable and effective activities -- or inactivities-- that encourage the mind to
shift out of a doing-and-thinking mode and into a mode that is relaxed and
spacious, yet alert to its own meandering. Fishing is a perfect excuse to gaze at
the scene while the mind wanders free; it is not uncommon for the fisherman to
resent an interruption by a fish taking his bait. Rhythmic activities like knitting,
gardening, swimming and walking all encourage mindfulness, drawing
attention away from problem-solving and back into the perceptual world.
Gradually, you develop the quality of attention of the cat: relaxed and watchful at
the same time.
If our perception samples our experience only in order to categorize it, to decide
whether it is potentially useful or harmful, the conscious image it creates is likely
to be rather flat and dull. Without vivid and animated mental graphics, we tend
to go looking for them: in intensely stimulating movies, roller coaster rides, or
numerous forms of risk-taking behavior, in order that we may have at least a
transient experience of aliveness that our habitual mode of mind prevents us from
having for, and by, ourselves. But greater mindfulness and attention to the
details makes the conscious experience of our lives richer and more vivid. Our
ability to dwell in perception opens huge gateways to life's charm and vitality.
I am alarmed when it happens
that I have walked a mile into the woods bodily
without getting there in spirit.
-- Henry David Thoreau
42
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Unconscious Perception
43
We are constantly reacting to things that do not enter consciousness (though it
takes an effort of will to notice the existence of things that one has not noticed).
As you read these words, your body is conforming to the chair your sitting on, and
you are adjusting your posture every so often in response to sensations of which
you are usually unconscious. Your hands are responding to the size and stiffness
of the book as you hold it and turn the pages. You may even, while reading, have
the experience of realizing that a clock is in the middle of the hour, and of being
able to count the number of unheard chimes that preceded your moment of
"awakening".
The classic example of unconscious perception is the driver who suddenly realizes
that she has driven for the last 20 minutes without apparently -- consciously -noticing anything at all about the road, the traffic or the actual operation of the
vehicle. Consciousness was absorbed in a conversation, or deep in thought, while the
unconscious automatic pilot coped reasonably well on its own. The ability to
pursue flexible, intelligent routine while being mentally somewhere else can
be experienced anytime we are engaged in performing a dynamic skill that
has been mastered well enough to run subconsciously. Part of our mind is
sensitive to what is happening and how things are going, just as the computer than
controls a 747 receives and responds to information intelligently. Sometimes,
though, we become absent-minded. Halfway out the door, we realize we forgot the
car keys. Or, on the way to the shopping mall, we realize that our car has
mysteriously taken us to work instead. When our conscious minds are preoccupied,
we find ourselves pouring the hot water for instant coffee into the sugar bowl.
But when consciousness is not so totally obsessed, when it is merely entertaining
itself with a fantasy or a rehearsal, then we do find that the unusual breaks through;
it grabs our attention and we wake up. A ball bounces from between two parked
cars... Consciousness is re-engaged with perception and action. But how
did we know to lock consciousness onto this one small detail out of all of the
available impressions flooding in? The only possible explanation is that our
undermind keeps a continual check on what is happening below the horizon of
conscious awareness, detecting what might be important or dangerous. Our internal
news editor is not omniscient; sometimes it renders a false alarm or fails to alert us
to something important. We are constantly reacting to things, not solely in
terms of what they are, but in terms of what we expect them to be.
We prepare ourselves, physically and mentally, for what is going to happen next on
the basis of cues that frequently do not themselves enter consciousness. In a routine
and successful event, this trait usually remains unnoticed. But it reveals itself
through errors. The first few times you use an escalator, getting on and off feels
slightly peculiar but, with experience, your body learns to make a subtle set of
adjustments, using visual cues from the environment, that help you keep your
balance. Then, as you approach an escalator that is not moving, the same cues
trigger the same pattern and you make a delicate compensation for the movement
that disconcertingly does not occur.
G-36
Think of someone who is being interviewed for a job they desperately want, or
a child who has been specifically told to carry a full cup of hot soup very carefully.
In such situations, there is a sense of vulnerability, of a precarious balancing act,
the successful execution of which depends on a degree of skills or control that we
do not confidently possess. Thus there is a degree of anxiety and apprehension.
And this leads to a coarsening of motor control, making us clumsy, in addition to
the constriction of attention. Under pressure, we seize up, or go blank. The
interviewee fails to understand a perfectly straightforward question. The child
concentrates so hard on not spilling the soup that her coordination falters and she
becomes graceless.
On the very day that my long-standing partner and I had finally finished our
relationship, I dove -- without conscious suicidal intention -- into the
shallow end of a swimming pool and split my head open on the bottom.
Losing keys, breaking plates and denting the car are similar symptoms of stress.
When consciousness is most fiercely occupied, usually with a difficult and emotionally
charged predicament, it disregards glaring information (like the large sign saying
DEPTH: 3 FEET) most flagrantly and siphons off resources from the unconscious that
are required for optimal performance. One way in which the relationship between
consciousness and the undermind can be radically transformed is through the
combination of active relaxation, the suppression of active thinking, the setting aside
of anxiety-producing desires, and the embrace of faith and trust.
The Process of Sensory Experience
44
As living creatures we continue to exist because we successfully respond to our
changing environments. We develop ingenious methods to gather, understand and
use information about our world. Once we receive information from our environment,
we assess it, make decisions about what to do and take action. Each stage depends
upon the previous:
without
without
without
without
information being received, there is nothing to assess;
assessment, decisions cannot be made;
decision, there is no action;
action, there is no life.
This process of experience occurs over years, or in a fraction of a second.
Imagine standing next to someone striking a match. Our senses gather sensations
and transfer them to the brain instantaneously undergoing the following steps:
1. Sensory experience: We hear the sound, see the glow, smell the sulfur, and feel
the heat.
2. Perception: We blend all the relevant information into a single event.
3. Attention: We choose those perceptions on which we will concentrate.
4. Memory: We identify the occurrence and compare it to similar events in our
memory.
5. Action: We assess the significance of the event and decide what to do.
G-37
Our body's sensory systems receive information for our surroundings. The senses of
sight, sound, smell, taste and touch send messages to the brain. In addition, we
have a sensory system that gathers information from inside our body, telling us
about our physical position and movement. This is the proprioceptive system located
in special receptors in our muscles and joints. Sensory stimuli carry the individual
strands of information such as light and sound. The visual system mingles a pattern
of light waves into a shape or surface. The auditory system blends sound waves into
a single message that may be heard as deep resonant throbbing or clustered highpitched reverberations. Since both light waves and sound waves can emanate from
the same object (such as a brass bell), sight and sound can be stimulated
simultaneously. The more senses we use, the more reliable our perception.
As the collection of sensory information travels along the complex neural pathways,
messages of little immediate importance are suppressed in favor of the available
pertinent information. These messages form sensory units. We compare these for
identification and meaning with previously stored memories. If there is a match
between the present perception and a memory trace, we can identify the experience.
For instance, the bands of light forming a rounded shape become a vase of flowers.
According to our stored memories, we may consider the vase an object of beauty, a
product of gardening labors, an object one must remember to water, or all of the
above.
If the stimulus does not match any identifiable memory, the mind makes the best
possible association using the most similar memory and establishes connections
creating a new identity and meaning for this experience. When stimuli stir our
memory's network of associations, we theorize possible outcomes if we take this
action or that action, or perhaps no action at all.
We may see a vase of flowers shifting its position and we feel intuitively this
movement will cause it to fall. In the decision-making phase, we ask:
•
•
•
•
•
Is the vase worth spending the energy needed to save it?
Is the vase unbreakable?
Is it a dry arrangement with no water to spill?
Is there any risk in moving as will be required to catch the vase?
Can we get there in time?
The brain assembles all this information, reaches a decision, checks where our body
is, how far and in what position our body must move, sends messages to the
appropriate muscles, and we rescue the vase. The intuition that guides this
movement arises from our sensory memories we began forming in infancy.
There are, of course, similar processes involved in athletics... in hitting a 88-mph
curveball, in catching a 30-yard football pass in a crossing pattern between a
linebacker and a safety, in attempting a header of a corner kick, and so on.
All day long we make decisions based on information from the body's senses,
calculations from the brain, and memory's emotional influences.
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Perception 45
Perception is the first requirement for learning to move with skill. And
movement, conversely and surprisingly, is necessary for accurate perception.
Perceptual selection is the ability to pick out the significant elements in a given
sensory frame. [The linebacker soon learns to look at the running back's midsection, not his head, or arms, or legs.]
Perceptual speed -- the ability to make rapid perceptual judgments, very likely a
sizeable component of reaction time -- varies from person to person.
Perceptual flexibility is the ability to shift from one perception to another within
the same sensory framework, to shake up or recast information for greater
understanding - - and is likely of great importance to fighter pilots and useful to
baseball hitters.
Perceptual structuring is an individual's ability to create whole perceptions out of
partial or fragmentary sensory evidence.
But perception is only the beginning point for performing a motor task, and vision
is only one beginning point for perception.
In fact, sensory information arrives in many forms, from many receptors, and
the receptors are so closely linked that the individual is swimming in a sea of
information. There are broad-band receptors which respond to the general nature of
a stimulus, and narrow-band receptors which pick out specifically applicable stimuli.
One receptor can augment or inhibit the other; one portion of the brain can damp
out or overwhelm the receptivity of another part.
At the same time that judgments are being made about all that external
information, the athlete must also be perceiving himself or herself within that
universe.
Altered perception in sport
46
can range from subtle heightened alertness and
a sharpening of vision or hearing to a keener sense of kinesthetic awareness.
Pitcher Whitey Ford wrote, "You know the way Jack Nicklaus can remember every
shot he took in a golf tournament? Well, I think I could tell you just about every pitch
I threw in those 3,170 innings. And Mickey Mantle could tell you just about every
pitch thrown to him.... Most guys have this total recall about the things they saw or
did in ball games."
Former quarterback John Brodie "Often in the heat and excitement of a game, a
player's perception and coordination will improve dramatically. At times, and
with increasing frequency now, I experience a kind of clarity that I've never seen
adequately described...."
>>>>>
G-39
Kathy Switzer, marathon runner: “When I’m training, I’m more physically sensitive to
food, to weather, to touch.., everything. I also become more mentally sensitive to
social problems, the ills of the world, and so on. When I’m not in training, I'm more
lethargic and apathetic. Everything I see and feel is more extreme when I'm in
training. If I’m happy, I'm happier. If I'm sad, I'm sadder. If I'm emotional, I'm more
emotional. I once ran 31 miles and after that there was nothing I thought I couldn't
do."
Dorothy Harris, Director of the Center for Women and Sport at Pennsylvania State
University, found mental alertness and clarity associated with all sports. In a
systematic study she found that after vigorous exertion, most people are "more
alert, they can think more clearly, and are more effective mentally."
As a result of this heightened sensitivity, sports participants often report more
vivid perceptions. Valentin Makin, twice Olympic yacht-racing champion: "I try
to feel the yacht with my body and watch the sea and the air with my eyes. To me,
every air current has a color of its own. I try to feel every wave with my feet. At
the Mexico City Olympics, where I made my best showing, I saw all the air
currents and made almost no mistakes. On the other hand, when I am in poor
shape, the air becomes invisible."
Proprioception 47
Proprioception literally means "self-perception", and the earliest research in
motor learning was done to try to discover what, in a motor sense, man could
perceive about himself. What is the smallest movement that an individual can
make? The smallest that one can detect? At what point does motor discrimination
begin to occur? What are the finest discriminations that can be made in estimating
speed, time and distance?
It has been determined, for example, that your hip and shoulder joints can register
passive displacement more quickly and more sensitively than can the other joints in
your body. Joint receptors let you detect passive movement of a limb long before you
can determine the direction of that movement. Flexion movements (bending the
knee) are much more easily detected than extension movements (straightening the
knee). If your task requires that you make accurate movements, you'll do a better
job if movement takes place directly in front of you, in a space that is accessible to
your vision, whether you use vision or not.
Some of these determinations seem self-evident, but many are not. Outward
movements are more accurate than inward movements; short movements tend to be
overestimated, longer movements underestimated. Judgments about movements
made close to the body are more accurate than judgments about movements made
farther from the body. In general, errors in the extent of movements are greater
than errors in the direction of movement. Most skills that are used in sports involve
ballistic motions -- those launched with an initial force and then use momentum to
be carried to completion. Once initiated, such motions tend to be guided rather than
powered, and correction under way is almost impossible.
>>>
G-40
Movement will be spotted more quickly if it occurs near the periphery of your vision
that if it is near the center, even though focus is much sharper at the center. An
object moving vertically seems to be moving faster than one moving horizontally at
the same actual speed. The larger an object is, the slower it will seem to be moving.
Some people are velocity-susceptible -- the faster an object moves, the more their
judgment of its speed will be in error. Others are velocity-resistant, their judgment
less affected by increasing velocities. Good athletes, needless to say, tend to come
from the latter group - - especially good hitters.
Ted Williams, who could see at twenty feet what "normal" athletes see at ten, has
always claimed that hitting a round baseball with a round bat is the most difficult
motor task in sports. Visual tracking is the largest part of that job, and not even
Williams in his .400 batting average prime, could track a fastball closer that about
10 feet from the plate. The mechanics of that skill are fascinating. A 90-mph fastball
thrown from 60 feet [or a 65-mph softball thrown from 43 feet] reaches the plate
0.4 second after the pitcher lets it go. A batter has about 0.1 second to pick up
the incoming pitch visually and "recognize" it -- discern whether it is a fastball,
curve, riser or drop pitch, and where it is likely to be headed in relation to the strike
zone. During that tenth of a second, the pitch travels approximately one-third the
distance to the plate. The batter has another 0.15 second in which to decide whether
or not to swing. The average batter loses sight of the ball thereafter -- when it is
almost two-thirds of the way home -- but has another 0.15 second in which to start
his swing and guide it to the spot where he thinks the ball is headed. To hit a fair
ball, he has to meet the ball within about 15 degrees to either side of a dead right
angle to the direction in which the pitch is traveling within about 24 inches of the
bat's total travel. That means he has to have the bat there during the time the ball is
passing that 2-foot arc. That passage takes 0.013 second. One study indicates that if
the batter does not have the heel of his forward foot raised by the time the ball
leaves the pitcher's hand, he has already missed the pitch. [See below (G-42) for
further information on training tips and aids if you are a baseball or softball hitter.]
Visual tracking is more difficult on the horizontal plane that it is on a vertical plane,
and requires more illumination. One study has shown a positive relationship between
exercise and visual function; sedentary people who are getting into shape enjoy an
improvement in visual acuity by as much as 45 percent. Another study found that
high-level soccer players tend to have wider-set eyes -- more distance between the
pupils -- than the average, which means that they should have better depth
perception. Another study showed that motor skill performance is less affected when
the central vision area is blotted out that when peripheral vision is restricted. Bill
Bradley, basketball star for Princeton and the New York Knicks, senator from New
Jersey and once a Presidential candidate, has 15 degrees more peripheral vision on
the horizontal plane and 28 degrees more in the vertical plane than an anatomically
“perfect” set of eyes. Bob Cousy, former Celtic great, is reputed to have even
greater peripheral range. Perhaps the most interesting perceptual finding for athletic
purposes was a study done in 1960 which showed that high scores in visual acuity
predicted high scores in the faculty of balance -- and that balance scores give the
best predictive index to ability in sports.
G-41
In general, good athletes tend to score better that the norm in depth perception,
visual apprehension, peripheral vision, sensitivity to depth cues, visual reaction
time, resistance to eye fatigue, etc. However, these have been other studies that
have shown no advantages, no significant differences, and there have been great
athletes who have been measurably deficient in one or more of these visual
characteristics. They are individuals who have compensated (adjusted), with
experience, with better visual-motor coordination, with superior motor response,
with simple determination.
Attempts to determine the specific physical or neurological advantages of great
athletes are difficult and frustrating. We keep expecting them to be off-the-scale in
one aspect or another, to have some huge obvious disadvantage, since they have a
huge edge in performance. More often than not, it turns out that they are simply
closer to the norm in all their faculties than the rest of us, and have perfectly-normal
capabilities which are more effectively fine-tuned to work with each other better than
normal. The previously-accepted explanation of superior athletic skills has always
been "coordination", the quality that allowed the good athlete to pick up a new skill
quickly and easily, to perform an assimilated skill more smoothly and efficiently, to
improvise entirely new movements for unusual situations. But there isn't any such
thing. There is coordination of hand and eye movements. There are capabilities for
performing complex motor skills while keeping an unusually high level of attention
focused on the contest in progress. But general coordination, as some kind of
athletic capacity that makes everything easier, seems to be something of a
myth. One study that attempted to capture this elusive characteristic finally
decided that "well-coordinated" individuals actually have one or more of three
specific explanations for their apparent advantage. They do have clear, specific
qualities going for them, qualities as measurable and distinct as speed, reaction
time or strength. Or perhaps they happen to have put in a great deal of practice
at a lot of different activities, or they have such a strong drive for approval that they
work harder at acquiring skills.
Attempts to find a generalized key to skilled motor performance keep disappearing
into a fog of specifics. The small advantage one may have in performing a certain
skill turns out to be the result of a measurable advantage in the specifics that one
needs to perform that skill -- and very little of those specifics translate to any other
skill. Arm strength and maximum speed of arm movement, for example, are
independent on one another. Limb speed and limb reaction time are also
unconnected, as are arm mass and speed of movement.
Performance in gross motor skills has been found to be affected by at least
ten different identifiable factors:
strength; dynamic strength or energy; ability to change direction;
flexibility; agility; peripheral vision; general visual acuity;
concentration; understanding of the mechanics of the skill; and
the absence of conflicting emotional complications.
Athletic skills have been organized into 3 clusters of abilities:
•
the accurate utilization of space;
•
the maximum and immediate use of force and balance; and
•
the ability to move rapidly.
>>
G-42
Within these broad areas, there are six primary motor ability traits:
1. Speed of change of direction -- the quick propulsion of the total body in
running tasks, a capacity that is believed to be related to the ability to mobilize
energy quickly.
2. Gross body equilibrium -- both static balance (the length of time an individual
can balance on a narrow beam) and dynamic balance (skill at walking such a
beam).
3. Balance with visual cues -- a separate balance factor, evaluated in static
balance tests with the eyes open.
4. Dynamic flexibility -- the ability to make repeated trunk and limb movements
quickly; that is, testing speed of movement through a wide range of body motion.
5. Extent flexibility -- measuring the range of motion of the back and trunk.
While dynamic flexibility measures speed of repeated motion, extent flexibility is
concerned only with the amount of motion available.
6. Speed of limb movement -- measuring leg and arm speed. These were once
thought to be separate, but are now considered a single quality.
If you had high scores in items one thru six, you'd have the profile of a
perfect running back for football. This might be a description written by a
computer, or a physical educator.
However, it would lack the poetry that is an inescapable part of the running back's
art. The antiseptically perfect description of the athlete fails to capture the
aliveness, the demonic joy of the athletic performer. Or of the spectator.
We all enjoy watching an athlete perform with energy and verve, going all-out,
abandoned for the moment in the motion. We forget, immersed as we are in slowmotion replays featuring professional athletes, that the effort expended at that
level is all-out, thorough, total. We see, too, that the particular eye of the camera
will expose the half-committed, especially in slow-motion.
The developing athlete would be well-served to watch as much of his or her sport in
film or slow-motion video as possible; it renders a greater and clearer understanding
of the workings of the human body at maximum effort than anything else. Watch
Bud Greenspan's films on the Olympics in which slo-motion cameras are focused on a
single athlete from three different angles.
But as research has now identified ever-finer descriptions of athletic attributes
and motor skills, none of them ever seem to be required for great athletic
performance.
Great athletes lacking in physical traits keep turning up anyway.
G-43
Visual Tracking & Depth Perception Training for Baseball Hitters 48
To improve his visual tracking abilities, Edgar Martinez bunts tennis balls blasted
from a pitching machine at 150 mph, and then reads painted numbers on them at
slower speeds. "After tracking a smaller ball going 150, a baseball at 90 doesn't
seem so fast." Derek Jeter uses a very expensive video system to catalog and
analyze pitches thrown to him. A-Rod uses an eye focusing technique in the ondeck circle. He holds hit bat a few inches from his face; he focuses on the
trademark, then quickly shifts his focus to the face of the center-fielder. "The first
time it takes your eyes about three seconds to adjust, but as they warm up it gets
quicker." Once in the batter's box, he focuses on the emblem of the pitcher's cap
as the pitcher begins his delivery and then slides his focus to a spot on the
pitcher's throwing side, roughly the same height off the ground as the cap, from
where the ball is released. (In softball, these points would be the belt buckle and
hip areas.) This is where he picks up the ball and begins to read its spin. "When
you are locked in, the ball seems to be coming at you in slow motion and you see it
so clearly." A-Rod also hits five times a day, off a tee, off soft toss, during BP, off a
pitching machine, and then another round of soft toss. "I call it taking my
vitamins", he says. (Others would call it entraining eye-hand neuronal networks!)
Edgar Martinez also does eye exercises twice a day. He keeps a worn card, slightly
larger than an index card, that has a green circle to the left and a red circle to the
right. Inside the perimeter of both circles are the words THESE LETTERS, though the
R is missing from the green circle and the first T is missing from the red one. When
he stares at a spot between the two circles, because of a process optics experts call
binocular fusion, a brown circle appears with all of the letters of THESE LETTERS.
This exercise strengthens his eye muscles. The card also includes a box of assorted
letters in fine print. To improve his depth perception, Martinez will shift his focus
from one of those letters to a spot on a distant wall with the same grid of letters,
only larger, and then back again. An optometrist has marketed eye speed
concentration and 3-D depth perception training systems. (See the end of the
bibliography for further details.)
Why You Should Smile At Your Opponent 49
There are two types of instruction pathways in our neural system. The first is
concerned about what we intend to do -- our voluntary aims -- and the second is
concerned with refining or coarsening our movements and making postural
adjustments to enable us to move better. The sensory neurons of the gamma
system, the ones that take in constant information about the state of our muscular
activity, feed this information into the central nervous system, and the body
adjusts accordingly. Right changes in our movement depend to a major extent on
the correct information being fed into the central nervous system. The system
works on a yes-no basis and will make adjustments on this basis until the right
information is fed into the right places and we get the results we want.
When you are learning a series of continuous movements in a dynamic,
competitive context, the quantity of information being sent to the central nervous
system is much greater and more varied than when you are simply learning a
series of positionings and movements. Furthermore, the amount of interference and
blocking of this information flow, in the shape of emotional tension and
G-44
mental commentary, is very much increased. Thus, at times, your system is
receiving contradictory instructions simultaneously.
By smiling and developing a friendly non-ego-centered attitude, and by having no
attachments to the outcome, you reduce the physiological quantity of contradictory
messages by easing the burden on the central nervous system and allowing the
gamma system to function more efficiently.
The gamma system is primarily activated from the spinal level; the alpha system
goes all the way up to the higher centers of the brain. So the key is to keep an
"empty mind”, a mind that watches the gamma system deal with physical
movement. Repetition accompanied by a finer awareness of what is taking place, of
the slight variations that invariably enter into any movement, is therefore profitable.
It means that we are making use of the finer and more sensitive possibilities that we
have. The more aware we can be, the more intelligently we will move. Smiling (even
if only inwardly) opens the way to the participation of this intelligence. Animosity, on
the other hand, blots out data or allow us to see that data from only one view.
When your eyes engage those of another person,
greet him or her with a smile and they will smile back.
This is one of the essential techniques of the Art of Peace. 50
The Attitude of the Dojo 51
A set of Eastern disciplines that have become popular are called the martial arts,
including judo, jujitsu, karate, aikido, T'ai Chi et al. These forms of unarmed
combat all originated in China; disciplines that involve arms, like kendo (fighting
with swords), kyudo (archery) and ninjutsu are more closely associated with
Japan. All martial arts are influenced by Taoism and Zen Buddhism, and they
all emphasize consciousness-controlling skills directed toward improving the
mental and spiritual state of the practitioner who strives to reach the point when
he or she can move with lightning speed without having to think or reason.
Performed well, advanced martial arts exercises and performances are joyous
artistic states of being in which the everyday experience of duality between mind
and body is transformed into a harmonious unity.
It is useful to note here that the Japanese word do contained within the many
martial arts refers to the mental attitude or mind-set or method with which the
practitioner approaches the task. Another translation is the way. Judo, then, is
one path, aikido is another, and kendo a third.
The term dojo is simply the place or location where one practices one's particular
discipline. You are no doubt familiar with the respect that the martial arts student is
expected to show both the location and the teacher of his or her particular way. The
word do is also translated to convey a particular mindfulness of attitude and manner
of performance, or the purposefulness with which the practitioner approaches his or
her discipline, a way of acting without haste or waste in a spirit of play. Athletes
should emulate these mental disciplines and attitudes when they enter their own
particular sport's dojo. G-45
Mindfulness 52
Mindfulness is conscious living and alert presence of mind.
Mindfulness is when our innate awareness has been brought into sharp focus; it
helps us pay attention to what we are doing as we are doing it. Paying attention
helps us live in, and appreciate, the present moment, in all its richness and
depth. It helps us truly see what is going on. Paying attention pays off.
Mindfulness practice is a way of training ourselves to notice the casual relations
and interconnections between actions and their affects. It helps us slow down
and use more of our capabilities, our innate intelligence and inner wisdom. It
helps us savor and experience the full texture and feel of whatever we are doing.
It helps us shed layers of habits and learned responses that lead to careless
thought and action. It allows us to let go of dissatisfying and unhealthy patterns.
As we slow down, we become more aware of everything that is taking place. We
become conscious of the small intermission between inhaling and exhaling. As
we break it down even more, we notice more details. We see that each inhalation
has different phases and parts -- the breath enters through the nostrils, makes its
way down through the throat and into the chest. It may have sounds associated
with it.
The point in mindfulness and in meditation is not to worship the breath (although
its function in your life is central to your life, to your body and certainly to your
athletic performance). You can concentrate on a candle flame, a flower, a star,
on washing dishes, on eating a fruit, or while taking a walk.
Mindfulness helps us stay in touch with our bodies, our emotions, and our minds.
When we are mindful, we have fewer accidents, make fewer mistakes and have
fewer lapses in judgment.
All mindfulness exercises are, by definition, repetitive. (And so when you have
something repetitive to do, do it mindfully. It will make it more enjoyable, the
time will pass more easily and more quickly, and the process will become useful.
For example, when your coach asks you to practice 40 free-throws, do it
mindfully.) Mindful repetition is the essence of training.
A classic mindfulness exercise is Mindful Walking. Breathe in as you slowly
raise the right foot, and breathe out as you lower the right foot. Be conscious of
placing the foot on the ground, first the heel, then the sole, then the toes as they
push you off. Practice this and the other simple exercises a few times to cultivate
the skill of mindfulness in action. Pretty soon, you will learn to be mindful when
you are competing at high speed. Find two trees in the woods and walk mindfully
between them for a few minutes each morning and each evening. If you do this
long enough, you will have created your own path. This is an excellent metaphor
for how to practice anything.
>>>>
G-46
Mindful Walking doesn't have to be done slowly, but it must be done carefully. As
you walk, you are also centering and collecting yourself, using your breath as a
touchstone or anchor to bring you back to awareness of the moment. In any
mindful action, you simply need to be aware of your thoughts. Keep your gaze
lowered slightly and focused on the line you are walking. You will be distracted,
mentally and visually, and that's okay. When you become aware of it, re-focus.
To bring mindfulness into full bloom, choose a few things you do each day and
create the intent to do them mindfully. Start with one, add another, go to five
things.
When you wake up each morning, for example, start your day by first being aware
of your thoughts as you wake up. Each day is a new opportunity. Take a few good
mindful breaths. Exhale fully. Expel any negatives. Stretch. Exhale fully again.
Incorporate into your one-minute morning mindfulness exercise a simple positive
focus your goals, on what you want to accomplish with this day. Stand in front of the
bathroom mirror. Look into the mirror, into your eyes, with fresh eyes. Brush your
teeth mindfully. Go take a mindful shower.
As you get ready to go out the door, stop at the door, stand up straight, and take
three mindful breaths. Collect your thoughts. Where are you going with this day?
Do you have what you need (books, keys, wallet, purse, umbrella, a smile in your
heart, a positive mindset)?
On your way to the next place, take three mindful breaths. Look around. Pay
attention to what you see. Feel the texture of the moment. Don't jump far ahead
to where you are going, to events later in the day. Stay right where you are. Feel
the atmosphere, space and time around you. Give it a chance to reveal itself to
you before you jump out at the next stop.
When you arrive, as you enter, let your three breaths bring you in touch with
where you are. Notice the surroundings. Notice the mood. Notice your thoughts
and attitudes about being there. Then take your place.
When you take a break of any sort, take those three breaths and re-connect with
who you are. Re-center yourself.
When you eat, experience the tastes, textures and temperatures. Be aware of what
you are eating, and why.
When that time comes during the day when you have to wait, create for yourself a
rich moment.
When you get home, rejoice. Stand in front of the door and take three breaths.
Note your satisfaction. Mark the day's accomplishment. Celebrate yourself home.
Celebrate those with whom you share your domain.
G-47
Mindfulness In Movement & Exercise
53
Mindfulness is the capacity to be aware of what is going on and what is there, in
and around you. The object of your mindfulness can be anything. Mindfulness is
the energy of awareness, the ability to be in touch with felt experience in the
present moment, the ability to appreciate the beauty and wonder of each moment
of life. Thich Nhat Hanh, a Zen Buddhist monk who was nominated for the Nobel
Peace Prize by Martin Luther King, Jr. and is the author of over 70 books on
mindful living, offers these ten simple mindful movements that are a simple way
to begin to experience awareness of breathing in movement, which allows your
body and mind to merge. Practice them on a daily basis.
Beginning position: Feet flat, your balance centered, your back straight and
shoulders relaxed, with hands down by your side, allow your breathing to come
down into your belly. Enjoy standing in this way for just a moment or two.
#1) With your palms face down, slowly raise your arms to shoulder level in front
of you while breathing in, and slowly move them back down while breathing out.
Repeat four times.
#2) With your palms facing the center line, bring your hands up slowly and
stretch them to the sky while breathing in, and then slowly bring them back down
to your side while breathing out. Repeat four times.
#3) With your elbows straight out and your fingers touching the tops of your
shoulders, slowly open your arms up and out like a blooming flower while you
breathe in, and then slowly return your fingers to the tops of your shoulders while
breathing out. Repeat four times.
#4) Move your feet apart to shoulder width; keep your arms straight out in front of
you with your hands together. Slowly move your hands up and out in a wide
circle while breathing in, and then down and back in together while breathing in.
Reverse this movement, breathing in on the upward movement and smiling out
on the downward movement. Repeat twice.
#5) With your hands on your waist and your torso bent forward to the
perpendicular at the hips, slowly move your torso from the waist in a complete
circle, up and out to one side while you breathe in, down and back while your
breathe out. Then, reverse direction and repeat, and repeat the cycle twice.
#6) in the same position, bent over at the waist, let your fingers touch the ground.
Slowly stretch up to the sky while breathing in, and slowly return your fingers to
the ground while breathing out. Repeat four times.
#7) Stand up straight, with your feet in a V, heels together, toes pointing out,
hands on hip. Stretch up on your toes while breathing in, and then squat down as
far as you can go while breathing out. Repeat four times.
>>>
G-48
#8) Now, with feet naturally together and parallel, and your gaze focused on the
ground 2-3 yards in front of you, raise your right knee to hip height while
breathing in, and then extend your toes straight out while breathing out. Then,
with knees still up, bring your toes back to your shin while breathing in, and then
return your foot to the ground while breathing out. Repeat this on the left side.
Repeat the entire left-right cycle four times.
#9) In the same basic position as above, raise your right foot off the ground to the
left, slowly extend the toes straight out, and circle your foot all the way around
back. Complete the first half of this circle while breathing in and the second half
while breathing out. Switch legs and repeat. Repeat the left-right cycle twice.
#10) Using the wider stance, move the right foot perpendicular to the left. With
your left hand on your hip, bring your right hand to it. While breathing in, slowly
extend your hand and fingers in a wide circle out in front of you and up to the sky;
breathe out as you slowly return your hand down and back. Repeat this, then
reverse sides and repeat twice.
Come back to the center position. Enjoy your breathing.
Drops of Emptiness
A shimmering arrow leaves the bow,
speeds upward, splits the sky and explodes the sun.
The blossoms of the orange trees fall
until the courtyard is coppered there,
the flickering reflection of infinity.
-- Thich Nhat Hanh, "The Virtuous Man"
The Physiological Benefits of Meditation in Action 54
When practiced regularly, meditation can help to:
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
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lower your resting heart rate;
reduce both systolic and diastolic blood pressure;
produce significant changes in brainwave activity, with increased frequency
and amplitude of alpha waves, strong bursts of theta waves, and
the synchronization of alpha waves between left- & right hemispheres,
producing greater brain efficiency and a state of relaxed alertness;
increase respiratory efficiency while sitting or in action;
reduce muscle tension;
lower anxiety and stress (as measured in skin resistance);
heighten visual sensitivity, auditory acuity, and musical tone discrimination;
improve reaction times and responsive motor skills;
improve concentration;
improve memory and general intelligence; and
increase energy.
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Focus on the Process 55
Having a process focus means paying attention to the actions, the strategies, and
the techniques of performance in your sport. Process is about doing. The opposite
of process is outcome, the final results of your doing. Process occurs in the
present. Focusing on process keeps the athlete centered on the performance
as it unfolds.
Staying in the moment is a good way to remember what a process focus is all
about. When attention is focused on what is going on, you are fully aware of
everything affecting your sphere of consciousness. Maintaining this focus means
you move forward, staying totally in tune with what is happening. You don't slip
behind and worry about past mistakes, nor do you slip ahead to future moves or
the outcome of your effort and the competition. By staying fully in the present,
you center yourself in the performance. You are also in control of your actions
and thus are able to direct their future.
An athlete with a task goal desires to improve his or her own performance in a
certain way and is not concerned with how the performance may compare with
other participant's achievements. Task-oriented athletes enjoy the process of
competition and the challenge of extending personal limits.
An athlete with an outcome or ego goal, on the other hand, sets standards in
comparison to other competitors, and is focused on how well he or she can do
against others of similar ability. Final results are what matter to the ego-oriented
athlete, and success is judged on outperforming competitors. An athlete may
have both task and outcome goals. Outcome goals can motivate the athlete to work
harder and longer but, during competition, a task orientation based on a proper
balance between challenge and skill allows the athlete to focus more effectively on
the elements that he or she can control.
It's not uncommon for young players to expend a great deal
of energy trying to be somebody they’re not. I discovered
I was far more effective when I became completely
immersed in the action, rather than trying to control it
and fill my mind with unrealistic expectations.
-- Phil Jackson 56
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Be Present and Notice What Is
57
Relax your brain-mind, then draw your attention back to your body, redirecting it
to start noticing details of your current physical state. Follow your breath in and
out. Return inside of your skin. When your awareness is inside your body, you'll
also be in the present moment. Slow down enough to describe in simple terms the
things you feel, as though you're taking inventory. "I notice I’m sitting in my
desk chair; there is tension between my shoulder blades; my feet are crossed at
the ankles. I notice a slight nervous feeling at the base of my sternum. I am
hungry. I can feel my pulse in my right foot." By noticing things, you connect
with your world. Connectedness spawns intuition.
Move out to the layer of reality beyond your body and start noticing and describing
the details you find there. "I observe that the air is slightly stuffy and warm. The
color of the air is pinkish. I see the pencils and paper, the bookshelves.... I’m
aware of the smell of coffee coming from the next room, and the buzz of the
computer." Let your awareness extend outward. "I'm aware of the breeze
coming in through the window, the trees in the yard, the birds singing. I notice
that the sun is at a low angle, its pink, red and orange tinting fading and washing
the houses on the right." Everything you become aware of is in you, of you, by you
and for you.
You don't need an opinion right now. You aren't required to make a decision, to
like or dislike what's happening. No action must be taken. Let it be. You are
what you are. The situation is as it is. When you are not busy trying to make a
mark on your environment, it might just have a chance to educate you about a few
things. Keep company with each object, creature and situation you notice. Draw
similarities, connections and commonalities between what's there to be observed.
Every new perception and every new connection brings you more deeply into
compassion, and compassion produces the highest level of intuition.
Let yourself become amazed at the beauty of a dragonfly, or the intricacy of how
your hand works. Cultivate wondrousness. Everything is interesting if you are
interested.
The more you consciously notice something, the more you'll learn about it and the
more energy you'll feel. Sensitivity increases in proportion to your ability to attend
to things. What you will discover is that the knowledge and energy was always
there, but you weren't aware of it because your mind was elsewhere. Attention
reveals energy, information and knowledge.
Now turn on your 360-degree awareness; open the eyes in the back of your head.
Become like the deer in the forest, alert, fluid in action, spontaneously responsive
through immediacy of attention and freedom of mind.
The new physics says that, in effect, it is impossible not to be involved.
G-51
Recognition is often unsatisfying, and fame is like seawater for the thirsty.
But love of your work, willingness to stay with it even in the absence
of extrinsic reward, is good food and drink.
58
Flow doesn’t involve anger or ego... 59 but it can result from
athletic competition if the athlete uses the experience not to conquer an
opponent and subsequently make himself feel better, but to stretch his
skills to meet the challenge provided by the skills of an opponent.
"Competition improves experience only as long as attention is focused
primarily on the activity itself. If extrinsic goals -- such as beating the
opponent, wanting to impress the audience, or obtaining a big
professional contract [or college scholarship] -- are what one is
concerned about, then competition is likely to become a distraction,
rather than an incentive to focus consciousness on what is happening."
Techniques change constantly. In Aikido, change is the essence of
technique. There are no forms in Aikido. Because there are no forms,
Aikido is the study of spirit. Do not get caught up in form and
appearance.
A true technique is based on true thoughts. Use your body to
manifest the spirit in physical form. Focus on the spirit rather than the
form. Every encounter is unique; the appropriate response should
emerge naturally.
The art has no form; study the spirit. 60
The Russian neuropsychologist Alexander Luria describes
highly precise sequences of muscle movement, especially
the fine motor movement of fingers, as "kinetic melodies".
61
G-52
The Climactic Moment 62
Our culture continually bombards us with messages that have an underlying
theme: the climactic moment. TV commercials and other advertising, sports
highlights and broadcast news all project this mindset. The cake has already
been baked; the extended family joyously watches the three-year old blow out the
candles. The 10K mountain bike race has been won; it's time for all the beautiful
young people to jump up and down and celebrate, and reach for a can of cold diet
soda. Men are shown working at their jobs for a few seconds, and then it's time to
quit and enjoy a beer. The baseball player hit a home run. The President is at his
desk to sign the latest piece of legislation. The surgeon and the patient smile for
the cameras announcing the latest success in neurosurgery. Everything worked
out perfectly without effort. One epiphany follows another.
But we do not see the detailed preparations involving both patient and surgeon,
we do not see the incredibly difficult surgery, the precision of the teamwork
surrounding the surgeon, or the years of study and training. We do not see the
extended efforts of associations, citizens and legislative staff that were involved in
marshalling that legislation through a five-year process. We do not see how the
home run hitter fouled off five potential strike threes or mastered his ability to hit
the high inside pitch with hours of batting practice. We do not see the behind-thescenes administrative and voluntary support that enabled the 10K race to be held.
We do not see the mountain bike trail maintenance crew at work, and we do not
see the mountain biker working an extra job to be able to afford the mountain bike.
Excessive attention on the climactic moments separate us from the experience,
and ignore the values and rewards of mindful attention to the commonplace.
We do not see the love and the joy that went into making the cake. But this
is precisely where mastery dwells, why it enables the extraordinary, and how
it sweetens the deliciousness of the climactic moment.
Where is the Music? 63
Our picture of the world is basically a product of brain impulses, at the end of which
is energy, emptiness, the quantum void. Which part along the string of thought is
real? Every step along the way, from energy vibrations to nerve impulses to thought
formation, is just a code. No matter where you look, the visible universe is
fundamentally a set of signals. Yet these signals all hold together, turning totally
meaningless vibrations into full-blown experiences that have human meaning. The
love between two people can be broken down into raw physical data, but to do that
is to lose its reality. All these codes must stand for something more real, something
beyond our senses. At the same time, this something is very intimate to us, for we
all can read the code, turning random vibrations into orderly reality. A good image
for this would be a pianist playing a Chopin etude. Where is the music? You can find
it at many levels -- in the vibrating strings, the trip of the hammers, the fingers
striking the keys, the black marks on the paper, or the nerve impulses in the player's
brain. But all of these are just codes; the reality of the music is the simmering,
beautiful, invisible form that haunts our memories without ever having been present
in the world.
[Where is your art, your grace, your rhythm, your talent, your knowledge, your wisdom?]
G-53
Flow Power versus Muscle Power 64
It is useful to think of the generation of power as a flowing river. Strength lends
additional power to the muscles if used properly, but it's more important to generate
a river of energy that can flow through your body. Over-tightening restricts this flow,
and decreases power. If you remind yourself just before the effort to use energy, not
strength, it will result in a more powerful movement.
Whereas strength is a function of the development and reflexive abilities of our
muscles, power is generated by muscles contracting and releasing, and so it has
more to do with coordination than force. When you swing a golf club (or a baseball
bat), it is the speed of the club head (or the barrel of the bat) that imparts power to
the swing (and energy to the ball). This velocity is the result of a complex and welltimed sequence of muscle contractions that build up tempo from one muscle group
to the next. It starts in the feet and legs, moves through the hips, through the back,
into the shoulders, down the arms and finally into the wrists. The sum of the
momentum building through the body is what finally drives the ball.
The entire sequence has to be coordinated by unconscious parts of the nervous
system. All that can be grasped consciously is that the power swing is really a
series of momentums, each building on the other. No single one of them is very
fast in itself, but the total velocity imported to the ball itself is enormous when the
timing is right. The timing of this muscle-releasing process is more important to
power than the strength of any single muscle group. This is the reason why
trying for power by flexing different muscles to the maximum can in fact impede
the velocity of the club head or bat barrel.
In baseball, particularly, the trend toward muscling up in order to produce more
power as a batter is visible. Compare the swing and results of Mark McGwire
with the swing and results of Ken Griffey, Jr. Mark's superior upper body
musculature produces explosive muscular power and 15-20 or so more home runs
a year than Junior's thinner, more supple upper body that produces a more fluid
and quicker swing. But Junior also has to play centerfield, make leaping catches
and fire bullets back to the infield, and Mark would never catch him in a foot race.
I don't have the numbers in front of me, but Junior's total base average is
probably at least as good, and Mark will never score from first base on a single.
To explore your own potential for power, practice swinging a bat or a club with the
intent of increasing the flow of energy through your body. Pay attention to
anything that seems to be restricting this flow. When you find your flow
restricted, pay attention to whatever is happening there. As you focus on it, it will
likely free itself of its own accord. Don't tell yourself to relax; this will probably
produce more tension. Do this exercise until you experience your body as a
channel through which energy is flowing in an unrestricted fashion. You can't
push water, remember, so you'll want to let it build up behind a dam, and then
release it at the right moment. There are many focal points on which to
concentrate your attention; stick with each area for at least a few minutes, and
let Self 2 help you find which ones need attention most.
>>>
G-54
Another way to experience the flow of power in your body the muscles in the area
of your stomach as hard as you can, and then release them and stay relaxed as
you swing. This may take conscious effort at first because of a natural tendency to
tighten at the center in moments of exertion. Relaxing the center introduces flow
and generates power.
Increasing the stability of the swing will also enhance power. Beginners seem to
believe that power comes mostly from the hands and arms. The experienced
players knows that the momentum begins in the feet. Imagine what would
happen to your power if you were suspended in a harness that left your feet
dangling six inches off the ground.
To get a feeling for the amount of stability you have, and how to increase it, take
your normal stance and have a friend test your stability by pushing you in the
upper body, front, back and sides to see how easy it is to topple you off balance.
Now make a conscious effort to ground yourself. Settle into your center as you did
in the balancing exercise and let your belly hang out as if it's resting on the
ground, but without changing your stance or posture. Relax any tension in your
upper body. Ask your friend to try to topple you again, using the same amount of
force. Unless your posture was already very stable, you'll begin to experience a
measurable increase in your stability. The greater the stability of the set-up
position, the more power and accuracy are introduced into your swing.
Proprioception and Eurhythmics 65
Proprioception conveys information to the brain about our body's position.
Without looking, we know whether our arm is raised, our heel is off the floor, or
our wrist is bent. Although we cannot see or hear our smile, we feel our smile
because of special receptors in the muscles, tendons and joints. The sensory
messages from these receptors travel to the brain and influence any decision
regarding action. How can we tell where to move -- even whether or not we can
move -- if we do not know how our weight is distributed, where our bodies are in
space, and how we are moving through space?
We are far more aware of information from our five external senses (vision,
sound, touch, smell and taste) that information of an internal or proprioceptive
nature. Perhaps because so much of our external world is experienced through
several modes at once -- we see the dog, hear the dog, touch the dog and smell the
dog -- we are highly stimulated by the "dog'. During our experience of the dog, we
form proprioceptive memories about how far down we must reach to pet the dog -a memory so strong that we can recall the sensation without actually making the
movement. We develop these movement memories, although we may not be very
conscious of them. Movement is likely to be taken for granted. We often have to be
reminded to pay attention to the proprioceptive sense. How many times have you
been told to "stand up straight" when you thought you already were? We tend to
disregard information about the refinements of our body position and movement.
We often tense muscles that have no effect on the action we are taking… Have you
ever clenched your jaw when you tried to remove a tight lid from a jar? If we
increase our sensitivity to the information signals firing along our neural
pathways, we can easily eliminate unnecessary actions. >>>>
G-55
Two kinds of specialized nerve receptors, kinesthetic and vestibular, inform the
brain about pressure, energy, and ease of movement in such features as the
tension in muscles, the position of the limbs, and the angles of the joints.
Kinesthetic receptors are located in the muscles, tendons, and joints; vestibular
receptors are present in the ear. Like the other sensory systems, these receptors
continuously fire impulses to the brain to keep us aware of the shape of our body
and our location in space.
The proprioceptive system is of primary importance in controlling body tension
and relaxation. It feeds the brain information necessary for calculating how far,
in what direction and with how much energy the arms must move in order to
send a basketball to the hoop. Such information is needed to balance time, space
and energy -- the three characteristics of movement. Only with rapid, accurate
calculations of these sensory movements can we produce the imagined results.
As athletes increase their proprioceptive awareness of time, space and energy
from inside their bodies, performance becomes more manageable, dependable
and predictable. With practice, the underlying movements and rhythms of their
sport and their specific maneuvers can become automatic, programmed within
the neurologic system to be instinctively correct, and from which further
distinction, differentiation, nuance and improvisation can evolve.
Through the practice of learning to move the entire body to music, the athlete
learns to move more fluidly, precisely, powerfully, accurately and delicately;
he then brings this increased awareness of rhythm, flow, space and self back into
the athletic arena where he practices his sport and is able to better tune into the
rhythms of his game and his role and place in it. He then brings those athletic
rhythms back into his Eurhythmics practice, selects music that is appropriate to
that athletic rhythm, and begins to practice athletic movement at a much, much
higher degree of awareness, refinement and control. With a recurring feedback
loop of continuous incremental improvement, and when combined with the
techniques of synesthesia, mental imagery and the expression of desired athletic
qualities, the experienced athlete can use his truly blend his mental and physical
capacities with those of his heart and spirit.
Information flows into our minds along two pathways: from inside our body
(our proprioception that includes awareness of position, pressure, tension and
relaxation) and from outside (our five senses of sight, smell, taste, sound and
touch). Simultaneous messages from external senses provide us with a vital
experience. The addition of enhanced body awareness through the development of
our proprioceptive sense helps us to embrace and better understand ordinary
events, like mowing the lawn or eating a meal.
In the larger picture of our lives, Eurhythmics raises the consciousness that rests
within our physical bodies in the form of bones, muscles and nerves. The body is
a vehicle, a source of sensations that fuels and guides expressive impulses. It is
also a doorway from the physical realm into the imagination and the spirit. As
we communicate with others as well as within ourselves, the health of our body
becomes a positive value to our community and our society. Athletes and
musicians are performers; audiences delight in their capabilities. Learning to
move body, mind, heart and soul allows us to delight in each other.
G-56
Like musical sound, body movements unfold across time, so muscular sensations are
an apt medium for representing rhythmic patterns. We do something like this when we
try to remember a phone number for some moments until we can write it down. Most of
us can't create a visual image of the number in our mind's eye, or an auditory image of
the spoken number in our mind's ear, so we say the number out loud over and over,
moving throat and jaw and tongue and lips. No one would claim that language comes
from the vocal apparatus; it clearly originates in the brain. We merely use the brain's
motor system as a means of perpetuating an idea until we no longer need it. 66
Rhythm 67
Rhythm is found everywhere..., in machines, in nature's tides, in sunlight and
wind and seasons, in animals and plants, in art and architecture, in the human
body's circulatory and respiratory systems, in the way we walk, and in music.
The word "eurhythmics" comes from the Greek words meaning "good flow'.
The ancient Greeks used the term eurhythmic to refer to the good form of an
athlete in action, or the pleasing shape of a statue. When flow is missing, we say
"the athlete is off his game", or "I do not like that statue", or "that architecture is
fragmented", or "that music does not move me".
Sensory integration is best supported and expressed by linking auditory
stimulation and body movement. This has been dramatically demonstrated by
Emile Jacques-Dalcroze and the teachers of his Eurhythmics approach. As
sound vibrations travel through the air and enter the ear, the aural system
transmits them to specific areas of the brain for processing. Information about
the body's arrangement in space and the state of its musculature (relaxed or
tense) comes to the brain simultaneously through the proprioceptive system.
The visual sense carries images of the activities of others around you, or from
within your own mind, from which you takes cues and clues. This complex flow
of internal messages moving along different branches of the nervous system
operates similarly in anyone who must perform with precision and skill -a violinist, a tennis player, or a surgeon.
Practice moving in time to music, stopping quickly when the music stops,
starting when the music starts. In order to move with rhythm and flow to music,
you must listen carefully, and you will improve your degree of alertness; it
becomes a game of keeping up with the music by clapping, then walking, then
moving all of your body in more complex ways. If you feel embarrassed doing this
in the presence of others, that's okay. Start by trying this in a private setting, then
with a close friend, but do it. You may remember playing musical movement
games of this kind in kindergarten. It's okay: let go and be a child again.
Although clapping in time with the beat is a common response to music, walking
is a more vibrant expression of the beat.... The action of walking involves the
whole body. We feel the movement in our knees, ankles, toes, elbows, head,
shoulders, back, hips -- all over. Walking uses balance as the principal force to
propel the body ahead, supported by evenly-timed leg movements. It provides a
greater stimulation for memory impressions than clapping, which lacks the
demands of balance and the impelling force of leg movement. >>>>
G-57
Walking is a simple, reliable source of stimulation for establishing ... a sense of beat
which then leads to establishing a beat using all kinds of movements including
conducting, clapping, swaying, twisting, stretching and skipping. You can
become keenly aware of the varying intensities of energy necessary to move
specific parts of the body: a hand, a whole arm, a shoulder, or the entire upper
torso. The body offers many ways of moving -- each with a different flow of effort,
direction, articulation and speed. The body is an instrument in itself!
Different muscles can be used to mimic the different rhythms in music. Slow,
heavy rhythms might be reflected by movements in the larger muscle groups
such as the legs and torso. Quick, light rhythms might involve the fingers or the
tip of the tongue. As you learn greater control over your large muscle groups, you
will feel a corresponding growth in control over the smaller muscle groups. It is
the smaller muscle groups that are vitally important in mastering performance
on musical instruments. [Musicians are athletes of the small muscle groups!]
Musicians, athletes and dancers often make it look so easy. This apparent ease
arises from repetitive practice -- so that their bodies move smoothly and elegantly,
without detectable effort, nervous obstruction, or mental or emotional distraction.
Playing games with the natural forces of weight and gravity, and taking risks to
find the limits of balance, will enlarge your field of sensation and expression.
Lisa Parker, head of Eurhythmics, Longy School of Music, Cambridge, MA.:
"Once students start to use their whole body, it becomes like new words in a
language. They find a richer vocabulary of behavior: they discover a lot of
equipment in the back closet."
Soon, if you give yourself permission to play at moving your body to music,
you will learn to express the quality and characteristics of the music by the manner
of your movement..., fast, slow, light, graceful, forceful, tentative, exuberant....
By learning to move your body to music, you can learn to transfer the feeling of
selected pieces of music to your movement and to your performance.... Linking
movement with sound will help you increase your perceptions and awareness,
focus and improve your attention, allow you to develop finer degrees of muscle
control, and enhance your ability to improvise and respond creatively in situations
of all kinds. Moving to music encourages the shy, lends balance and flow to the
awkward, brings control to the impulsive and sensitivity to the unaware. It
harmonizes our body's sensory systems, the evocative influence of our emotions,
and our mind's memory and creative functions.
When internal communication flows effortlessly between body, mind and spirit
without interference, the level of performance, insight and creativity soars.
Practicing Eurhythmics [and/or tai chi] will improve and accelerate your kinesthetic
awareness. With this enhanced experience of making stronger neurological
connections with your proprioceptors, you will enhance your athletic capability.
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Toning Up for a Great Vocal Performance 68
Toning is a soothing activity related to both making music and to meditation.
It involves making sound with an elongated vowel for an extended period and
offers us, at the beginning or end of a busy day, or whenever we feel we need a
moment of its added benefit of increased focus and serenity. The vibrations of
toning are like an internal massage. Toning oxygenates the body, deepens
breathing, and relaxes the muscles. A practice dating back thousands of years,
toning can also be used to open natural channels of energy in the body.
Warm up by simply spending five minutes humming -- not a melody, but a pitch
that feels comfortable. Relax your jaw and feel the energy of the hum within your
body. Bring the palms of your hands to your cheeks and notice how much
vibration is occurring within your jaw and throat.
At the next stage, make an ahhhh sound. This immediately evokes a relaxation
response. You produce it naturally when you yawn, and it can help you both
wake up and go to sleep. If you feel a great deal of stress and tension, take a few
minutes to relax your jaw and make a quiet all. There is no need to sing. Just
allow the sound to move gently through your breath. After a minute or so, you
will notice that your breaths are mushc longer and that you feel more relaxed.
The next toning sound is eeee; the most stimulating of all vowel sounds, it
awakens the mind and body. When you feel drowsy or sluggish, 3-5 minutes of a
rich, high eeeee sound will stimulate the brain, activate the body and keep you alert.
The next toning sound is the oh sound and is considered the richest by those who
tone or chant. Put your hand on your head, neck and chest when you make the oh
sound and notice how it vibrates most of the upper parts of your body. Five
minutes of oh can change the skin temperature, muscle tension, brain waves,
breathing rate and heart rate. It is a great tool for an instant tune-up.
Knowing that the quality of our voice and our breathing affects the way we think
and feel, we can experiment with toning, chanting and singing. Start at the
lowest part of your voice and let it glide upward like a very slow elevator. Make
vowel sounds that are relaxing and that arise effortlessly from the jaw or throat.
Allow the voice to resonate throughout your body. Explore the ways that you can
massage parts of your skull, throat and chest with long vowel sounds. Let your
hands trace the upper parts of your body very slowly, and you will discover
which vowels emit the strongest, most stress-relaxing energy.
The Rhythms and Melodies of your body 69
Your brain is extremely well integrated with the rest of your body at a molecular
level, so much so that the term mobile brain is an apt description of the
psychosomatic network through which intelligent information travels from one
system to another. Every second, a massive information exchange is occurring in
your body. Imagine your messenger systems humming a signature tune, rising
and falling, waxing and waning, chemically binding and unbinding.
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Sound has power.
70
"Then all the people shall shout with a great shout,
and the wall of the city will fall down flat."
Some singers can shatter glass. Sound vibrations can affect physical matter.
Sound also has spiritual impact. Spirits are lifted by the sound of music, from
drumming to melodic singing. Listen to the chanting of Jewish cantors, or
Gregorian chants by monks, or Native American chanting. Chanting improves
and purifies energy. Chanting leads to enchantment. The power of sound is
united with the power of repetition. Open your heart, open your throat, open your
chest, and chant.... In this way, you can uninhibitedly create your own
resonance. It's like creating a magic circle around yourself.
[See the description of the use of sound and chants by the Adelphi baseball team under Tab O
on “The Psychology of Strategy”.]
Music as a mind/body accompaniment or enhancing force in athletics 71
can lend an appreciation to qualities like fun, movement, difficulty, rhythm,
perfection, flow, improvisation, awe, pleasure, insight and integration.
Listen for pieces of music that exhibit these qualities.
Learning to move to music 72, even when the music is playing only within your mind,
is an exhilarating approach to growth in physical, mental, emotional and
spiritual zones. Finding yourself wholly involved -- mind concentrating, body
demonstrating, heart full of sensitivity, in synchronization with beautiful music -creates a condition of being that is accessible to anyone, can be transferred to
any endeavor, and is renewable.
It is a way to find yourself in a new zone.
Improvisation 73
There is nothing extraordinary about improvisation.... A jazz pianist begins by
playing a theme, takes it through variations, weaves in a second theme, attaches
ornaments. The conversationalist draws upon a well-organized hierarchy of
knowledge...
In either case, the quality of the performance depends upon the depth and flexibility
of the learned hierarchy, and the performer's ability to exploit that hierarchy quickly,
in real time.
Improvisation can be a marvel..., the intersection of technique, understanding
and creative flare.
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The Role of Music in Pre-Game Rituals 74
Guy Ogden, former international runner and specialist in the treatment of sports
injuries in London, recommends using music in your preparation rituals to
increase your hype, or provide calm, whenever necessary.
If you've got a cassette recorder or CD player, find or tape record your own variety
of musical pieces that support the kinds of sports events you participate in and the
right level of cool or hot you need for a variety of times and situations.
"Athletes should choose music they enjoy hearing", says Esther Haskvitz,
assistant professor of physical therapy at Springfield College in Springfield,
Massachusetts. "It helps concentration and motivation and increases an
athlete's exhaustion threshold." Listening to music has been proven to raise an
athlete's brain levels of endorphin and serotonin, as well as self-esteem and
confidence. According to clinical psychiatrist Anthony Storr of Oxford, England,
author of Music and The Mind, "Fast music is less effective for sports and
activities that feature spontaneous creativity and thinking, but more effective for
sports with repetitive moves, like bowling."
Practice and experiment with how you perceive music. Keep a simple record of
how a certain piece of music makes you feel, and the effect it has on you and your
mental and physical performance. Choose music that is most closely aligned
with your behavioral and mental discipline goals and the rhythms of your sport.
Consider re-recording and mixing cassette tapes with your own voice to include
affirmations, trigger phrases for visualizations, or simple reminders about
technique-oriented goals and objectives.
Obviously, you cannot compete wearing head-phones and a Walkman on your hip,
but you can learn to use music effectively as both a pre-game (and post-game) tool
to assist in relaxation, mental focus, visualization and rehearsal techniques.
Improvisation 75
Improvisation is the pinnacle of musicianship. Expressing oneself is a form of
communication that is individual, intimate and, when done well, capable or
touching the emotions of others. Most improvisation operates within some
external design. Improvising requires initiating action rather than responding to
someone else's command; it is an activity that affirms our individuality. The
impulse and the realization come from inside, and impulse is the critical
element. Improvisation flows from moment to moment, each moment flowing
out of the previous activity. We find the next step although we are not sure
what the next step should be. It requires sizing up the situation, trusting our
judgments, and acting upon our own assessments.
Improvisation occurs throughout our day in many ways. A conversation is an
improvisation, unless we have a prepared speech. As we speak, we pull together
the words that express the images, emotions and thoughts in our mind.
>>>
G-61
There is probably no field of activity where improvisation does not occur. Ingenious,
impromptu bits of activity often avert disaster. We freely improvise when cooking.
Skilled improvisation requires a vision of what needs to happen and the ability to
assemble the needed resources. The resources for improvisation are stored as
the sensations, the connections and the constructs in our memories. Improvisation
excites the memory traces in a lively way, alerting everything available.
Time is an essential element in musical improvisation. When we open to the
whole world of knowledge (and we need to do this to explore the maximum
number of choices), we cannot review every item with equal consideration. The
rational planning part of our mind must back off and give control to the musical
impulse. Because the outcome is unplanned, there is always risk involved. The
success of improvisation depends on the strength and flexibility of the
imagination - - its capacity to hold and re-arrange impressions from memory.
If the memories can be recalled with considerable detail, choices can be made and
the results shaped with continuity and skill.
Improvisation 76
Jazz, our uniquely American musical form, is remarkable not only for the magnificent
way it wears its heart and soul on its sleeve, but equally for its structuralimprovisational nature, the depth of its musical intelligence, and its raw life force.
The key to improvisation: chose to enter an unpredictable arena, well-prepared.
You intentionally take your skills away from a safe place to play in a danger zone.
Luck has little to do with it -- the more background, preparation and courageous
readiness one brings to it, the better it goes. One can spend a lifetime getting better
at it; making a habit of it throughout life improves the quality of one's music and
one's life. Improvisation is a fast series of technical choices with personal skills.
So fast is the choosing that they cannot think or plan; they must rely on educated
intuition. Improvising happens in the perpetual present tense, and it always comes
with risk.
Musicians are not the only ones who improvise. All of us do it every day: when
there is a traffic problem on our usual route and we contrive another route; when
we meet someone new who catches our interest; when we dance; when the child
asks where babies come from and we stutter a response; when we lie; when we try
to express our feelings; when we tell an anecdote; when we order a meal in a
restaurant; when we make love.
The artistic skills of jazz are used to improvise a life. We experiment, return,
respond, follow intuitions, weave together thematic strands; we play what is there.
It's like stand-up divine comedy. Life jazz is our yearning cruising the streets to find
the undeveloped raw material of daily life. It is the alchemy by which leaden life
experiences are spun into gold. It engages all of the skills of the artist to play
seriously, to make high quality experiences in the present tense.
G-62
Music: The Magic That Moves Within Us 77
Parkinson's disease affects the motor system, in which two tiny bundles of neurons in
the brain's core fail in their job: intentions can no longer be translated into intent.
The afflicted no longer guide from movement to movement, motions become
inaccurate and jerky, can't get started, or won't stop once they've begun. The
conscious mind goes right on intending, shouting out the commands, but the
mutinous body refuses to listen. Dr. Oliver Sacks discovered an extraordinarily
effective treatment for the symptoms -- music. [His work is visible in the movie
Awakenings.] In fact, just the thought of music could do the job. One patient was
able to play whole compositions by Chopin in vivid mental imagery. The moment
she began, her grossly abnormal EEG (her brain waves) would abruptly turn
normal as if her disease had vanished, only to return, just as abruptly, the
moment her clandestine concern returned.
But music makes fickle medicine. The patient must be musically sensitive to
begin with, and has to be in the right mood. And it must be the right type of
music. Sharp percussive rhythm can make a person jerk like a marionette, while
monotonous crooning proves to be too flimsy to be much good. What is needed is
moderately paced, shapely music playing in flowing legato, music with a
pronounced beat embedded in a rolling melody. [Perhaps this is the type of music
that should be selected for athletically-oriented visualization exercises.]
Music can help a Parkinson's patient but only when it is of a kind that suits his or
her taste. Classical music might work wonders for one patient, while only
country music touches another. This shows us that music does not function
passively, but requires that we participate by generating anticipations.
Significantly, it is the fulfillment of that anticipation that goes wrong in a
Parkinson's patient. The brain makes the body move not merely by shouting
commands down the corridors of the nervous system, but also by anticipating the
sensations that will result from those commands. We anticipate widely and
frequently in whatever we do, and we test our anticipations against incoming
sensation. When the two don't match, we stop in our tracks like a Parkinson's
patient. Music overcomes Parkinsonian symptoms by transporting the brain to a
higher than normal level of integration. By its careful design, music organizes a
brain in a way that ordinary, chaotic experience cannot.
Music establishes flow in the brain, at once enlivening and coordinating the
brain's activities, bringing its anticipations into step. By so doing, music provides
a stream of intention to which a Parkinson's patient can entrain his or her
motions. Sacks writes of the "kinetic melody" that plays out in all our bodies as
we move about the world...the magic that works in Parkinson's patients is no
different from the magic that works on us all. It lifts us from our frozen mental
habits and makes our minds move in ways in which they ordinarily can not.
G-63
Kinesthetic Anticipations 78
Kinesthetic anticipations reside so deep in our existence that we hardly notice them.
Yet they are easy enough to observe. Just sit still and imagine the physical feeling of
starting up your car. You can feel the key sliding into the ignition, the touch of the
gear shift, the pull of the emergency brake, all without the slightest outward
movement. Watch yourself listen to music and you'll find similar sensations at work
-- an invisible dance. Imagine yourself, then, moving through specific athletic
sequence and order, and work on its mechanics in your mind.
Notice that we do not always appreciate music kinesthetically. When we are not
musically engaged, we can hear a piece in its every detail in a way that seems
entirely mental and not at all corporeal. Yet on another, more musical day, we'll
be swept away by that same piece, covertly dancing it our from head to foot.
Musical patterns that produce emotion and pleasure are replicated in a second,
particularly extensive neural system -- the motor system -- and so emotion and
pleasure arise in this second medium as well as in the direct experience of sound.
We use our bodies as resonators for auditory experience. The listener becomes a
musical instrument, places himself in the hands of the music, and allows himself to
be played.
Similarly, then, you can envision a complex series of athletic maneuvers in a
mental way on one day, and in a fully-involved kinesthetic sense on another.
If we were to match our practices and our visualizations with a particular piece of
music that seemed to us individually to invite and support both the mental
imagery and the kinesthetic imagery and the physical movements, we would then
have a special technique that allowed us to use more of our mind to achieve a
higher plane of accomplishment.
Perhaps the simplest way to enter this unique domain might be to watch and
participate in, through anticipation and your own movement, such things as
"Riverdance" on video, athletic performances, ballet and so on.
Mike Reid, two-time Pro Bowl football player for the Cincinnati Bengals,
is also a Grammy Award-winning composer. He said
79
"I do my best work at the piano right after a game."
Dave Brubeck, the well-known jazz musician and composer (still touring with his
new quartet at the age of 84) is perhaps best known for playing and composing in
offbeat rhythms like 5/4, 7/4 or 9/8 time. But one of his talents is his trained ear;
many of his tunes are built around sounds and rhythms he has experienced in
his travels. "Tokyo Traffic" was composed during a madcap taxi ride from the
airport in Japan. "The Crossing" picks up on the rhythms as the QE II pulls
away from the dock in New York harbor. "The Golden Horn" is based on the
rhythm of the phrasing the Turkish people use to say "thank you very much".
G-64
Listening and Hearing 80
Layered Listening: Once or twice each day, pause for a few moments, enjoy a few
full deep exhalations, and listen to the sounds around you. First, you'll hear the
loudest, most obvious sounds -- the traffic, the air conditioner, the background
noises of people and machinery. Then as that "layer" becomes clarified, begin to
notice the next layer down -- the sounds of your breathing, the gentle breeze,
footsteps in the hall, the shifting of your sleeve when you move your hand. Keep
moving your awareness deeper into the next layer and then the next until you
hear the soft, rhythmic beating of your heart.
Listen for Silence: Practice listening for the spaces between sounds -- the pauses
in a friend's conversation, the pauses in a favorite piece of music, and the silences
between the notes of a songbird. Make silence a theme for the day and record
some observations in a notebook.
Practice Silence: Experiment with periods of silence. Don't talk; just listen.
Spend some time outdoors and immerse yourself in the sounds of your
environment. Go to the seashore or the woods and immerse yourself in nature's
sounds. Listen deeply.
Listen to Music: Listen for patterns of rhythmic variation, key changes, rests,
tension and release, call and response, stair-climbing, plateaus, and delightful
phrases in lyrics. Listen for emotional qualities, transitions, and the sounds of
triumph, tragedy, exuberance, gloom, hope, and joy.
Orchestrate Yourself: Music affects mood and emotion, and changes your brainwave patterns. Music has been used to energize boxers, rally soldiers for war,
help babies sleep, encourage plants to grow, and comfort the sick. Take
advantage of the power of sound by noting how certain types of music affect your
mood and energy level. Try to match various activities of everyday life with an
ideal musical accompaniment.
Music and the Athletic Body
81
Whether we are engaged in performing or composing, singing, moving to it, or
simply listening to it, music has been shown to increase reading ability,
memorization skills, vocabulary recall and creativity. Music is able to do this
because it has a physiologic effect on the body.
For example, listening to baroque and classical music slows the listener's heart
rate, activates brain waves of higher-order thinking, and creates a positive,
relaxed, receptive state of mind that is ideal for learning. This is also because
music combines two forms of mental processing, both the declarative memory
that allows us to do multiplication tables and remember dates as well as
procedural memory that allows us how to recall such things as how to skip or
how to balance on one's head.
G-65
Procedural memory belongs to the body.
82
When we integrate mental
activity with sensory-motor experience (moving, singing, or participating
rhythmically in the acquisition of new information), we learn on a more sophisticated
and profound level. When we read important material out loud with Vivaldi playing
softly in the background, we retain that material more effectively. Petr Janata of
Dartmouth College's Center for Cognitive Neuroscience recently used functional
magnetic resonance images of the brains of eight musicians to discover the role of
the brain's rostromedial prefrontal cortex in remembering music (it's located in
the center just behind the forehead). Of note, this area of the brain also plays a
role in learning and in control of emotions.
Dr. Carla Hannaford 83 explains that "singing stimulates the nerves in the vestibular
system, the eyes, ears and vocalization areas, thus waking up the brain to new
learning and a more optimal processing of sensory information". [The vestibular
system is also responsible for the maintenance of physical balance.]
The physical encoding that takes place within the vestibular system
is done through the bundling of information. 84
[Words are merely letters that are bundled together so that we can process them
more readily. Computer systems talk to one another across vast distances by
bundling bunches of l's and 0's into packets.]
Remember that the human brain can handle only about seven bits of information at
once? We get around this limitation by bundling our data. When related groups of
information are bundled through rhythm, they are remembered procedurally as one
bit of information, and the volume of material that we can therefore store and recall
is increased. This is how we learn the alphabet. We can recite a long poem because
we have bundled it into related groups of words.
The depth of our enthusiasm for something may have something to do with how
long the results of any lesson last, or the extent and ability of our brain to bundle
thin~ effectively and quickly.
When we make learning processes more creative (by changing the pace, cadence
and intonation of the voice, using new words so as to renew and refresh the bodily
memory of the material differently, by changing our movement patterns,
associating them with words, thoughts, emotions and musical rhythm), we
increase and enhance the neural chains active in our learning and recall.
[Could football players devise a better way to remember their complex
playbook by developing a physically-memorized rap version of each play
or set of similar plays, a whole body memory method?
Could infielders better remember, synchronize and execute
defensive bunt rotations if they were practiced in association with
a very short rhythmically-emphatic dance step, like those of worker bees?]
G-66
Musical messages come from two sources: the external environment (aural)
and the internal environment (proprioception).
The mind can blend and assess these two signals; however, we learn at an
early age to attend to the aural signal and to suppress our musculature
impulse to move. Eurhythmics balances attention on both sources of
stimulation and thus improves the processes of perception, attention,
memory and action. 85
At the core of musical meter is pulse, an unceasing clock-beat that rhythmic
patterns overlay. Idealized, pulse exists as the steady recurrence of contraction and
relaxation, tension and release, every beat a renewal of experience. Psychologically,
pulse constitutes a renewal of perception, a re-establishment of attention. It is a
basic property of our nervous systems that they soon cease to perceive
phenomena that do not change. Pulses keep unchanging phenomena alive. This
process of renewing attention comes so naturally to us that our nervous system adds
pulse where none is found. 86
Tempo and Rhythm in Athletic Movement 87
Tempo refers to internal rhythm, or good timing within a single athletic motion.
Rhythm in athletics isn't just the regular repetition of movement. It's the ability
to bring in each segment of the movement right on some unheard athletic beat.
It's tiring and difficult to learn a new sports motion by means of sequential steps.
The heaviest neural input for an action is required at the initiation of the movement.
If you have to send a separate neural signal to the muscles to start each segment
of the motion, you are going to be tired, and your movement is going to be jerky.
If the internal rhythm of the movement can take over the initiating functions,
you'll have more energy and more time to focus on the intent and substance
of the move.
Tap your foot to music; you have to concentrate only at the beginning, to get the
beat. After that, you can put your foot on automatic. You never have to think
about it again until the tempo changes. Rhythm is the way in which your right
brain can be responsible for starting all those elements into action. The right
brain takes in all the data, all the requirements, in parallel, and simultaneously.
You only have to say "go". Playing with the rhythm is how you learn how to
maximize your athletic efficiency and power. And when you have finely-tuned
control of your own tempo and rhythm, you can begin to mess with your opponent’s.
[... and athletes?]
88
"It is musicians..., who must draw together every aspect of
mind and body, melding athleticism with intellect, memory,
creativity and emotion, all in precious concert."
G-67
The Music of the Spheres? 89
Many of Einstein's relatives recall that he regularly played the violin or piano
whenever he had come to the end of the road or into a difficult situation in his work.
He would take refuge in music, and that would usually resolve all his difficulties.
While developing the general theory of relativity, he frequently emerged from deep
thought, played the piano, made a few notes, then disappeared back into his study.
He told his music teacher that the theory of relativity occurred to him by intuition,
and that music was the driving force behind this intuition.
Richard Feynmann, the Nobel Prize winner in physics who demonstrated the problem
of the deformed Challenger shuttle 0-rings by dunking them in a glass of ice water,
was once asked about his problem-solving techniques. He noted that he thought in
visual terms, of course, but he also used acoustic or aural imaging. He talked to
himself internally and out loud, and family and colleagues often would hear him
muttering, rhyming nonsense words, humming or voicing clicks and whoops as he
translated physical intuition and equation into sound. He heard and felt the
rhythmical nature of quantum physics in much the same way he avidly played his
bongo drums.
One good way to learn more about rhythmic variation is to listen to be-bop and
jazz, and to dance. Rhythm is best learned through the ears and the legs. Express
the rhythms, climaxes, lulls, explosions, nuances and techniques of your sport with
your voice. Hum while you practice, or watch, your sport. Observe your breathing
and emotion as you engage in a critical movement. Punctuate the vital points of that
movement with your own made-up sounds.
The Sweet Spot in Time 90
Rhythm is timing -- a component of the signaling to each body segment the proper
moment to initiate movement. Rhythm in athletic motion means that each
segment of the body comes in on the right beat. Initiation of an athletic movement
can be the hardest part. That's where all those baseball bat wiggles and freethrow eccentricities and tennis-serve mannerisms blossom forth.
I happened to hear violinist Isaac Stern discuss his craft one night, and a jazz
musician discuss his on the following night. Both of these immensely talented
individuals would sing rhythmic parts of their music to illustrate one way to play
a phrase, then an alternative, varying the timing of the notes subtly without
violating the form, changing the emotional content of the music without changing
a note. I suddenly realized that, for musicians and for athletes -- there must be a
great deal more room in the flow of time than there is for the rest of us.
There is room for art in the microseconds that we ignore. Athlete, dancer,
musician, all may fulfill the basic requirements of their tasks by getting precisely
on the beat. Technical brilliance can spring from that kind of precision; just
playing the notes. A machine can be made to replicate this kind of performance,
but it will always be identifiable as machine-produced by its cold and stiff style.
To warm it up, put a human touch on it. Introduce human error. Or human
control. Or human imagination.
>>>>
G-68
Imaginative performers control their material by using the microseconds that
surround the instant of a beat. It is another order of precision entirely. The dancer
delays a step and introduces dramatic tension. The tennis player delays his return
and pulls the opponent out of position. The basketball player hangs momentarily
before letting go of the jump shot and is fouled, getting a free throw for the effort.
Hurrying the motion, moving it minutely ahead of the natural rhythms of the form,
can have similar effect. Feints and fakes are chiefly composed of this toying with
time. The musician moves notes micrometrically forward or backward in time,
making the music witty, or sentimental, or sad. The athlete varies the timing of
movement and "plays" the opponent as well as the game. What is interesting is what
the control of the time sequence within the movement does for skill. Fiddling around
with the timing of moves can go deeper than delaying a return in tennis. The tennis
player can also delay or speed up different segments, different arcs or portions of
arcs within the sequence of motion, with brilliant results as far as the stroke is
concerned. This does not happen because the athlete focuses attention on the
segments and arcs of the motion; it is almost impossible to do that. It happens
because the performer focuses attention on the time frame -- inside the time
frame – of the move. A coach advises "You have to have the confidence to take
the time to make the play." Focusing on time slows it down. Tell yourself that you
have more time than you think you have. You'll find several inches of incoming
trajectory to work with, during which you can focus and prepare and position more
effectively, if you have confidence enough to take it. All you will really have done is
to make that sweet spot in time a little more accessible. Most infield errors occur
because the fielder starts his play before he catches the ball. Many football passes
are dropped because the receiver starts running or avoiding tacklers before he
finishes catching the ball. Most athletes at a young age hear the coach say "look the
ball into your hands". You can see a lot more territory if you understand it in terms
of available time. The good performer simply takes advantage of all of the available
time for a particular move. The sweet spot in time is merely the true finish of the
move (but that is one hell of a "merely"). The concept of a follow-through in the
motion is usually misunderstood. As it turns out, it is just a memory device that
keeps us from screwing up the motion that leads to what we're following through. If
you intend a smooth follow through, that intention somehow takes you through the
sweet spot of the move. Finishing the move is a startlingly important aspect of
performing, although I have been unable to find a clear explanation of why it is so
critical. One aspect is that, by failing to finish a motion to its logical conclusion, you
are in a less-than-optimum position for starting the next move. Finishing a skiing
turn is a good example. The hurried move doesn't happen because the athlete
started the move too soon, but stems from neglect in finishing the preceding move,
cutting it off from the sweet spot in time. It is a paradox: taking time to finish one
move somehow gives you more time to get the next one started correctly. Restoring
the neuromuscular machinery to equilibrium gives you a better starting place. By
putting away the movement at hand before starting the next, you create time.
Finishing the move makes time. Baryshnikov has time. So does Julius Erving.
Although confidence certainly helps an athlete get control of the time sequence, the
ultimate tool is concentration, which slows time. Confidence allows you not to
rush. Concentration lets you have the time to choose when to rush.
*
*
*
*
*
*
"You must be quick, but don’t hurry."
*
*
*
*
former UCLA coach John Wooden
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Pleasure, Music and the Body 91
One way or another, everyone seeks pleasure of some kind in music, and rejects
music that does not provide it.... Remarkably, "pleasure" is a concept seldom
encountered in neuroscience or even in psychology. Although our days are filled
with pleasures large and small, we may not know what to make of pleasure, or
how to make it fit with concepts like seeing or remembering or intending....
We take pleasure in the sun's warmth, in a crossword puzzle, in a filet mignon,
in a Renoir, in driving skillfully, in fixing a broken chair. What can there be that is
in common among the diverse things that give us pleasure? Each of these activities
plays out in a different reach of the nervous system. Some have to do with sensing,
some with doing, some with reasoning. Yet we find pleasure in them all.
The concept of pleasure as the satisfaction of anticipations accounts for the
pleasures of the mind, such as we find in music -- pleasures that the usual
body-oriented motions of pleasure cannot begin to explain. Nonetheless, most
pleasure feels bodily to us, including much pleasure in music. When a good ear
follows music, somehow even the deepest and most abstract relations seem to find
expression in the body. Music lovers speak of feeling not just pulsating beat in
their muscles and bones, but also melodic contours, harmonic transitions,
dynamic shifts -- phenomena that by all rights ought to be entirely "mental" and
not at all "corporeal".
This is really very odd. Music flows through auditory cortex. This cortex is
densely connected with other parts of the temporal lobes and with the frontal
lobes, but not with the motor cortex that moves our muscles or the somatosensory
cortex that monitors the sensations throughout our body. So why would sound
register a physical sensation?
Clearly, if music does not channel directly to our muscles, then we must
consciously put it there. It seems that we use our musculature to represent
music, modeling the most important features of musical patterns by means of
physical movements large and small. At one extreme, we bounce up and down to
a pulsating beat. At the other, we are immobile yet are racked by anticipations of
movement, experiencing the impetus of motions that we do not actually initiate.
Once we learn an athletic or motor skill, we retain it better than we do other kinds
of learning. Motor learning causes a different sort of physiological change than
other kinds of learning, requiring increasingly less conscious thought; in fact,
once a skill like riding a bike or tying one's shoes is learned, conscious thought
can sometimes get in the way of performance. Motor learning may simply
increase the area available for the transmission of nerve impulses at the synaptic
junction. Nerve fibers swell as they transmit impulses, and the swelling can last
for days, or even years, indicating some sort of structural change. Lab animals
reared in "enriched" environments, with more sensory stimulation, develop more
branching of the nerve dendrites that animals raised in "impoverished"
environments, and neurons from the brains of older people show more extensive
branching that those from younger persons. There is also evidence that learning
improves the abilities of the involved nerves to transmit impulses: the membranes
are more sensitive.
>>>>>
G-70
If you must acquire a new skill in athletic body control and movement,
how do you go about doing it?
For starters, you have to pay attention. You have to be engaged by the problem; you
have to come at it with a level of mental and sensory arousal sufficient to pick up the
stimulus cues you need for a solution.
Next, you will probably examine the problem by comparing it with your own
experience, scanning your past for similar applicable skills that might provide
alternative solutions, assessing your own capacities and how they might apply.
You make a series of more or less unconscious judgments about where your
movements must take effect, about the speed of the movement, the space, the force
required. You will probably go through a certain amount of covert rehearsal,
complete with spoken instructions to yourself, vocal or subvocal, depending on the
complexity of the task.
Then you attempt the movement, running a constant comparison check between
the motions you intend and the motions you are actually making, correcting the
differences. As the discrepancy between the two is reduced [the creative tension],
as you grow confident that you can accomplish the movement you have in mind,
you are able to reduce the monitoring and let your attention move on to other
things. This is where the movement begins to become a skill.
In your first fumbling attempts, complete with instructions to yourself, the higher
brain centers are in almost total control, leaving very little for any other controlling
mechanism to do. As you are able to decrease your conscious analysis of every
aspect of the movement, the higher brain centers begin to tune out. In effect,
you acquire an athletic skill by taking the act out of your head and
putting it away in your nerves.
Fine-Tuning Your Rhythm and Consistency
92
English track and field athlete Steve Backley, who won gold medals in the javelin
at the Commonwealth and European Championships, hears the "music" of his
feet during imagery sessions. In practice, a videotape was made of his javelin
throws and a beeping noise was inserted every time his foot made contact with the
ground as he made his approach to throw the javelin. He watched and listened to
the tape over and over again and then, just prior to competition, he would recreate the "beeping" noise in his mind to visualize himself making his throw.
"This is the music I need to re-enact such a performance", said Backley, author of
The Winning Mind. "I know this series of beeps like I know my favorite song."
Using Musical Rhythm to Improve Athletic Technique
93
It has long been understood that sound can impact both physiological and
psychological aspects of performance. It can cause distraction, aid
concentration, create tension or promote relaxation. In sport, the athlete deals with
a myriad of sound: crowd noise, field chatter and even music. Musical rhythm can
be used effectively to fine tune and improve the consistency of virtually any athletic
movement or maneuver, to mediate synchronization, and to assist in the
sequential choreography of a specific move.
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Rhythm is fundamental to life. One of the most basic rhythms in one's life is the
beating of one's heart. Rhythm derives from beat. Beat is a pulsation that is
repeated constantly. Music is both heard and felt; it activates our aural and our
muscular neurology. Therefore, music can be associated with performance.
We do this as children, of course, when we learn out ABCs, or the spelling of the
word Mississippi with the use of rhythmic mnemonic devices. Dancers, of
course, recall intricately choreographed sequences through the musical
memories of mind/muscle. Rhythmic cues and choreography can be created for
shotputters, fencers, hurdlers, hoopsters at the free throw line, the putting stroke
on the green... indeed, there is not a single motor skill you can't set to a beat.
Rhythm is movement. Musical consciousness derives from our physical experience of
music. Perfecting movement in time and space can only be accomplished by
exercises in rhythmic movement.
A Millennium Sports case study related to a group of kickers (both punters and
placekickers) from the Temple University football team; these included Americans
using American football kicking technique, as well as players of other nationalities
using soccer/rugby kicking technique. The objective was improved hang time,
direction, distance, elevation and consistency. Music was used successfully because
kicking is a sequential pattern that can be experienced rhythmically. Rhythm is the
cue for the pattern of footwork. Repetition of rhythm, if effectively designed, aids
recall in patterns of repeated and contrasting elements. Attention is paid to accented
and alternate beats. Punting, for example, can be simply seen as “walk, walk, drop,
kick”. Place kicking can be broken down into a series of steps and pauses, as
one.. .two, three, four.. .five!. (One kicker settled into the rhythm of the title phrase of
Springsteen's "Born in the USA"). These movements can even be choreographed
musically to include individual idiosyncratic movements such as an automatic and
preparatory hunch of the shoulders.
Further implications:
1)
2)
3)
4)
5)
6)
Music can be used to enhance or even control consciousness and emotion.
Music has the ability to bring order to a given task.
Music and rhythm can be changed to meet circumstances.
Music can used to focus attention (both in the sense of tuning in, or tuning out).
Audiation is personal.
The variety of possible combinations is endless.
So what can you do if .... you are working alone, there's no one around with a
master's degree in music, and you have very little musical talent?
Begin by having the athlete repeatedly hum or sing through the physical
maneuver, listening for the quavers, nuances, bumps, points of emphasis, peaks
and drops. A rhythm will emerge. Boil it down, remove the nonessential, and
eventually a rhythm will become precise. Now punctuate the key points with
imitative, illustrative and onomatopoeic words like slide, pow, shift, etc.
Or, get out the video camera, tape the maneuver, and insert beeps or clicks at the
key points.
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Entrainment and Resonance: How Sound Affects the Body 94
Due to the physical Law of Entrainment, as described by Otzhah Bentov in
Stalking The Wild Pendulum (Dutton, 1977), an external rhythm will automatically
override our internal rhythm (the rhythm of our heartbeat or breathing, for
example). This means that music with a fast beat inevitably causes the heart to beat
faster. Music with a slow beat, on the other hand, can entrain the body to relax.
When the heart beat slows, the brain is pulsed by the blood ejected from the heart
with the greatest efficiency. This causes the electrical and chemical activity of the
brain to produce electromagnetic waves at a frequency of 7 to 13 Hz, the alpha
waves emitted when we experience a relaxed, quiet mind.
Resonance refers to the phenomenon whereby one vibrating entity such as a
tuning fork, musical tone or noise will cause a second entity -- another tuning
fork, for example, or part of your body -- to begin vibrating when their respective
frequencies match. In other words, if you took a tuning fork tuned to "C" and
another tuned to "A", the second fork would stay silent when you struck the "C".
But if you have two "C" forks and struck the first, the second would begin to emit a
sound, because its atoms would be set in motion by its vibrational equal.
It's the same with the music you listen to. If it's in harmony with the actual
vibrational makeup of your cells -- your internal organs, energy fields and rhythms -it amplifies your well-being. Conversely, certain sounds and pitches can have a
physically or psychologically disturbing effect on us. We are encouraged to pay close
attention to the effects of sound and music on ourselves and others. This is a highly
individual matter; there is no predetermined formula. A dialogue between the sound
and the listener is required. Observation of movement and the impact of music on
behavior is useful. In West Africa, for example, each "profession" (or dominant life
activity) has its own rhythm and music, its own characteristic dance step.
Precise, electronically-generated bio-pulsation tones have been shown to have a
direct effect on brain-wave activity, not unlike a mother singing a lullaby to her
child. Frequencies used in Acoustic Brain Research recordings are primarily in
the alpha/theta range, which is highly relaxing. As brain activity in the theta range
increases, awareness becomes more internally directed, conducive to relaxation and
healing, but this is potentially dangerous in situations where you need a quickresponse capability. [For this reason, you should never listen to recordings
specifically engineered to induce alpha/theta wave activity while driving a car, or in
other similar situations requiring alertness.] An important aspect of this specificallycomposed music is its harmonic structure. The melody and the harmony are
constantly changing in most music, but stays more or less constant in
psychoacoustic compositions, including use of the specific musical interval known as
the perfect harmonic fifth.
All mind/body healing is accompanied by changes
in perceived time and space.
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The Effect of Music on Mood 95
A) The higher the pitch, the more positive the effect generated.
B) Slower minor keys warm the brain, which fosters both cortical and limbic
alertness.
C) Faster, major keys cool the brain which fosters better moods.
D) Classical composers (Mozart, Hadyn and Beethoven) and mid-to-late Baroque
composers except for Bach (Vivaldi, Scarlatti, Handel and Corelli) are considered
universal donors in the musical world -- i.e., they tend to offend the fewest
listeners.
E) Mellow music like smooth jazz or regular jazz appears to enhance the immune
function (a 14% increase in the production of immunoglobulin A has been
measured).
F) Repetitive rhythms induce a trancelike state that approaches a state of ecstasy.
G) Musical rhythms liberate the mind from ordinary states, which is why it is popular
in religious and military settings.
H) Music that slows gradually has a gradual relaxing effect.
I) Lullabies across cultures imitate the breathing rhythms that occur in sleep.
J) The body's rhythms will adapt to the rhythms of live, close-up music.
K) In all cultures, observers are able to correctly identify the music of other
cultures that is intended to convey specific human moods and needs, such as war,
mourning, love, hunting and sleep inducement.
Musical elements associated cross-culturally with specific moods*:
Element
Frequency
Melodic variation
Tonal course
Joy
Sadness
High
Low
Strong
Slight
Moderate
Down
(first up, then down)
Tonal color (overtones) Many
Fewer
Tempo
Rapid
Slow
Volume
Loud
Soft
Rhythm
Irregular
Regular
Excitement
Varied
Strong
Strongly up, then down
Barely any
Medium
Highly varied
Very irregular
* Psychology for Performing Artists: Butterflies and Bouquets,
by G. D. Wilson, Jessica Kingsley, London, 1994.
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Brainwaves and the Entrainment of States of Mind 96
We all experience many different states of mind every day. In ordinary states of
mind, we pay attention to our everyday affairs, but periodically we experience
extraordinary states in which we seem to be "in the flow". Optimal performance
takes place when the mind is working effortlessly yet staying focused and
remaining aware of the overall picture. Research has shown us what this looks
like in our brainwaves, which are minute electromagnetic wave forms produced
by the electrical activity of the brain cells. These can be measured with sensitive
electronic equipment -- the electroencephalograph, or EEG. The frequences of
these electrical waves are measured in cycles per second, or hertz (Hz).
Brainwaves change their frequencies based on neural activity in the brain and are
closely tied to changes in mind or consciousness. Measuring brainwaves
shows that our states of mind fall into four general classes:
beta (30-13 Hz), alpha (13-8 Hz), theta (8-3.5 Hz) and delta (3.5-0.5 Hz).
Beta states are associated with linear-thinking mental activity. This is usually
call "left brain" or "logic brain" activity. This is usually the state that we are in
when driving, talking, and working. In beta states, the mind is focused, usually
on one thing, and productive concentration is possible.
Alpha brainwaves are associated with a quiet, inner, reflective mental state. In
this case, the mind has an open focus, looking at the larger picture of things.
Sleep research subjects awakened from alpha sleep report that they were not
quite asleep but not quite awake either -- a twilight or pondering state of mind.
A Zen meditative state is associated with alpha.
Theta brainwaves are found in both waking and sleeping states. In sleep, theta
brainwaves accompany dreaming sleep. In waking life, theta brainwaves appear
with creativity, imagination and visualization, in problem-solving moments, and
during the "aha!" state. Waking and sleeping theta states are both highly creative,
and this creativity carries rich emotions. In waking theta states, we experience
deep insight, often in the form of intense visualization, mental images and
emotional resolution. This expansive emotional insight can change some of our
core self-defeating behaviors.
The delta brainwave state is associated with the deepest relaxation the body
achieves. Delta sleep is the deepest type of sleep, with the lowest metabolic rate,
the lowest blood pressure and body temperature, and the slowest heart rate. It is
also the state of most rapid recuperation and physical healing. In meditation, a
delta state is associated with the experience of being totally immersed in a timeless,
dreamless state of non-sensation.
The brain has a tendency to match its own wave pulses to those of exterior sound
pulses, a phenomenon known as "acoustic brainwave entrainment". Research
has shown that different states of mind can be induced through hearing sound
pulses that match the speed of the brainwaves associated with these states of
mind. This can be accomplished by listening to music which contains inaudible
pulses of sound scored into the tracks. When your brain "hears" these hidden
pulses, it tends to align with them, inducing the appropriate state of brainwave
activity.
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These kinds of recordings will not change your brainwaves beyond the period of time
in which you are listening to them.
However, listening does created a learned response in your nervous system.
This means that, the more you go to a highly desirable state of mind,
the more your mind learns how to be in this state of mind effortlessly.
Eventually, you may be able to find this state of mind without the recordings. You
might think of these kinds of recordings as high-tech training wheels you can use
to enhance your ability to reach each of these states. Remember, these recordings
are not creating brain states. They are merely enhancing the ability of your brain
to expand the abilities it already has but may have difficulty contacting.
Compositions of the baroque period (Bach, Handel, Albinoni and Vivaldi, for
example) show a "unity of mood", expressing one feeling throughout. Rhythms
heard at the beginning of the piece are repeated throughout. Melodies never take
us far from the original theme in their development. Harmony produced by chord
progressions further instills a sense of cohesiveness and continuity. Whole pieces
or individual movements of baroque music, whether slow or fast, work well in
combination with beta or alpha states. Listeners can use this music to focus,
concentrate, memorize, carry on conversations, relax, and feel more
grounded.
Compositions of the classical period (Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven) elicit mood
shifts through changing rhythms, homophonic textures, symmetrical melodies,
and dynamic and surprising changes. Music from this period entrains beta and
alpha brainwave states to support mental concentration and focus, productivity, a
positive mood, and problem-solving ability. The sonata, minuet, rondo and
concerto forms allow for fresh musical statements. The sonata form is excellent
for guided imagery because they reflect a state of being in a location, followed by
departure, tension, conflict, resolution and return to home. This visualized
movement can allow for new insights that enhance personal balance and
stability.
Compositions from the romantic period (Mendelssohn, Chopin, Elgar, for example)
explore the universe demotion, including intimacy, melancholy, joy, love and others.
Solo violin, oboe, french horn or piano passages entrain theta and delta brainwaves
and evoke imagery and internal dialogue that allow the listener to daydream,
meditate, problem solve or feel creative.
Music from the impressionistic or early 20th century periods (Debussy,
Benjamin Britten or Ralph Vaughn Williams, for example) reflects a dramatic change
in the language of music, adding suspense, drama and dissonance to expand our
awareness and move beyond preconceived ideas and limitations of the past. The
music is more free and spontaneous, with rising and falling phrases that allow
the imagination to wander. This music entrains theta and delta brainwaves and
takes us into new territories of consciousness, helping us to daydream and
problem-solve, as well as stimulate and empower our intellect.
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Mozart isn’t the Only Music That Works for You 97
Mozart is usually best for study and for organizing thought, but when working on
a creative project or grappling with issues that don't lend themselves to simple,
linear solutions, jazz might better stimulate new ideas. The music of Miles
Davis, John Coltrane or other jazz greats can set the stage for highly creative
theta consciousness, the brain waves associated with artistic and spiritual
insight.
Some rock, rap and other music centered on the beat can help listeners stay
focused within a chaotic, unpredictable environment. It creates structure and
sharpens concentration. In contrast, New Age or ambient music allows highly
disciplined or overscheduled children to unwind and float freely. Samba and
Brazilian music, with its elements of Latino, Indian, African and indigenous
South American traditions, has the improvisational quality of jazz but just
enough sweetness and drive to keep the listener attentive, and moves the listener
toward emotions of feeling safe, soothed and energized. Playing or drumming
along relieves tension and instills a sense of community.
By trying out different types of music, we can learn how the various genres affect
our spirit and mind, and we can retain the freedom to choose, and feel no pressure
to give up the form of music we love most.
Bodily Feedback, Movement and Kinesthetic Imagery 98
Rather than working by a top-to-bottom chain of command, the brain churns
information through a system of loops, and loops within loops, until centers
concerned with every aspect of perception and movement are informed of what is
going on and have head their say.
The cerebellum appears to oversee detailed movements of the hands, while the
basal ganglia dominates the arms. Commands for the two kinds of motion are
carried along separate spinal pathways. Interestingly, the brain cranks out
commands for the arms faster that for the fingers. Researchers are mystified at
how such dissimilar systems can work together so effectively.
It's tempting to conceive of musical performance entirely as a flow of commands
from brain to muscle. But feedback from muscle to brain is just as important.
Feedback loops through the somatosensory cortex that interprets sensations of
touch coming from all over the body, a flood information about every body
movement gathered through receptors in skin, muscles, tendons and joints.
Millions of tiny spindles are embedded in muscle fibers. Each contains a minute
fragment of muscle that is independently controlled by the muscle system. The
brain pits the spindle muscles against the surrounding fibers, monitors their
performance, and compares and calculates muscle length and tension. The
result is an interior realm of kinesthetic sensation quite as rich as
our usual sense of touch but of which we are generally unaware.
Laboratory research has demonstrated that we can move about fairly well without
kinesthetic feedback, but only as long as we can monitor limb position with our
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eyes. Otherwise, errors quickly multiply and we soon lose an accurate body
image. Try this: Blindfold yourself, then relax your body as if paralyzed. Have
someone gently shift the position of your arms. Then try to touch the tip of your
nose. Even with the somatosensory system functioning, physical accuracy is
much reduced without the aid of vision. Like motor cortex, somatosensory cortex
is linked to the opposite side of the body. It too devotes a disproportionate area to
the particularly sensitive parts of the body, like fingertips. It also defies simple
mapping. Widely differing sensory pictures of various kinds are deeply
intertwined. The brain assembles these incoming sensations into maps of the
body and its environment in the parietal cortex, where sight, hearing and touch
are drawn together. In one part, information from muscles and joints form a
map of the body's limb positions and posture. In another, data from the eyes is
used to form a map of the surrounding world. Since the appearance of this
"world" always depends on one's body orientation to it, the two parts are
inseparable. The parietal cortex is studded with movement-specific neurons,
many devoted to motions of the arms and hands. Some of these neurons
become active at the mere sight of an object about to be grasped, integrating
our interior and exterior worlds, unifying the violinist with the violin, or Griffey with
his Louisville Slugger.
The parietal lobe works hard; the relationship between our muscles changes
constantly as we move around. We owe much of our analytical intelligence to the
parietal cortex. With increasing specialization, the tasks of body-in-the-world
mapping have been moved to the right brain's parietal cortex alone, leaving the
left side to manage sequence of activity (especially as it involves language). This
is what makes one hand more skillful than the other. In fact, the left parietal
cortex has been shown to be important in sequencing motions involving both
hands, even though the left brain normally controls only half the body.
The loop from action to sensation to further action suggests how the body steers
itself through the world without requiring a captain at the helm. Coordination of
the two maps gives rise to motor plans largely through the basal ganglia which
are then played out as actual movements which, in turn, further alter the maps of
the body and the world, leading to further motor plans, which drive the body along
even further. Action produces feedback which provokes action. This is an
oversimplified explanation, to be sure. Add in duration of motion, automatic
motion, conscious decision-making and highly intricate movement, and you have
the essence of how athletes and musicians move from note to note.
When a musician learns a piece of music so that he can play it automatically, or
an athlete practices complex eye-hand-foot maneuvers, he conditions his motor
system so that it reacts to particular internal body sensations in particular ways.
Playing one fragment of a song produces feedback that elicits movement to the
next fragment, and so on. The "piece" is recorded in the brain only as a tendency
to respond a certain way to a certain set of inputs, no internal blueprint needed.
This is not the only way we remember a performance routine, but amateur
musicians often learn whole compositions in this manner, and the mechanism is
useful for the most basic performance skills. The motor system does not "look up"
a routine and then perform it, like software in a computer. Rather, with practice,
the routine becomes a property of the motor system, a built-in feature or quality.
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This perspective on musical or athletic mastery is independent of simple will: the
better the wiring, the better the playing. Practice reinforces connections; neglect
weakens them; progress is, of necessity, gradual and grudging. However, the
better part of such mastery may depend on how the performer's mind is
organized during the performance -- how the body is comported, how the attention
is focused and, above all, how imagery is brought to bear. Mastery may be a
matter of abstract planning rather than raw muscular control.
The master develops mental hierarchies that are deep and flexible, so well trained
that they function automatically at superficial levels, freeing the mind to concern
itself with larger parts of the whole. Working with larger structure, the master
has time to consider every movement before it is made; attention is no longer
pulverized by a stampede of details.
Kinesthetic imagery is so much a part of our experience that we seldom notice it.
It's most conspicuous when we are held back from initiating an intended motion
(On your mark.., get set... stop.) Like visual and auditory imagery, kinesthetic
imagery normally occurs in small fragments which release motor routines. An
impetus towards a minor movement (like swinging a bat) will get the bat swung.
And, like other forms of imagery, kinesthetic imagery can be cultivated until it is
vivid and precise and until long sequences can be commited to memory.
What is the difference between a kinesthetic image and a normal intention to
move? Ten cognitive scientists might give a dozen answers to this question; the
very notion of imagery is controversial. It seems to occur not as an independent
mental faculty but as an extension of the anticipation required for any cognitive
act. To many cognitive psychologists, imagery is nothing more than the enactment
of such anticipations in the absence of actual perception or motion. Since activity in
motor cortex is always preceded by activity in premotor cortex, the basal ganglia and
other parts of the motor system, the idea of anticipation preceding movement fits
well with the facts of neurology. All complex actions require anticipations to see
them through, whether footsteps, a spoken phrase, or an arpeggio. This is really
saying nothing more than that deep levels of hierarchy must become active before
more superficial levels can set the body in motion.
Brain scans suggest that imagery emanates from perceptual cortex -- visual
imagery in visual cortex, auditory imagery in auditory cortex, and kinesthetic
imagery in somatosensory cortex. So motor anticipations have more to do with
"passive sensation" than "active intention". This is consistent with the idea that
complex motions are launched only after the parietal lobes have prepared maps of
the body and its environment. This is why music teachers constantly try to convey
to their students that musical virtuosity is attained not by exertion of will, but
by relaxed contemplation of deep structures. Rather than attempt to force the
motions made by superficial levels of motor hierarchy, the master musician
focuses upon the deep levels of sensation that give rise to movement.
As psychologist Fritz Perls puts it, "Trying fails; awareness cures."
Master musicians understand that the cause of playing a bad note
often exists not in the motions for that note, but in the motions made
for the notes around it.
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And so they correct the wrong notes by working on the relations between notes,
by reorganizing the deeper levels in the motor and conceptual hierarchies and
make them more self-aware and manipulable.
[In the same way, a catcher understands that the throw to second may be improved
by mastering the footwork underneath the throwing arm. The right-handed batter
understands that the ability to hit with power to right field has something to do with
where she places her left foot.]
The sheer quantity of practice is also important. To no one's surprise, studies
have found a strong correlation between quality of performance and quantity of
practice. At one noted musical conservatory, the best violinists practiced 7,500
hours, the average ones 5,000 hours, and the worst 3,500 hours. The best
practiced at the same time every day, and then took a few days off. Studies of
athletes have found similar trends, with the superstars typically practicing 25%
more than those in the echelon below.
It appears that, once a motor hierarchy has been well established and can
carry out any command, it requires only the occasional performance as a
refresher.
Everything else -- memorizing, experimenting and interpreting -- can largely
be accomplished through mental imagery.
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Multitracking 99
There are experiences you can have which we would wish you never to have,
moments that are illuminating and instructive. They are moments with
extremes of essence: risk and danger, profound terror, sensory potency, and a
sharpened, quickened consciousness. One could even say that they are a unique
frame of mind, except that they are thousands of frames of mind all at once.
One simple example of a moment such as this is the experience of being involved
in a high-speed car crash, clearly a case of the value of learning through indirect
experience. Listening to someone describe in detail what occurred when the car
they were driving had a blowout and swerved across two lanes of traffic into a
guardrail, bounced off into a slow 720-degree spin as cars and bridges and trucks
waltzed past in some surreal cinematic event, and then suddenly found the bite of
rubber and hurtled backwards off into the median strip, slamming to a stop when
the rocker panel found a raised drain pipe. The car was dented, but fortunately
and miraculously, no one was hurt beyond having been shaken up pretty badly.
When we hear of another's experience in such a moment, we realize that it can
take many minutes to describe what occurred in the space of about five seconds.
Such is the powerful ability of the brain to process many different types of
information simultaneously, a concept known as multi-tracking. This parallel
processing capability is largely responsible for the undeniable fact that the sum of
the brain's energy (the mind) is greater than its parts. We are told that a typical
human being can only handle seven variables at a time, and this may be true
when things come at us in a linear fashion. But when many things happen
simultaneously, we can and do integrate them.
The experience above has many parallels in the world of sports: quarterbacks,
hockey goalies, and point guards, among others, surely have had moments like
these. Procedural memory, sensory input, proprioception, categorization,
rhythm, timing and intent all come roaring together in a moment which, if you
were to describe completely, would take pages of text. You can read about some of
these moments in books like In the Zone, and you can experience them in
moments of competition (and mental rehearsal).
Enhance your ability to process vast amounts of information simultaneously
by listening to music while you engage in specific physical activities. Mozart
composed while he played billiards. Listening to a symphony provides many
voices, instruments and segments to track and anticipate; move your body in
synch. Jazz passes energy and transition and expression between players. Music
enhances the way out brain integrates its work. Moving to music integrates
our body into the process. The truth of the matter is often felt, a "gut feeling'; we
"know it in our bones". We learned to integrate ourselves in space and time by
walking to music (remember musical chairs?). We can enhance our inner sense
of time, space and energy relationships by playing with music. Do routine
chores like washing the dishes with musical enhancement. Watch others play your
sport while listening to some well-selected tune. Visualize yourself more effectively
in moments of sporting intensity with the help of music that reflects the rhythms of
your game. Practice your skills to the tune of your favorite drummer.
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Mental Imagery
100
Many athletes find it helpful to see themselves performing perfectly immediately
before competitive performances. Team sport athletes run through key plays and
moves, quick transitions and tough defensive moves. This process calls up a
feeling of a best performance and focuses full attention on the task at hand.
It provides a mental checklist.
Doing mental imagery after a successful performance, when the feeling is still
fresh, can also be very valuable. It allows you to re-experience and hang on to
successful aspects of a performance, which leads to further positive imagery and
better performance. Some athletes find it especially helpful to increase their use
of mental imagery when they have limited practice time, or when recovering from
an injury.
The use of mental imagery helps athletes get what they want out of training and
strength their belief in their capacity to achieve their goals. The refined
performance imagery that highly successful athletes have developed almost
always involves an inside view, as if they are actually doing the skill and feeling
the action. Even the best athletes did not initially have good control over their
mental imagery; they perfected this skill through persistent daily practice.
Work towards developing and using short, high-quality, vivid multi-sensory,
feeling-oriented imagery rather than longer, lesser-quality imagery.
•
Start with just a minute or two each day and work towards a point where you
can do three to five sessions each day.
•
If possible, actually move your body during the imagery sessions.
•
Use imagery to familiarize yourself with new skills, routines and plays,
or even specifics of a course, arena or venue of competition.
You can mentally simulate virtually any situation that might arise.
If you can see yourself, hear yourself, feel yourself and think yourself
Through situations in a constructive manner, you will be better prepared
when you encounter that situation in real competition.
Mental imagery, rehearsal and simulation techniques will
a) help you improve your focusing skills,
b) remind you of critical elements in a successful performance,
c) boost self-confidence and
d) set the stage for success.
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Visualization, Mental Imagery & Mental Rehearsal 101
Set aside time each day, at least once, to visualize your goals. Find a place that is
private and quiet, one in which you won't be disturbed by others and in which you
are not likely to distract yourself.
This is especially important for a full visualization process, but visualization can
be amplified by using time during other activities (in the shower) during which
your mind is less occupied with issues. Practiced visualizations can also be built
into and are very beneficial when used during goal-related activities like physical
workouts at the gym, while running, or prior to workouts, games and tryouts.
One of the ways in which you can carve out some private space for a visualization
process is to envision yourself in a favored tranquil and beautiful setting, such as
at the seashore, by a mountain stream or waterfall, at the peak of a hill on a
warm summer day, etc. Feel the sun's rays on your back and head; feel your body
warm. Hear the waterfall. Frolic. Be a child. Watch the butterflies.
In order to bring yourself to the correct mental setting for your visualization (in a
relaxed condition of mind, body and spirit), do some quick muscle-relaxing exercises,
and then calm your breathing with deep cleansing breaths. Then let yourself breathe
naturally & become aware of your breathing. Gradually move into the visualization
by being aware of your body, your breathing and your mental state. To help clear
the noise from your brain, be aware of your breathing and focus on a specific object;
this might be a candle flame, a mandala, a piece of artwork, a spiderweb, a flower or
some similar small item which has intricacies, patterns and beauty into which you
can lose yourself. If you find it useful, you may wish to use incense, or light a
scented candle.
[If you are having conflicting or intrusive thoughts which continue to
interfere despite reasonable efforts to lose yourself, deal with them rather than
trying to block them out, and then re-start. After two attempted restarts, abandon
the visualization attempt until another time.]
The body position you choose is entirely up to you, but a comfortable, upright
posture with hands held loosely on your lap is recommended. If you keep your
back erect -- not stiff nor slumped -- you are balanced and stable, and thus more
able to avoid distraction.
Although it is not necessary, you may wish to use your Walkman, CD player or
other source of music. Choose a musical background that is pleasing to you,
conducive to the process of mental calming & focus, and allows you to envision
the setting, the athletic movements or other critical elements of your visualization.
For these reasons, you'll want to consider music without lyrics (or whose lyrics
are at least non-intrusive or perhaps even supportive). You'll also want to consider
rhythm, pace, flow, etc. Try a few different pieces to see what works and move
towards a definitive choice.
Pick a piece of music that you will use repetitively; its very melody, strains,
rhythm etc. will gradually become highly-identified with this visualization; each
time you hear it you will reinforce the goal.
>>>>
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Furthermore, because of the mind's capability to mentally re-create a complex piece
of music note-for-note and instrument by instrument (the same capabilities that
make visualization work), you will be able to bring this music to mind for quick
visualizations when you are without a means of playing it. [For this reason, though,
you will want to choose a piece of music that has no other emotional meanings or
attachments, because it will become bonded with the visualization for a long time.]
Alternatively, you might want to experiment with other musical sounds, such as
tape recordings of big church bells or gongs, chimes, a burbling stream, falling
rain, waves at the seashore, Gregorian or other chants, the sound of water
dripping, or a recording of heartbeats. Much of this type of sound recording
mixed with pleasant music is commercially available. It does not matter what
sound is used, as long as it works for you. For more advanced exercises in
concentration/focus, you can use recordings of noise, such as crowds, traffic, etc.
Visualization exercises are like making music or dancing. Musicians do not play
a piece of music to reach the end of the composition; if that were the case, the best
musicians would be those who play fastest. When we dance, we do so not to arrive
at a certain point; the journey itself is the point. In visualization, the image of you
successfully achieving your goal is the journey. Visualization works because,
when the time comes to actually take that trip, you will have been there many
times. The body tends to do what it hears most clearly; the mind tells the body
what it sees most clearly.
The ability to visualize a desired outcome is built into your brain, and your
brain is designed to help you succeed in matching that picture with your
performance. You visualize by drawing on your internal image data bank, the
occipital lobe of your cerebral cortex. This data bank has the potential, in
coordination with your frontal lobes, to store and create more images, both real and
imaginary, than all the world's film and television production companies combined.
To get the most from your visualization practice:
Keep your visualization positive. Many people practice unconscious
negative visualization, more commonly known as worrying. Although the ability
to picture what might go wrong is essential to intelligent planning, be careful to
avoid fixating on images of failure. Instead, visualize your positive response to
any challenge.
Distinguish between fantasy and visualization. Fantasy can be fun, and the
free flow of imagery it inspires can be useful in generating creative ideas. But
visualization is different from fantasy. When visualizing, you consciously focus
your mind on imagining a desired process and outcome. In other words, you
practice disciplined mental rehearsal. It is the consistency and intensity of focus
rather than the Technicolor clarity of your visualization that is most important in
making it effective.
Make your visualization multisensory. Use all of your senses to make your
visualization unforgettable and irresistible.
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Mental Imagery 102
The very best athletes have developed an excellent capacity for clear, vivid imagery
and can use it extensively. If you can develop and refine your imagery, it can
serve a variety of useful purposes.
To see success. See yourself achieving your goals on a regular basis both by
seeing yourself performing the skills at a high level and by seeing the desired
performance outcome.
To motivate yourself. Call up images of your goals for the daily practice, or of a
past or future competitor or competition; it will vividly remind you of your
objective, which can result in an increased intensity in your training and more
functional focus on what precisely you need to do.
To perfect skills. Mental imagery can be used to make learning and refinement of
skills or skill sequences easier. The best athletes "see" and "feel" themselves
performing perfect skills, programs, routines or plays on a regular basis.
To familiarize. Mental imagery can be used to familiarize yourself with all kinds
of things: A competition site or race course, a complex play pattern, a
precompetition plan, an event focus plan, a media interview plan, a refocusing
plan, or the strategy you plan to follow.
To set the stage for performance. Mental imagery is often an integral part of the
precompetition plan, which helps set a mental image for a good performance.
The best athletes often do a complete mental run-through of the key elements of
their performance. This draws out desired precompetition feelings and focus and
keeps negative thoughts from interfering with a positive pregame focus.
To refocus. Mental imagery can be used in helping you to refocus when the need
arises. Imagery of a previous best performance can get things back on track, or
by imagining what you should focus on.
To become highly proficient at the constructive use of imagery,
you have to use it every day.
See, feel, hear, touch and do as you would like to do.
Above all else, fee what you are doing.
Artists make sense of their lives through the serious interplay of
life and work, by asking, by attending and making connections,
by developing greater skills of awareness, by paying attention to
detail, and so they learn to recognize excellence wherever it
appears, and to take something away from that experience, that
awareness, and put it back into their lives in other ways. 103
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Raising Awareness 104
While awareness includes seeing and hearing and other sensory input including
kinesthetics, it is also the gathering and the clear perception of relevant facts and
information, with attention given as necessary to systems, dynamics, and
relationships between things and people. Awareness also encompasses selfawareness, in particular recognizing when and how emotions or desires distort
one's own perception.
In the development of physical skills, the awareness of body sensations may be
crucial. In most sports, the most effective way to increase individual physical
efficiency is for the performer to become increasingly aware of the physical
sensations during an activity. This is poorly understood by many sports coaches
who persist in imposing their technique from outside. When kinesthetic
awareness is focused on a movement, the immediate discomforts and
corresponding inefficiencies in the movement are reduced and soon eliminated.
The result is a more fluid and efficient form that corresponds more closely to the
"book" technique, with the important advantage that it is geared to that particular
performer's body.
Though all this explanation of awareness may at first seem daunting, it is something
that develops quickly through simple practice and application, and
through being coached. It is perhaps easier to relate to the following definitions:
Awareness is knowing what is happening around you.
Self-awareness is knowing what you are experiencing.
Awareness and responsibility are, without doubt, two qualities that are crucial to
performance in any activity. Olympic gold medalist David Hemery researched 63
of the world's top performers from more than 20 different sports for his book
Sporting Excellence. In spite of considerable variations in other areas, awareness
and responsibility consistently appeared to be the two most important attitudinal
factors common to all -- and the attitude or state of mind of the performer
is key to performance of any kind.
"I see [art] as a new kind of wealth that counts for more
than owning material things; I’m talking about art as
something people do rather than consume, and do as a
normal part of their lives: creative endeavor as a form of
profound spiritual satisfaction."
105
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Are You Dancing Through Your Sport? 106
Modern dance pioneer Doris Humphrey argues that a choreographer must be
"a keen observer of physical and emotional behavior". Martha Graham adds that
"the dancer's art is built on an attitude of listening with his whole being”.
Choreographer Aiwin Nikolais says that the dancer is a specialist in the
sensitivity to, the perception and the skilled execution of motion ... not just
movement, but the qualified itinerary en route.
The difference is clear if we think of two people walking from home to school
or work. One person may accomplish it while being totally unaware of and
imperceptive to the trip, having his mind solely on the arrival. He has simply
moved from one location to another. The other man, bright-eyed and brightbrained, may observe and sense all that through which he passes. He has
more than moved -- he is in motion.
Merce Cunningham, another pioneering choreographer, studied small-scale
movements found by watching people. They were mostly movements
anyone does when getting set to do a larger movement. Even gestures have a
beauty of expression and meaning begging to be discovered and exploited.
Pay attention to the small-scale movements and gestures of your teammates and
opponents. Observe facial and emotional expressions. You may discover something
that lends enjoyment, that allows you to integrate your own movement more
successfully, or that can be exploited to your own advantage with better timing,
insight or foresight.
And so the experience of music is an entirely artificial one,
its qualities almost unknown in daily life
apart from special moments
when things come together just right. 107
Relaxed Concentration 108
has three essential characteristics:
(1) heightened awareness, or perception;
(2) heightened trust in potential and an awareness of self-doubt; and
(3) strong and undivided desire, or will.
Awareness, trust and will are not merely ingredients but
skills that can be developed by practice.
Those skills will improve performance, learning and enjoyment,
indeed the quality of your life.
They are the doors to the intensifying levels of mind-body excellence.
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Watch out for the times of transition.
109
They are times of danger, when the present situation is ending and the next one
hasn't yet begun. Those gaps are the places where awareness can most easily be
lost.
It's like going through a doorway. If you barge through without caution, awareness
and connection, you open yourself to disruption and invite chaos. Look for the
transitions in your day, and in your athletic or artistic endeavors.
There is an interval as you awaken and prepare for the day. There is an interval
as you prepare to go to class, or to work, or to play, or to create. Even within these
times, there is an interval as you switch tasks, assignments or locations. There is
an interval wherever or whenever there is a distinct difference between what it
was you were doing and what you will do next. Take an extra moment or two to
fully finish what you were doing. Clear the deck. Put it away, in whatever sense
is appropriate for that activity, and prepare for the time when you will return to it.
Now take a moment to prepare for that new and different thing you will do. Focus
on the next task at hand. Check your intent. Choose the qualities and characteristics
that work for you in the new context. See the outcome you want. Clear away any
tension. Take a deep breath and find your center.
In an athletic or artistic context, there are transitions in your game. In slower,
more static games, there may be a moment when you switch from offense to
defense, a perfect opportunity to reset yourself. In the performance of any
technical or mechanical act, there is a moment of approach, a moment of set-up,
a moment of execution, the moment following execution, and the interval before
we do it all over again. There is a moment for planning, and a moment when you
turn over control for performance to your intuitive, subconscious mind.
Plan with your head; play with your heart.
In the cycle of performance, watch your tempo. The tempo for your approach and
set-up may incorrectly set the tempo for your performance. Don't start the next
moment before you finish the last one, before you finish your breath. However,
prolonged hesitation may mean that you haven't fully decided or committed, or
that you are anxious about the results. Find the flowing tempo that works best for
you, that allows you to fulfill your intention. Give yourself a vivid picture of the
desired outcome, and let if flow from the center of your being.
Then there is the moment when we move from performer to observer, or
commentator, or critic. In this moment, increase your awareness, and decrease
your judgment.
There is an interval between cycles, before we do it all over again. This is the
moment between golf shots, between baseball swings, between songs in a concert
we're performing. Let go of the past; don't jump ahead to the future. Being alive
in this moment is a gift, a chance to connect our senses and our selves with
something beautiful. This is the most important transition; it is where we can
connect with the nature of basic goodness and simply appreciate being alive.
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Bringing It All Together Into One
110
The work in the Eurhythmics classes made sense to me instantly. In a few days,
it was fairly clear to me what was going on. What I have experienced since then
is a progressive, continuing opening to the interaction of different components of
the human system... I think it's catalytic. There's a different kind of
concentration that comes along with this kind of work -- you have to be
concentrated and open at the same time. You have to be ready for anything to
happen, rather than the stock Western cultural definition of concentration: "Keep
your eye on the ball." You know exactly where you're going to go. Before these
ideas became real, I would solve problems head-on, tackling the difficulties. This
other form of concentration where you have to be absolutely concentrated and
absolutely present, that's different.... There is a collective tendency to separate
the sensory, mental, kinesthetic, emotional, intellectual and spiritual
aspects of experience [but] you have only one nervous system. All of this
information is traveling along one set of railroad tracks to one railroad station.
Philosopher Alan Watts used to say, "You don't dance to get to the other side of the
floor." Nor do we play to get to the finish of the event. Extraordinary performance
and success in sport, as in all of life, are created by our passionate moment-tomoment involvement. Our victories are natural by-products of this approach.
Extraordinary performances come out of a process of continuous, regular
physical and mental practice. The mindset of an extraordinary athlete is relaxed
but focused and open to even higher achievements. Real success or victory is
measured by the quality of that very process of attention and mindful involvement,
practice and commitment. The process is a joy; the results are the bonus. 111
Journal Writing
112
There are a number of ways that we could navigate or gain access to our creative
impulses, but the one that I would recommend most widely is the writing process.
Writing is not only a tool for self-discovery but a process through which other,
different modes of communication can be understood more easily. Not only do I
want my dancers, musicians and actors to be artistically literate, I also want
them to be meta-cognitive -- to understand themselves as learners and
performers. Journal writing is a natural vehicle for enhancing these
understandings. The written word ... can be used as the basis for the symbolic
language of many different art forms.
[For a deep look at the journaling process, please see At a Journal Workshop:
The Basic Text and Guide for Using The Intensive Journal Process, by Ira
Progoff, Dialogue House Library, New York, 1975. See also The Artist's Way
as noted in the bibliography, or Writing The Mind Alive: The Proprioceptive
Method for Finding Your Authentic Voice, Linda T. Metcalf, PhD. and Tobin
Simon, PhD., Ballantine Books, NY 2002 or visit Proprioceptivewriting.com.]
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Synchronizing Body and Mind 113
Can you send your body into the past or the future? Of course not.
Your body can only exist in the present.
Can you send your mind into the past or the future? Of course you can. We all
spend a lot of our time there, thinking about what happened, or wondering and
worrying about what will happen.
Of course, your mind can be in the present, but is it in the same place as your
body? Not if you're thinking about the strikeout in your last at-bat.
Your mind can be in the present ... you're now up again in the seventh inning...
but if you're thinking about your swing, you're thinking, not swinging.
Your mind may be "in your head" working with conceptual ideas about how you
should swing, not "in your body" running the swing.
What is the difference between being concerned about the results and having an
image of the intended outcome? One's a negative expectation; the other is a
positive intention. There is no tension in having the image. In fact, using
imagery actually reduces tension. But worry and concern and expectation create
bodily tension and provides a different focus for the mind.
If you anticipate how you will feel when you get the result, whether it is the one
you hoped for or the one you feared, you will then have to think about what you
will do next, how it will affect things, and you're way out in the future again.
If you are thinking about what clothes to wear to the award ceremony, you probably
won't be getting the award.
Keep your thinking mind busy by asking it to be aware. Aware of what?
Aware of your center, your breathing, your tempo, your pre-performance routine,
and your intentional image.
If you must think about your performance, it is better to have thoughts that
describe what you intend to do rather than how you intend to do it.
The moment of performance is not the moment for self-instruction.
When body and mind are synchronized,
they are unified in purpose, presence and focus.
They are functioning together
in the same place at the same time.
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Distilling Your Athletic Experience 114
Abstracting is a process that begins with reality and uses some tool to pare away
the excess to reveal the critical (and often surprising) essence, to examine some
quality of the real thing through a brief expression in another form, to shed the
obscurity and the complexity, to cut to the quick of the matter.
Choose some aspect of your sport, and play around with its various elements,
properties or characteristics. Try to discover what's at its essential core.
Write about it. Create a haiku poem. Draw a picture. Create a metaphor.
Mime it. Express it mathematically. Sing about it. Choreograph a dance.
Create something in another form that expresses the single most important skill,
technique or understanding from within your athletic experience with which you
are currently working. Then, put it aside. Come back a week later. Reconsider
your results with the distance of time or space. Is there a new appreciation, a
new understanding?
Exercise for Reflection 115
Once in a while it is necessary or useful to take a few moments to reflect on what's
going on in and around you so that you are better able to cope with life's patterns,
cycles, crises and setbacks. Find a moment and place to relax. With practice, you
can do this almost anywhere and any time. Take a cleansing breath and go to
that favorite place of yours in your mind. (My favorite is sitting on sun-warmed
rocks on an afternoon in autumn at the edge of a 2,000 foot high ledge that
overlooks a deep, forested and uninhabited valley.) You can ask yourself
some simple questions:
How am I feeling emotionally? Identify any sadness, anger, excitement, peace,
frustration, happiness, confusion, or disappointment that is present. What are
you feeling this way? How do these feelings impact on what's going on in your life
at home, in school or at work, in sports, and in your relationships?
How am I feeling physically? Sense the tiredness, the calmness, the strength, the
relaxation, the energy, the weakness, or the tension that is present. Why are you
feeling this way? How do these feelings affect the rest of your life?
How am I feeling mentally? Am I alert, clear-thinking, decisive, or dull and
hesitant? Why am I feeling this way? How does it affect what's going on in the
rest of my life?
How am I feeling spiritually? Am I feeling connected or disconnected? Am I
soaring, or dragging? Why am I feeling this way? How does it affect what's going
on in the rest of my life?
With just a moment's time, you can check in with yourself on the status of your
emotions, your body, your spirit and your mind.
Your awareness alone will tend to move in you in the right direction.
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A Subtle but Undeniable Signature 116
In the creative act, when we are in the flow, all the elements of the process
synchronize into what we experience as a unique sense of "rightness". We are
here, now, occupying the moment with all of ourselves. Our energies are fully
engaged. It is a form of magic, a finely-tuned sorcerer's dance between ourselves
and our medium of expression. We could not be anywhere else. This moment
and this place vibrate with a resonant intensity.
The observer of any creative product (whether crafted with words, paint, clay,
cloth, sound, or movement) can bear witness to a palpable presence, a subtle but
undeniable signature, the result of the creator, artist or performer having placed
all his energy and attention with care into the time and place, the here and now,
of the creative moment.
Devotion works through the medium of your love... 117
The dance becomes the dialogue between Lover and Beloved...
Notes:
1
Coaching For Performance: A Practical Guide to Growing Your Own Skills.
2
Flow in Sports.
3
Staying With It: On Becoming An Athlete.
4
The Ultimate Athlete: Revisioning Sports, Physical Education and The Body.
5
Murray Sidlin, former conductor of the New Haven Symphony, in "Lessons of
the Wild" by Laura Parker Roerden, in Schools With Spirit: Nurturing the Inner
Lives of Children and Teachers.
6
The Everyday Work of Art: How Artistic Experience Can Transform Your Life.
7
Smart Moves: Why Learning is Not All In Your Head, Carla Hannaford, PhD.,
Great Ocean Publishers, Arlington, VA 1995.
8
Rollo May, The Courage to Create, in The Widening Stream: The Seven Stages
of Creativity, David Ulrich, Beyond Words Publishing, Hillsboro, OR 2002.
9
"The Gift of the Arts", by Zephryn Conte, in Schools With Spirit.
10
Deep Play.
11
The Everyday Work of Art.
12
Ibid.
13
Ibid.
14
Ibid.
15
The Art of Peace, by Morhhei Ueshiba, translated and edited by John Stevens,
Shambhala Classics, Boston, 2002.
16
The Everyday Work of Art.
17
Ibid.
18
Ibid.
19
Ibid.
20
The Intuitive Way: A Guide to Living From Inner Wisdom.
21
The Mental Keys to Hitting: A Handbook of Strategies for Performance
Enhancement.
22
The Inner Game of Golf.
23
The Sweet Spot in Time.
24
The Intuitive Way.
25
Creativity: Where the Divine and the Human Meet, Matthew Fox,
Tarcher/Putnam, New York 2002.
26
Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience.
27
Competitive Fire.
28
What Makes Winners Win.
29
The Widening Stream: The Seven Stages of Creativity.
30
The Inner Game of Golf.
31
Golf in The Kingdom, Michael Murphy, Penguin/Arkana, New York 1972.
32
Coaches Guide To Sport Psychology.
On the Sweet Spot: Stalking the Effortless Present, Dr. Richard Keefe, Simon and
Schuster, New York 2003.
33
34
In the Zone: Transcendent Experiences in Sports and Awakening to the
Sacred.
35
The Intuitive Way.
36
The Mental Keys to Hitting.
37
Karl Albrect, Brain Power, in The Mental Game of Baseball.
38
The Rhythm Inside: Connecting, Body, Mind & Spirit through Music.
39
Coaching Mental Excellence.
40
The Future of the Body: Explorations Into the Further Evolution of Human
Nature, Michael Murphy, Jeremy Tarcher, Los Angeles, CA 1992 [see
Chapter 19, footnote number 82].
41
Hare Brain, Tortoise Mind.
42
"Lessons of the Wild", by Laura Parker Roerden, in Schools With Spirit.
43
Hare Brain, Tortoise Mind.
44
The Rhythm Inside.
45
The Sweet Spot in Time.
46
In the Zone.
47
The Sweet Spot in Time.
48
See Sports Illustrated (3/25/02).
49
Tai Chi Combat.
50
The Art of Peace, by Morihei Ueshiba, translated and edited by John Stevens,
Shambhala Classics, Boston, 2002.
51
Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience.
52
Awakening to the Sacred.
53
"Mindful Movements", a video production of Sounds True productions.
54
Based on a review of over 2,000 studies published in reputable journals
("The Physical and Psychological Effects of Meditation", a monograph by
Michael Murphy and Steven Donovan), cited in The Way of Aikido: Life Lessons
from an American Sensei, George Leonard, Penguin/Plume 2000.
55
Flow in Sports.
56
Sacred Hoops: Spiritual Lessons of a Hardwood Warrior.
57
The Intuitive Way.
58
Mastery: The Keys To Success and Long-Term Fulfillment.
59
Competitive Fire.
60
The Art of Peace.
61
A Mind at a Time: America's Top Expert Shows How Every Child Can
Succeed, Mel Levine, M.D., Simon and Schuster, New York 2002.
62
Mastery.
63
Quantum Healing: Exploring the Frontiers of Mind/Body Medicine.
The Inner Game of Golf. [The baseball comparisons and analogies are mine,
following from Gallwey’s description of a golf swing.]
64
65
The Rhythm Inside.
66
Music, The Brain and Ecstasy: How Music Captures Our Imagination.
67
The Rhythm Inside.
68
The Mozart Effect for Children: Awakening Your Child's Mind, Health and
Creativity with Music, Don Campbell, HarperCollins, New York 2000.
69
Candace Pert, Molecules of Emotion, Scribner, NY, 1997 (a leading
neuroscientist's engaging personal account of her pioneering work in
illuminating the inseparability of body, mind, emotion and spirit), noted in
How To Think like Leonardo da Vinci: Seven Steps to Genius Every Day.
70
Awakening to the Sacred: Creating a Spiritual Life from Scratch.
71
The Rhythm Inside.
72
Ibid.
73
Music, The Brain and Ecstasy.
74
Competitive Fire.
75
The Rhythm Inside.
76
The Everyday Work of Art.
77
Music, The Brain and Ecstasy.
78
Ibid.
79
In the Zone.
80
How To Think like Leonardo da Vinci.
81
The Mozart Effect for Children.
82
Boston Globe, December 17th, 2002 (page C24).
83
Dr. Hannaford, the author of Smart Moves: Why Learning is Not All in Your
Head (Great Ocean Publishers, 1995), is noted in The Mozart Effect for Children.
84
The Mozart Effect for Children.
85
The Rhythm Inside.
86
Music, The Brain and Ecstasy.
87
Staying With It: On Becoming an Athlete.
88
Music, The Brain and Ecstasy.
89
Sparks of Genius: The 13 Thinking Tools of the World's Most Creative People.
90
The Sweet Spot in Time.
91
Ibid.
92
Competitive Fire.
93
Lois Butcher (Millennium Sports, Philadelphia, PA), at Enhancing Life
Through Sport, the 18th Annual Conference on Counseling Athletes, June 14-17,
2001, sponsored by the Springfield College Department of Psychology.
94
From the liner notes of Healing Music Project (Vol. 2) by The Relaxation
Company. See the bibliography for further resources and/or explore on your own
at Border's Books and Music stores.
95
The Owner's Manual for the Brain.
96
From the liner notes to Brainwave Symphony: Orchestrate Your State of
Mind, a package of four CD's produced by The Relaxation Company. See
resource notes in the bibliography for further information.
97
The Mozart Effect for Children.
98
Music, The Brain and Ecstasy.
99
The Mozart Effect for Children.
100
In Pursuit of Excellence: How to Win in Sport and Life Through Mental
Training.
101
Compiled from several sources including The Mental Game of Baseball,
the Orlick texts and tapes, Rainer Martens' text, Gelb's How To Think like
Leonardo DaVinci, et al.
102
Psyching for Sport: Mental Training for Athletes.
103
104
The Everyday Work of Art.
Coaching For Performance.
105
Environmentalist Theodore Roszak in Common Boundary magazine, in
The Everyday Work of Art.
106
Sparks of Genius.
107
Music, The Brain and Ecstasy.
108
The Inner Game of Golf.
109
Zen Golf: Mastering The Mental Game, Joseph Parent, Ph.D., Doubleday,
New York 2002.
110
Actor Abbot Chrisman, in The Rhythm Inside.
111
Thinking Body, Dancing Mind: TaoSports for Extraordinary Performance in
Athletics, Business and Life.
112
"The Gift of the Arts", by Zephryn Conte, in Schools With Spirit.
113
Zen Golf: Mastering The Mental Game.
114
Sparks of Genius.
115
Thinking Body, Dancing Mind.
116
The Widening Stream: The Seven Stages of Creativity.
117
Ram Dass (Richard Alpert) (the author of such books as Be Here Now,
The Only Dance There Is, Journey of Awakening, and Grist for the Mill) in the liner
notes of a CD performed by "On Wings of Song" and produced by Robert Gass and
Spring Hill Music.
End