The Second Spear
Mindfulness as a Foundation for Resilience and Performance
Written by Joe Glaser-Reich, Certified mPEAK Coach
Staring at the spear protruding from the diver’s head, I took a deep breath. In that instant, I heard my mind begin to chatter: “How the @#% did that happen?!?” Followed in rapid succession by “you’ve never seen anything like this before…he’s screwed…I’m screwed…there’s nothing you can do to help...this guy is going to die.” And then, as I exhaled, I shifted my attention. The stream of thoughts didn’t go away - mindfulness isn’t magic after all – but their urgency and volume diminished as I firmly, deliberately turned my thoughts to my training: OK, signal for the med kit from the helicopter. Gloves on. Airway open. Is he breathing? How bad is the bleeding? Let’s get this guy to a higher level of care as fast as possible.
While not everyone gets lowered out of a helicopter to care for a critically injured diver, we all have seen our share of metaphorical spears-to-the-head over the past year. We have witnessed life change radically during the pandemic, and this change has been hard. In response, you may have tried mindfulness as a tool to cope or doubled down on your existing meditation practice.
Mindfulness is often presented as one psychological tool among many, one way of reducing stress or coping with hardship. And that is – in fact – a fair way to think about mindfulness. After all, numerous scientific studies have demonstrated that practicing mindfulness meditation decreases stress and anxiety and increases emotional and attentional regulation.
However, this view of mindfulness as one tool among many is radically incomplete. Instead, mindfulness can be a foundational skill, a way of being that supports our ability to act wisely and perform under stress. And this deeper approach to mindfulness can be taught.
In Mindful Performance Enhancement, Awareness & Knowledge (mPEAK) we develop mindfulness as a way of being, explicitly introduce skills from both positive and performance psychology, and dive into how mindfulness integrates with and supports these other mental skills.
We start by developing the foundations of mindfulness through formal, and what might be familiar, meditation practices, such as body scan, awareness of breath, and open awareness meditations.
As we develop mindfulness through formal meditation practices, we begin to create or enlarge a bit of space, a micro moment, between stimulus and response in which an opportunity to respond, instead of reacting out of habit, arises. This space gives us time to act wisely.
To this traditional foundation, we add a multitude of skills drawn from performance and positive psychology. That is to say, we offer explicit means of wise action drawn from ancient mindfulness traditions and multiple streams of modern psychological investigation.
As we begin or deepen a formal meditation practice, we start to notice that thinking is happening. While this sounds self-evident, when we begin to pay close attention to the stream of chatter in our heads, we realize that the brain pumps thoughts just like the heart pumps blood. And, on top of that, we have surprisingly little control over what thoughts come out and when they show up. These thoughts rapidly become stories, and these stories often drive how we perform in a given situation.
For example, I did not choose the initial stream of thoughts that emerged when I hauled myself up on to the boat and saw a spear sticking out of the diver’s head. I was there to help, and the last thing I wanted running through my head was a stream of thoughts telling me that all was lost. And had I believed the first spurt of thoughts that my brain pumped out, I would have almost certainly given up and radioed for a coroner. Mindfulness gave me, and anyone else who practices for that matter, the ability to pause long enough to become aware of this negative “performance story.”
Once we become aware of our performance story, we have several courses of wise action available. We can deliberately shift the story, employing strategies drawn directly from the traditions of cognitive behavioral therapy and it’s more recent upstream cousin resilience training.
Once I noticed the narrative around the hopelessness of the diver’s situation, I was able to shift the primary radio station playing in my brain from profanity-laced despair to mater-of-fact training. And this training immediately helped me dispute the belief that the patient was past saving. Did he have a pulse? Yes. Was he breathing? Yes. Then there was definitely hope and more than enough motivation to try everything I could to help this very much still alive person.
Another wise course of action available once we notice our performance story is one found more frequently in traditional mindfulness training: to simply acknowledge and stay present with the unknown. Rather than needing to reach a conclusion right now, we can allow the mind to rest in this lack of certainty. We can pause and admit that we don’t actually know yet, and that it’s OK not to know.
On the boat, this approach looked like letting go of the need to diagnose or determine the patient’s ultimate fate, allowing the uncertainty of his outcome to be. Dropping the need to know how things would ultimately turn out, freed extra energy and attention to focus on what needed to happen in the present moment. Stabilize the spear. Begin preparing the patient for immediate transport.
There’s a fairly well-known Buddhist story about the power of mindfulness for dealing with suffering that goes roughly like this: In battle a warrior is shot with an arrow. He immediately experiences sharp searing physical pain at the site of the entry wound. And, on top of the physical pain, his mind begins spinning stories about how unfair it is that he got shot, how much it will continue to hurt, how he will never be able to fight again…you get the idea. This, according to the parable, is roughly akin to the warrior taking out his own bow and shooting himself a second time. While that might be a bit of an exaggeration, it is definitely fair to say, had I lost my ability to focus and believed the first (or second) series of thoughts that arose in my mind when I first saw the diver, that would have been as good as whipping out a spear gun and shooting the poor diver again. As with many instances in life, I arrived after the first spear had been fired. However, I had the skills, one of them being a decade of mindfulness practice, to work to heal the wound caused by the first spear instead of adding another spear to the already dire situation.
If you’re curious about increasing your ability to bounce back and perhaps even thrive during stressful times, consider joining us for our next mPEAK course, on Zoom, Friday March 26 – Sunday March 28:
Corrie Falcon and Joe Glaser-Reich will be your coaches for this intensive course in mindfulness training for athletes, professionals, first-responders, and anyone seeking to achieve their goals, as well as attain new levels of performance and well-being. The foundation of this program is based on the highly respected and empirically supported Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) program. Additionally, mPEAK incorporates elements of sports psychology, positive psychology and specific exercises formulated to correspond to recent neuroscientific findings and related research regarding optimal performance.
Your coaches bring a wealth of professional and personal experience working and coaching in high performance and high stress settings.
Corrie Falcon is the Performance Mind & Coach Success Coordinator at UC San Diego Athletic Department and specializes in helping athletes, teams, and coaches reach peak performance. Corrie is a former world-class swimmer and USA National Team Member. Prior to her current role, Corrie was an award-winning Swimming and Diving Head Coach for the University of California, San Diego. Corrie is trained in performance psychology, is a Certified mPEAK (Mindful Performance, Enhancement, Awareness & Knowledge) Coach, a Life Coach, and Yoga Instructor. In her spare time, Corrie enjoys surfing, swimming, yoga, and spending time with her husband and two children.
Joe Glaser-Reich serves as a rotary wing search and rescue professional in the federal government and co-led a mindfulness pilot project designed to advance the wellness, resilience, and performance of individuals across multiple federal agencies. Joe is a certified mPEAK (Mindful Performance Enhancement Awareness & Knowledge) coach, and he graduated from the University of Pennsylvania with a Master of Applied Positive Psychology degree in 2018, returning to the program the following year as an Assistant Instructor. Prior to his current roles, Joe also sailed on an ice breaking buoy tender for a year and taught English in Thailand on a Fulbright Scholarship. In his free time, Joe enjoys meditating, hiking, reading a print newspaper, writing, hanging out on a surfboard, and occasionally catching a good wave.
