THE MINDFUL ATHLETE: Secrets to Pure

Performance
Excerpted from

by George Mumford, with a Foreword by Phil Jackson

Permission is granted by Parallax Press for reprint of this excerpt on the
WBUR website.
May not be reprinted without written permission from Parallax Press.
INTRODUCTION :

The Zone
Seventy-two million people were watching game six of the 1998 NBA
Championship Finals between the Chicago Bulls and the Utah Jazz. With only
eighteen seconds left in the game and the Jazz aheadby one point, an
invisible shift seemed to occur: Michael Jordan stripped the ball from Karl
Malone, slipped away from Bryon Russell so deftly that Russell careened to
the floor, and effortlessly made the winning shot with only five seconds to
spare, bringing the Bulls to their sixth championship and second three-peat.
It would be Michael Jordans and Phil Jacksons last game with the Bulls, and
it is considered one of the greatest plays in NBA sports history. Fans
remember what they were doing at that moment the way some people
remember where they were when JFK was shot or Neil Armstrong landed on
the moon. If youre too young to remember those milestones, fill in the
blanks as you see fit.

Life is available only in the present moment.

THICH

NHAT HANH

I was sitting a few rows behind the bench, watching this groundbreaking play
unfold, knowing that Michael was in that very special place called the Zone.
When I got that rebound, my thoughts were very positive, Michael
recounted later. The crowd gets quiet, and the moment starts to become
the moment for me. Thats what weve been trying to do...thats part of that
Zen Buddhism stuff. Once you get into 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. We were hanging too
close.
Id been doing that Zen Buddhism stuff with the Bulls for five years when
Michael Jordan made that famous play, and I had seen countless athletes
experience the Zone. By that time, Id also taught mindfulness to people in
every walk of life, from the locker room to the boardroom, from Yale to jail.

Back in the day when I embarked on the journey that would lead me here,
people didnt use the word mindfulness. It was called stress management,
of which I had plentystress, that is. And it was during a moment of extreme
stresscrisis, reallythat Phil Jackson contacted me in 1993. The Bulls had
just come out of that three-peat when the team fell into a crisis: Jordan had
announced his retirement in the wake of his fathers murder. Media attention
on Jordan, intense under normal circumstances, had reached an almost
frenzied state. Meanwhile, the teams identity was adrift; it had been so
wrapped up in Jordan that they were referred to as the Jordan Airs. Without
their superstar, public perception of the Bulls ability to keep their stride hit
an all-time low; team morale went south for the ride. In the midst of this
adversity, with team members in various states of emotional distress, Phil
had to rebuild a team and bring harmony to discord. Thats when he reached
out and brought me to his training camp to teach mindfulness and help heal
the team.
At the time, I was a full-time staff member at the Center for Mindfulness
(formerly called the Stress Reduction and Relaxation Program) in
Shrewsbury, Massachusetts, and I was teaching mindfulness to prison
inmates in a program I helped develop with Jon Kabat-Zinn in the early
nineties. Over the course of five years wed taught mindfulness to over five
thousand inmates in five different locations. I had never been incarcerated,
but in addition to being familiar with the stress experienced by professional
athletes, I could understand the stress experienced by some of these
inmates because, like many of them, I grew up in the inner city where
impulse control is, shall we say, something of a problem.
When Michelangelo was asked how he created his master- pieces, he replied
that all he did was to chip away to get to the masterpiece that was already
inside. I believe were all chipping away to get to that masterpiece, even
those of us who grew up in the ghetto, on the wrong side of the tracks. We all
have a divine spark within us, but weve either crushed it, created an
ingenious system for hiding out, or devised ways of being that make us feel
separate. I now regard each person I meet as a caterpillar in a chrysalis. In
order to become butterflies, we have to break our way into freedom and
transformation. Mindfulness is a tool we can use to do this in the most skillful
way. Admittedly, I had to hit rock bottom with my ass on fire before I figured
out the most skillful way out of my own chrysalis.
Mindfulness was the skillful means to help me emerge, and I have used
mindfulness techniques to help athletes of every shape, size, age, gender,
and skill level emerge to be their own selves. Mindfulness comes out of
Buddhist meditation, an ancient practice with many layers of complexity.
What I offer in this book is a synthesis of mindfulness principles that fall
under the aegis of what I call the Five Spiritual Superpowers. These

Superpowers are my personal spin on the Buddhas Eightfold Path and on his
teaching of the Five Spiritual Faculties: faith, diligence, mindfulness,
concentration, and insight. The Eightfold Path was the Buddhas
understanding of the way out of suffering. In his book Old Path White Clouds,
the Zen teacher Thich Nhat Hanh tells the story of the way the Buddha
regarded the Eightfold Path and all his teachings. According to the story, the
Buddha said, My teaching is not a dogma or a doctrine. He goes on, I
must state clearly that my teaching is a method to experience reality and is
not reality itself, just as a finger pointing at the moon is not the moon itself.
Consider these Superpowers to be like spokes in a wheel: They are nonlinear
and they work together. Take one away, and the wheel doesnt turn. Remove
the hub or the center, and you have no wheel. Purists interested in a more
traditional approach will find many books on the subject of mindfulness,
several written by my friends and esteemed colleagues. At the end of this
book Ive collected a list of these that have been most influential to me.