What inspires and limits us

Mind and body are the two pillars that sustain human existence. A sportsperson spends a lifetime perfecting his body to the demands of his chosen sport to achieve excellence. In the limitless vast space of the human mind, there is no goal which is not achievable. One can imagine flying to the Alps and conquering the Himalayas or falling into the depths of despair without blinking an eye. It is said if body and mind are in sync, no hurdle, howsoever difficult, is insurmountable.

The world is a crucible in which human bodies are shaped and new ideas forged. If we assume that sport is a metaphor for life, one would realise that if the mind and the body work at cross-purposes, success can never be achieved. Sport is as much about how to deal with the fault lines of your emotional conditioning as it is about perfecting your physical skills.

Mindfulness is the new-age mantra, that magic potion which can keep you off all traumas of the past and anxieties of an imagined distressing future. Be present in the present and all worries will dissolve, the Buddha said 2,500 years ago. I am a regular visitor to a Buddhist meditation centre where, surprisingly, the young and restless flock more than those whom age has left withered and helpless. Fear of the future, endless distractions and very little human contact in a world driven by the faceless social media has forced them into searching for an escape route that their present life denies them.

Among the many young seeking stillness and training in single-pointed attention was a professional golfer. He was struggling with his game, which had more to do with an afflicted mind that lacked focus. He was not seeking salvation but ways to keep his mind reined in so that he could perform to his potential on a golf course. Many years later, I met one of India’s most lethal strikers of the cricket ball, who is now retired from the game and like most of his ilk, spending his time playing golf. Many say he is so good that he can turn pro. Is he thinking of becoming a professional golfer? “No, I want to enjoy my golf. Don’t want to take pressure anymore.” Pressure on a man who hit six sixes in a T20 international? Success comes at a cost.

The aspiring sportspersons require as much technical coaching as they need mind, or more appropriately, emotional coaching. Our five senses are our gateway to the world and every person has a unique neurology which gets expressed through verbal and non-verbal language. A distinctive psychological training method called the Neuro Linguistic Programme (NLP) to deal with the emotional issues that sportspersons have to deal with, puts these sensory perceptions at the centre of its research to solve their problems. It is a field which deciphers a person’s trauma through the body and muscular movements.

One of the practitioners of this method is the bright, articulate Rukhsar Saleem, who is helping out with a hockey coaching programme being conducted at Delhi’s Shivaji Stadium for underprivileged children by K Arumugam, better known for the hockey book he wrote on India’s 1975 World Cup win.

Rukhsar was a business journalist who shifted gears, did her Masters course in NLP to understand human behaviour patterns and says that each person has a unique programming of neuro-linguistics in their bodies. One of the established facts of this programme is the dictum: “Feelings live in the mind (brain), emotions live in your muscles.”

According to her, three of the five senses — visual, auditory and kinaesthetic — are the robust and dominant ones to receive any information. Each person has an innate or acquired preference (either due to culture or practice) to imbibe information from the outside environment. “So a good coach identifies how that information has been received and helps the sportsperson use that as a resource and bypass un-resourceful information to optimise performance under pressure. For example, in the case of Virat Kohli, the ease in his body movements and the ability to keep seeing around the field even when he is not batting, are strong indicators of him being extremely visual and kinaesthetic.”

But there could be a player who feels stifled and gets choked by the sight of screaming crowds. It is likely that people from riot-ridden areas have a different neurology and are always looking outside, looking for danger. A coach’s job is to find a balance between the outer and the inner world and reduce the gap between knowing and doing.

To understand the mind and its complexities and the resultant behavioural patterns could be a life-long project. According to Buddhism, it will require many lifetimes to achieve that end-goal of equanimity and wisdom. For our limited project to help sportspersons achieve their optimum potential, it is very important to understand what inspires us and what limits us. We can’t get rid of all our problems but we can understand them and accordingly deal with it.

As Rukhsar puts it, “Courage is not the absence of fear. It is the ability to acknowledge it and how to deal with it.” Cliche maybe, but its relevance has stood the test of time.

— The writer is the author of ‘Not Quite Cricket’ and ‘Not Just Cricket’

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