wisely and slow
They Stumble that Run Fast
Last Saturday on my new podcast, I shared Part 2 of my recent interview series with Dr. Ben Bocchicchio. If you gave a listen, feel free to leave a comment or reply to this email with your thoughts! This podcast experiment is a bit outside my wheelhouse, so I welcome any and all feedback.
One of the takeaways was that, when doing resistance training, whether using resistance bands (the cheapskate’s choice for home gym equipment!) or the Nautilus machine, there are lots of benefits to slowing down, including safety, effectiveness, and intensity.
Picking up on that thread of slowing down to speed up, here’s a quote I love from a book I’m reading now, The Competitive Buddha by Jerry Lynch, PhD:
An athlete went to her coach and asked how long it would take to develop into a world-class triathlete. He reassured her that if she trained properly, it would take four to five years to come into her own. Feeling frustrated and uneasy about this, she told him she didn’t want to wait that long. In an attempt to force the issue and arrive on the scene sooner, she asked how long it would take if she worked harder, faster and with more effort. Ten to twelve years was his reply.
I have read and reread many of Lynch’s books over the years, including Thinking Body, Dancing Mind and The Way of the Champion (both coauthored with Tai Chi master Chungliang Al Huang). They bring together Eastern philosophy and sports psychology in a way that’s really interesting and engaging.
You might think it’s impossible to combine Buddhism — a philosophy that teaches that desire is the root of all suffering — with Western sport, which is all about “going for the gold,” and how the only way to get there is by “wanting it bad enough.”
But this is where Lynch pulls off his magic. He cites one example after another of world-class athletes who have upped their game by toning it down, like coaches Phil Jackson and Steve Kerr (who writes the foreward to the book), and players Kobe Bryant and Michael Jordan (who’s been quoted as saying “this Zen Buddhism stuff really works”).
Mindfulness meditation, which is all the rage these days, is really just a secular form of Buddhist tradition. I myself caught the bug after reading Dan Harris’s funny and insightful book, Ten Percent Happier, and I now use the meditation app of the same name almost every day.
The promise of mindfulness meditation is that it allows you to become aware of your own thought patterns and to have more control of your racing “monkey mind.” Victor Frankl, an Austrian psychologist who survived the worst Nazi death camps during the holocaust, and whose work laid the foundation for the field of positive psychology, famously said:
“Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.”
The idea of mindfulness meditation is to widen that space just a little, so that we can become less reactive to the events in our lives (and to the runaway train of worries and fears and thoughts about those events), and instead respond in a productive, healthy way. In other words, it slows the world down just a little, so you can act more wisely and arrive sooner at the place where you want to end up.
You can see how this might be helpful in a sport like basketball, which is all about reacting in the moment, while also trying to execute a play. Or in racing sports, like running or rowing, where the mental game is to stay focused enough to give it your all while not letting nerves or tension hamper your performance. But it’s also useful in real life.
I’ll admit, I’m still pretty terrible at meditating, and I actually don’t enjoy it all that much. But after keeping at it for the past year or so, I have found that I do see benefits in my everyday life. For example, when I find myself in a difficult interaction or stressful situation at work, I’m able to push the pause button, mentally speaking, before acting. When I wake up in the middle of the night, ruminating on some past mistake or future situation, I am able to stop that train and bring myself back to the moment — which vastly improves my chances of getting back to sleep. And when I get a hankering for some high-carb sweet treat, it helps me to stave off the craving… most of the time.
As I’ve said before, lack of sleep and stress are two big seizure triggers, and killing cravings is essential for sticking to a low-carb diet, so for me meditation is a survival skill. I recently learned that there are two types of neurons in the brain: excitatory and inhibitory. The brain keeps these in balance to maintain homeostasis — a yin and yang, in Taoist terms. If I’m understanding the theory correctly (and I make no guarantee that I am), a seizure occurs when that balance is disrupted: excitatory neurons get too worked up, and/or the inhibitory neurons can’t do their job well enough.
Maybe there’s a connection there (or at least a metaphor): meditation strengthens the inhibitory part of the brain, so we can keep the excitatory part in check.
…and in this lies freedom.
PS: If you enjoyed this post, why not share it? Put in your socials, or email it to a friend who needs a smile right about now. Just click the shiny red button below! Email me a screenshot of your share (drobinsonwrites@gmail.com) and you’ll be entered to win an autographed copy of My Unremarkable Brain - hardcover edition before it’s available in stores!
Big Dave - that’s some excellent advice!