Recent lessons on calmness & well being from Olympic contestants have some surprising roots as they fight performance destroying attacks of jitters

Triumphs, challenges, harsh disappointment, astonishing skills still float in the minds of millions. As are strange tales proving that Sochi, Russia, is what many people have said it is – a weird, troubled dictatorial piece of the Cold War.

In the media here, this is coupled with “officially conceded” apparent drug cartel-related killings, beheadings, etc. seemed on the uptick here.  As a consequence of both of these “items,” uncommon attention has been paid to the strength of human character to meet both exceptionally tough challenges and the vicissitudes of daily life.  (Note: On the heels of all this came the “astonishing” capture on February 22, of Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman, king of world drug lords.  Most seasoned observers say that will not stop of Guzman’s Sinaloa cartel from continuing to operate.) 

The Olympics presented thousands of younger people displaying amazing commitment and the investment of years of resolute training.  It also was an awesome demonstration of what Hemingway called  “grace under pressure.”   Yet the temptation to indulge in slack discipline is apparent as people try to write about the characteristics required in tackling the challenges and vicissitudes of the Olympics, which also color familiar quotidian demands.  No self-discipline, no competence, no success. That was apparent in the Olympics.

A few days earlier, a timely, pertinent article appeared titled “Samurai Secret to Always Being Your Best.”   The primary characteristic so highly valued by those who took up that risky bit of business:  Calmness.  From their point of view it was be calm or be dead. The other samurai skills are assumed.  For the well-known “samurai mind” calmness meant, among other things, using meditation to look carefully at what the challenges ahead demanded of one.  Using calmness to visualize what the enemy’s destructive response will be if you do A, or B, or Z in creating a strategy.  The mental tools used here were the products of Zen Buddhism with bits of Confucianism. That is attributed to the development of the samurai culture.  The samurai mind cherry picked Buddhism – a peaceful philosophy\religion.  Many samurai eventually gave up such things that often historically characterized Japanese “soldiers,” such as torture and needless killing.  Indeed, the Buddhist concept of reincarnation and rebirth led some to eventually abandon all violence and become Buddhist monks “after realizing how fruitless such killings were.”

Stories were heard of Olympian figure skaters – and other athletes – battling nerve shattering jitters as they prepared to display their skills to a worldwide audience.  The results of a lifetime of training were to be revealed to that audience and Olympic judges.  Most well-known, for both TV and print attention, was a candid interview by 18-year-old Gracie Gold.  The legs for skaters, and others, are first to get tight. Then shaky.  For some athletes their pegs won’t move, they remain frozen – and it’s not the temperature. Then the breath: the lungs aren’t furnishing enough oxygen.  Ultimately, all key parts of the body needed in an athlete’s performance seem to be shutting down.  To counter this unwillled reflex, not a few coaches, trainers, parents, and even the athletes themselves, have introduced Zen, or Zen-like instruction into their regular training regimes.

Calmness is the key to being at your best also in less dramatic circumstances.  Example: After living in California and Mexico for some time, circumstances took my wife and me to her home state, Minnesota.  I hadn’t driven on icy roads or streets for 15 years.  Then late one night I was driving my wife’s teenage sister and a group of young friends home from Madison, Wisconsin, in December.  All the overpasses would drip melting snow onto the highway during the day.  That water would turn to a glaze of ice when nighttime temperatures dropped. We were returning from a rock ’n’ roll concert featuring Otis Redding – of “Dock of the Bay” fame.  We traveled at a good speed to avoid getting my wife’s sister home to her parents late.  Then, we hit a sheet of ice and the car began to go its own way.  I saw no vehicles in the other two lanes.   I’d been mediating for years by then.  Without thinking, I calmly addressed my car-load of joyful passengers:  “We’re have a little ice problem here.  I’m going to take the car off the highway.  It may a bit bumpy.  Hang on.  Right about ... NOW.”  With just bit of steering adjustment to tighten the 360-degree spin, I headed off the road onto a matt of frozen wild grass.  More brake and we came to a halt.  The teenage reaction: “Wow.  That was neat.”   Later, I realized that if that incident had happened before my long stretch of meditation, my reaction would have been different,  probably jerking the wheel, excessive, dangerous braking.  

When in harsh or perilous circumstances, Buddhism teaches that calmness coupled with careful thought can do wonders.  We unfortunately live in a electronic age in which immediate satisfaction is the prime answer to almost everything.  Yet one sees more and more people losing control, lashing out at others – even inanimate objects – for no rational reason.  Prompting the old saying:  Much of life is not about what you want, but what you’ve got.  The best tools: calmness, patience.              

Also today sharp-eyed observers will tell you that the career track for people advertising themselves as  “personality advisers” or “personal counselors” is crowded.  Some outrightly declare they’re qualified to provide Buddhist teachings of some sort.  Yet in their private lives they demonstrate not the slightest bit of understanding of how to incorporate Buddha’s teachings into daily life, to say nothing of tackling the long, hard process of attaining enlightenment.   Rather, the worn cliche about talking the talk, but not walking the walk, clearly applies.  The goal of Buddhism, self-enlightenment and regard for others is overwhelmed by ego, living totally undisciplined and addled lives while peddling a mélange of “therapy,” that they themselves find discomforting to practice.    

That is not say that true Zen teachers are easy going, or that falling away from their teachings for stretches of time do not occur even among the most sincere  students.   Shortly after I landed in Los Angeles from the a distinctly un-Buddhistic Great Plains venue, without much reason I picked up a large used text on Eastern culture.  That sent me on a search among libraries and used-book stores known for cheap very old books. There, among stacks of broken-spined hardbacks, and bent paper-bound, crumble-paged fare, I found foreign printed English-language dust-gatherers.  Among them, a dog-eared work published in Kyoto by The Eastern Buddhist Society in 1934:  “The Zen Monk’s Life,” written by Daisetz Teitaroi Suzuki.  Then I found Suzuki’s 1927 “Essays in Zen.”  This was before the notoriety\popularity of the Allen Ginsberg\Jack Kerouac Zen Buddhism discovery. Soon, names of such samurai leaders and writers as Shiba Yoshimasa (1349-1410), were being referred to by people just back from mountain dojos in a still war-shattered Japan.  

Using these tools, I and several friends concentrated on “calmness,” and the samurai’s goal to “always be at your best.”  Then I ran into someone who had received his Dharma training from a Japanese roshi, a master, of forbidding demeanor.  This was was a huge help.  That encounter and the later teachings of D.T.Suzuki (1953), and of Philip Kapleau, who would write the superb “Three Pillars of Zen” (1965) were crushingly demanding mentally and physically.  I and my fellow students of Buddhism learned that we too would often wander from these teachings.  But most of us came back, armed with new vigor.

To possess calmness is the point here, not Buddhism per se.  It is a most well-known tool for cultivating calmness.  If you’re a skater who legs are loosing feeling and strength, what you do, in your mind, is step back and meditate on your own work in cultivating calmness.  It doesn’t have to be Buddhism, but it’s got to be pretty strong psychic stuff if it’s going to work.  All of us can profit from this ability. You needn’t be a king or queen of calmness, just be working on it everyday.  Makes you feel better.