Home Base with Jeff Warren
Home Base with Jeff Warren
Frisbee
15
5
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-16:10

Frisbee

The core skills of meditation and practice.
15
5

For a few years, it was a ritual. On sunny afternoons, my friends and I would converge at Trinity Bellwoods Park and separate across the field. Then the hypnotic exchanges would start: the long throws, the bright orange disk against the blue blue sky, the running and catching and passing and laughing. Time would drop out and our cares would sluice away.

Design by our pals The Muse Collaborative - fellow frisbee enthusiast David!

Frisbee as an activity is packed with specific qualities: fresh air, endorphins, physical exercise, camaraderie (sometimes, beer). Practicing solo violin in the back of a church has a distinctly different feel, although some find it equally fulfilling. 

Frisbee and violin may look very different on the surface, but my sense is that committing to either trains some of the same underlying mind-body skills. A handful of these skills live at the headwaters of mental, emotional and spiritual health. 

When you know the skills, it’s like you know a secret. You know how to direct almost any activity towards something more powerful and fulfilling. And if you pay close attention to what’s happening – to how the practice deepens and the specific skills involved in helping it deepen – then you’re also learning how to adjust the controls of experience itself, at any moment. 

Let’s look again at our frisbee game. Don’t look at Mark – he drank too much beer, now he’s dozing on a grassy knoll with his shirt off, getting a terrible sunburn. Let’s look at James, or rather, let’s look out from James, at the experience of playing frisbee through the aperture of James’s awareness. 

Before anything else, James chooses what he wants to pay attention to. Too often we’re hijacked by things we don’t actually enjoy attending to – our worried thoughts, say, or in James’s case, the book he’s supposed to be working on. This afternoon, the demands of frisbee mean that all James’s attention is flowing out to the disk and the exigencies of play. He’s already feeling better. 

This is the skill of concentration, which has two parts: selection, and then full engagement. James focuses on frisbee, and then he engages. He notices the more of himself he commits to the activity, the more satisfying it becomes. He starts to get into flow, his mind synchronizing with the action, his catching hand right where it needs to be.

James also notices how much he’s enjoying himself, and makes a mental note to play frisbee more often. This is also a skill – the skill of clarity, of insight, of seeing what’s true in experience. After a while, he notices other things that are harder to put into words. Something about the perfection of the scene, the green grass and white clouds. Something about time. Something about Mark’s tender humanity.

In his total availability to the moment, James is deepening a third skill: equanimity. Not pushing or pulling on how things are, but opening so fully that certain inherently fulfilling qualities – we can call them spiritual – begin to saturate his experience. James feels gratitude. He feels connected. He feels things are as they should be. And this is healing. It helps build trust in life's basic goodness. 

The main point I want to make is that this way of relating to our experience can be practiced, so that it happens more often, in more activities, in ever-deeper and more continuous ways. Meditation is one way to do this, and the relative simplicity of a sitting practice can accelerate our understanding of the dynamics involved. 

But meditation is not the only way. As we learn to recognize and cultivate these skills, any practice – including frisbee – can deepen our experience of life. We just have to incline ourselves – patiently, consciously –  in that direction.

This is endlessly fascinating to me. Among other things, it means each of us can customize practice to fit our existing passions and circumstances. 

Tasha and I are writing a book about all this, so I’ll have more to share about this subject in the months to come. For now, let’s practice. In this meditation, we’ll touch on each of the three skills mentioned above, as a way to help recognize them in other parts of life.

Jeff

PS - My understanding of the core “attentional skills” of mindfulness has been hugely influenced by my teacher and mentor Shinzen Young. He’s written a lot on this subject, but to get a real sense of Shinzen’s precision nerdiness, video is the way to go. Here is Shinzen on concentration, sensory clarity, and equanimity.

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Extended 25-Minute Meditation


Eudēmonia 3-Day Summit – Florida

November 1-3, 2024
West Palm Beach, Florida

Happy to announce that I’m part of an impressive lineup of people who know more than I do about almost everything. I guess they needed someone to sit around and do nothing?

There are many many fascinating talks and offerings and experiential activities at the first-ever Eudēmonia Summit. Dan, Sebene and I will be there to offer a Meditation Party, plus each morning I’ll guide meditation for curious attendees and luminaries. Come say hi!

Here’s some copy from their website: “Eudēmonia—named after the ancient Greek word for “well-being”—is poised to become the world’s largest wellness gathering. Alongside other experts, scientists, teachers, and creators, we’ll be exploring the latest in evidence-based research on cultivating your well-being.”

Learn More


THIS WEEK ON THE MIND BOD ADVENTURE POD

Our guest wandered out of the Ontario forest and is here to challenge how we think about ourselves and meditation and nature and agriculture and the old crafts and a lot more. Welcome, Steven Martyn, founder of The Sacred Gardener School. While living alone in the bush - mediating, surviving - Steven came to understand meditation as a form of hunting for the origin of thoughts, looking for the “I within the I.” His relationship to nature changed. More intimate, more connected to nature’s gifts. He found the old ways of agriculture, of grafting, of building – all of them sacred practices. And now he teaches this in his forest mystery school.

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Home Base with Jeff Warren
Home Base with Jeff Warren
A friendly community with free guided audio meditations every week, and mini-essays on the baffle-wonder-challenge of somehow existing.
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