It’s spring training season here in beautiful Florida with major league teams playing all of half a mile from the Tiny Ashram! I went to a baseball game (the second one I have seen in my entire life) and what I found was a master class in high pressure performance and mediation as the secret weapon of the best. For all those familiar with the game; I am not. I was learning in the stands and I still have a lot of questions. But let me share what I saw. Being spring training, each team rotated through as many as five different pitchers. The pitcher is alone, on a hill, surrounded by a critical crowd of people who could never do what they do, but are all too willing to judge. Each and every pitcher there is professional quality. They all grew up playing the game and honing their skills and they all know how, physically, to throw the ball. But those 8-10 pitchers that I watched were all so different from each other. The difference was not how well their arms worked. The difference was entirely what was going on in their heads. Some succumbed to the fear of team cuts that were days away. Some were attached to ego, or self-consciousness. Some were focused on the crowd’s response to their pitches. Some may have had distracting problems at home.
And then there was one that really stood out. He walked to the mound, took a deep breath, and proceeded to turn the next three batters into the three outs that would turn over the inning. Simple, elegant and done. Call it a fluke but when the next inning came, he did it again. While others would throw a random assortment of targeted and wild pitches, sometimes throw into the dirt, become flustered, or angry, this pitcher did not. He was calm, collected, centered and detached from ego. His relationship with each batter was not adversarial but cooperative. The batters did not know it, but they were working with the pitcher to strike themselves out. The pitcher, the catcher, the batter, and the earth of the field itself were all one in the mission. It was something to see.
I spoke with the pitcher later and confirmed what I had suspected, he is well versed in meditation. That understanding of self and practice in meditation allowed him to – in a single breath – detach from ego, get out of his head, connect with the batter and the field, and therefore perform at a level that the others that day could not. The other pitchers, as incredibly skilled as they were, simply could not get out of their heads and focus as well as this one pitcher could.
So how in the world could mediation do all of that? Meditation is simply the practice of taking a distracted mind and bringing it to focus, over and over. It is a workout for the mind. When you practice that enough, you can focus your whole being on any task in even the most noisy, distracted, and potentially unfriendly environment. For major league baseball pitchers, Olympic athletes, CEOs, broadway actors, surgeons and many other high-performers, years of training lead to a short performance on the field or in the board room, on which futures and fortunes hinge. The ability to focus quickly and stay focused to allow a high level of performance, is everything. Your training means you know, inherently, what to do. Your focus is what allows you to get out of your own way and do it.
I found out that many professional athletic teams have mindset coaches. So in essence, they are training their players to have a mindset, when they could be training their players to shut off their mind altogether to allow training and gut instinct to take over. Off the field, mindset matters a great deal and contributes to good training. On the field, an active mind of any mindset at all means it takes more pitches to turn over the innings. More pitches, means more injury and earlier burnout and an opportunity to hand the win to the other team. While I know nothing about baseball, I deeply understand people, the human mind and the practice of mediation. So for all the amazing teams here in Florida enjoying their Spring Training, may you be blessed with centered focus and the wins that come with it.
