“Seek opportunities to show you care. The smallest gestures often make the biggest difference.”
John Wooden

Tuesday, September 6, 2022

"That Zen Buddhism Stuff"

By Jim Freeman

6 September 2022

"When I got that rebound, my thoughts were very positive, the crowd gets quiet, and the moment starts to become the moment for me. That's what we've been trying to do...that's part of that Zen Buddhism stuff. Once you get in the moment, you know when you are there. Things start to move slowly, you start to see the court very well. You start reading what the defense is trying to do. I saw that moment. When I saw that moment and the opportunity to take advantage of it...I never doubted myself. I never doubted the whole game." - Michael Jordan

(Fernando Medina-NBAE/Getty Images)

The above quote by Michael Jordan is taken from George Mumford's excellent book The Mindful Athlete and was recounted to the author after Mr. Jordan hit the shot pictured above to win the 1998 NBA championship. Mr. Mumford collaborated with Dr. Jon Kabat-Zinn to start the Inner-city Stress Reduction Clinic in the early nineties. That connection ultimately led to Mr. Mumford being introduced to coach Phil Jackson and his role working with the Chicago Bulls during their last three championship seasons in 1996, 1997 and 1998.  In 1999, Mr. Jackson moved on to coach the Los Angeles Lakers and Mr. Mumford was asked to consult with those teams as well. The Lakers would win five NBA titles under Jackson's guidance including three in a row from 2000 to 2002. Kobe Bryant commented on Jackson's influence in this area in his book The Mamba Mentality, "When Phil Jackson came...I started to understand the importance of my personalized meditative process. From then on, I placed an increased emphasis on it." 

"There will be calm and tranquility when you are free from outside influences and are not disturbed. Being calm means having no illusions or disillusionment with reality." - Bruce Lee, The Tao of Jeet Kune Do

The term meditation comes from the Latin word meditatum which means "to ponder". There are many different ways to meditate including such methods as transcendental, compassion and mindfulness. We will focus our attention on mindfulness meditation in this essay. 

There are writings in India that discuss the training of the mind that date all the way back to 1500 BC and later works from approximately 600 BC in the writings of the Chinese philosopher Lao Tzu (author of Tao Te Ching). Meditative methods for developing and calming the mind have been used for thousands of years across a wide variety of cultures. Meditation is a primary tool in the art of mindfulness training. The term "mindfulness" is defined by Jon Kabat-Zinn in The Mindful Athlete as "paying attention in a particular way, on purpose, in the present moment, nonjudgementally, as if your life depended on it."  Mindfulness is a state of awareness, a state that is focused on the present moment. It allows us to be fully present where we are right now without being distracted or overrun. It is a capability we all possess at some level but training will lead to an enhanced ability to control our thoughts and emotions and stay in the present. Controlling does not mean we try to suppress unhelpful thoughts and feelings when they arise. Instead of being surprised or becoming more anxious at their arrival, we expect those thoughts and emotions to come and gently nudge them aside so our minds can be in a more productive state. All this has proven helpful to me during such mundane times like standing in line in a grocery store or sitting in traffic. In my pre-meditation days, which were not that long ago, I would sometimes react in a volatile manner to everyday circumstances like those mentioned above. For example, I have memories of me shouting and pounding the passenger seat in my car (it was empty) while stuck in traffic...a response that I've thankfully outgrown. Those incidents are embarrassing and humbling but I use them when discussing ways to gain control of thoughts and emotions.

"If you are depressed, you are living in the past. If you are anxious, you are living in the future. If you are at peace, you are living in the present." - Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching

Buddhist teachings describe the unsettled, restless, easily distracted and indecisive mind as a "monkey mind", a mind that is hopping about in a reactive and uncontolled manner. Mindfulness practices help us calm the monkey mind by training us to become more aware of our thoughts, remove judgement from them and return us to the present moment. Dr. Herbert Benson describes this calming effect as the "Relaxation Response" in his impactful book by the same name published in 1973. In that book, Benson discusses how some of our increased ability to calm and control our minds is a result of physical changes in the brain that take place during minfdulness training. He writes, "Zen monks who meditated...developed a predominance of alpha waves, brain waves usually associated with feelings of well-being. Furthermore, the alpha waves increase in amplitude and regularity during meditation." In the past, we thought at some point in the maturation process our brains were fully formed and there was no changing them. Much current thinking regarding how the brain works and adapts differs from that view and revolves around the term "neuroplasticity". Neuroplasticity refers to physical changes in the brain that occur in response to our environment whether they are an increase or decrease in the size of certain parts of the brain or altered neural pathways connecting to each other and other areas of the brain. 

A 2015 Washington Post interview with Sara Lazar, a neuroscientist at Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School, discusses the effects of meditation on the brain. An eight-week mindfulness study found changes in volume in five different regions of the brain. The participants in the meditating group for that study saw thickening in the following four regions:

The posterior cingulate ("involved in mind wandering and self relevance"), the left hippocampus ("assists in learning, cognition, memory and emotional regulation"), the temperoparietal junction ("TPJ associated with perspective, empathy and compassion") and the Pons ("where a lot of regulatory neurotransmitters are produced"). 


The amygdala ("fight or flight part of the brain important for anxiety, fear and stress in general") got smaller in the group that went through the mindfulness-based stress reduction program. The mindfulness training was practiced by the test subjects an average of 27 minutes a day but many adherents meditate for only 10-15 minutes a day and see benefits. Kobe Bryant (pictured above in Taiwan in 2016) discussed his daily mindfulness routine in an interview with Oprah Winfrey, "I meditate every day and I usually do it for ten or fifteen minutes in the morning, as that prepares me to face whatever comes next." Consistently engaging in a meditation program physically alters the brain as well as trains the mind to become more aware of thoughts and emotions which leads to an increased ability to control them. Dr. Benson writes, "Our Western society is oriented only in the direction of eliciting the fight-or-flight response. Unlike the fight-or-flight response, which is repeatedly brought forth as a response to our difficult everyday situations and is elicited without conscious effort, the Relaxation Response can be evoked only if time is set aside and a conscious effort is made." 

"Remain quiet. Discover the harmony in your own being. Embrace it. If you can do this, you will gain everything, and the world will become healthy again. If you can't, you will be lost in the shadows forever." - Lao Tzu, Hua Hu Ching

Dr. Amishi P. Jha is a neuroscientist and a professor at the University of Miami and she posits in her TED Talk that our minds wander to the extent that in roughly half of our waking moments our attention strays from the task at hand (monkey mind). In her outstanding book, Peak Mind: Find Your Focus, Own Your Attention, Invest 12 Minutes a Day, Dr. Jha discusses presence and purpose as well as the solution to our mind-wandering, "Mindfulness exercises are intended to strengthen and improve coordination between brain networks that carry out a variety of attentional functions: our ability to direct and maintain focus, notice and monitor ongoing conscious experience, and manage goals and behavior." Dr. Jha outlines a four-week program that involves the use of three different kinds of meditation practices each with a different focus and form of attention. Each day's schedule is for a 12-minute period but initially she suggests practicing for just three minutes. The amount of time spent will increase as you become more and more comfortable with the practice. The first method concerns directed attention (on your breathing or some other specific bodily awareness). The second category is an open monitoring exercise where you see yourself "standing on the river bank watching the water flow by". You see thoughts and emotions as they come flowing by without trying to capture or analyze them. The third method is a connection or "loving-kindness" meditation where you focus on improving your "ability to connect and offer goodwill" to those around you as well as to yourself. In all three methods your mind will eventually wander off. As you become aware of that wandering you gently guide your thoughts back to your meditation. Jha writes, "Success here does not mean that your mind never wandered, or that you didn't move at all, or that you experienced bliss, peace or relaxation. Rather, success means you put in the time and did the practice. Success is completion." (See Dr. Jha's book for a complete outline of her plan.)

Increased awareness of our thoughts gives us a chance to be more intentional in choosing them and thus, allows us to choose thoughts that are more constructive whether they be related to performance or our relationships with others. Dr. Rollo May states in his book, The Courage to Create, "Human freedom involves our capacity to pause between stimulus and response and, in that pause, to choose the one response toward which we wish to throw our weight. The capacity to create ourselves, based upon this freedom, is inseparable from consciousness or self-awareness." The more adept we become at using that pause, however brief, to select a more constructive response, the more we will be able to make decisions aligned with what we truly aspire to and who we truly wish to be. This is opposed to spending the bulk of our time being controlled by our reactions and remaining a puppet of our circumstances and the people around us.

"The present moment is filled with joy and happiness. If you are attentive, you will see it." - Thich Nhat Hahn

Mindfulness practices are used by high performers across a variety of disciplines but heightened performance isn't the only positive result of such exercises. Recent studies show potential health benefits from mindfulness practices including decreased levels of depression, reduced anxiety and stress, improved memory, slowed cognitive decline, and lowered blood pressure. Sara Lazar states, "Mindfulness is just like exercise. It's a form of mental exercise, really. And just as exercise increases health, helps us handle stress better and promotes longevity, meditation purports to confer some of those same benefits." Dr. Benson cites decades-old studies that show decreases in oxygen consumption, resting heart rate, respiration, and blood pressure during meditation. These are "indicative of decreased activity of the sympathetic nervous system and represent a hypometabolic, or restful, state. On the other hand, the physiologic changes of the fight-or-flight  response are associated with increased sympathetic nervous system activity and represent a hypermetabolic state...This is why we feel the Relaxation Response is of such import, for with its regular use it will offset the harmful effects of the inappropriate elicitation of the fight-or-flight response."

As mentioned earlier, meditation and mindfulness have been common practices across Eastern and Western cultures for many centuries. They may be somewhat different in certain specifics but they all possess a number of the same qualities, characteristics and benefits. Dr. Benson quotes William James from The Variety of Religious Experiences, "The fact is that the mystical feeling of enlargement, union and emancipation has no specific intellectual content of its own. It is capable of forming matrimonial alliances with material furnished by the most diverse philosophies and theology, provided only they can find a place in their framework for its peculiar emotional mood." Benson then goes on to cite examples in ancient and not so ancient histories of Christianity, Judaism, Buddhism, Taoism, and Sufism among others. Down through the ages, many in these disparate cultures have consistently practiced and advocated a meditative lifestyle. Some engage in a mindfulness practice for the physical health benefits and some do so in order to gain control of their thoughts and emotions. Some look to improve their free throw percentage or to more effectively handle preparations for an exam or calm the mind before giving an important business presentation. Some hope to become kinder and more considerate, to become the sort of person that has a consistently positive impact on others and their environment. Dr. Benson closes his book with the following lines, "You can choose any method of eliciting the (Relaxation) response which best fits your own inclinations: a secular, a religious, or an Eastern technique. We could all greatly benefit by the reincorporation of the Relaxation Response into our daily lives. At the present time, most of us are simply not making use of this remarkable, innate, neglected asset."

"The real meditation is how you live your life." - Jon Kabat-Zinn