July/August 2011 Alternative Health
Spirit Zone: The Spiritual Side of Sports
by Steve Taylor
The connection between sport and spirituality might seem hard to see at first.
You don’t see much evidence of spirituality at a soccer match, with 22 men running around a field chasing a ball and another 50,000 fans shouting and gesticulating at them.
There is, however, a pronounced psychic and spiritual aspect to sport, which the best athletes are familiar with, even though they may not use the word spiritual to describe it.
It’s possible to say that the desire to experience spiritual well-being is one reason we play sports. According to psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, sport is important because it’s one of the most readily available ways of generating the state of being he calls flow.
This is the state we experience when our attention is completely absorbed in an activity, and our awareness of our surroundings and ourselves fades away. It’s not the passive absorption of watching television, but the active absorption we experience when we fully concentrate and make powerful mental efforts — when we perform challenging, stimulating, creative activities like learning a foreign language or a musical instrument, painting or playing sports.
Flow enables us to take control of our own consciousness, and step beyond the psychic entropy which is our normal state, when worries, desires and other kinds of chaotic thought chatter run through our minds. We experience an inner peace, and a sense of being more energized or alive than usual.
Flow corresponds to the state that the traditional eight-limbed path of yoga refers to as dharana (concentration), which comes before the deeper spiritual states of dhyana (meditation) and samadhi (union with the divine).
In the Zone
But sport can sometimes enable us to reach these higher levels too. Once an athlete is locked into a state of flow, his or her absorption might intensify further, until it reaches a state which is similar to dhyana. At this point unusual things may happen.
Spiritual teachers tell us that psychic and paranormal abilities emerge naturally in higher states of consciousness, as a side effect of spiritual progress, and athletes occasionally experience these. They often speak of being in the zone. These are moments when suddenly everything clicks and they shift to a higher level of performance and become capable of astounding feats.
Time moves slower than normal — this is often the main reason why the player is capable of such astounding feats, because he or she has more time to play with, more time to anticipate his opponents’ actions and to position himself.
New age writer David Icke was once a professional soccer goalkeeper and he regularly experienced the zone. He recalls how during an important match, somebody fired a shot from close range, which looked unstoppable:
"As the Barnet guy made contact everything went into slow motion for me. I moved across, watching the ball drifting slowly to my left and then I dived, lifting my right hand to turn it over the bar. All was like a slow-mo replay and everything was quiet, like some mystical dream, until my right hand made contact with the ball. Then everything zipped back into conscious time, I landed and bounced on the floor and the noise erupted, as if someone had turned off the mute button."
At this dhyana (meditation) level, other types of strange phenomena can occur too. Many distance runners have reported seeing glimpses of the inside of their own bodies while running (which is one of the paranormal abilities the ancient yoga philosopher Patanjali describes in his Yoga Sutras).
Short-distance runners, on the other hand, often experience a phenomenon called tipping, in which they feel that they are rising into the air and becoming extremely light as they run. More dramatically, athletes might feel a sudden in-rush of great strength and energy, as if they’ve made contact with a giant energy reservoir inside them which is normally inaccessible.
Sports can also take us beyond the psychic level, and give us what I call awakening experiences — spiritual or mystical experiences of heightened awareness, connection and unity.
Other more sedate sports can give rise to awakening experiences. The English poet Ted Hughes often experienced a meditative state while fishing. Hughes notes that in order to write poetry you have to have the ability to intensely focus your mind, and he believes that he acquired this ability through fishing. He describes the effect of staring at a float for long periods:
“All the nagging impulses that are normally distracting your mind dissolve. Once they have dissolved, you enter one of the orders of bliss. Your whole being rests lightly on your float, but not drowsily, very alert.”
Why is it that sport has this seeming power to generate awakening experiences? Perhaps the best answer is to compare it to a more traditional method of inducing spiritual states — the practice of meditation.
Something similar can happen when we play sports. The activity or game itself can have the same function as a mantra in meditation: it focuses our attention. We turn our attention off to everything outside it, and as a result the level of consciousness-energy that we give away drastically reduces.
And if we focus our attention well, then our thought chatter subsides too. As a result, there is an intensification and purification of consciousness-energy inside us, which equates with states of dharana, dhyana and perhaps even samadhi.
Thus sport can be a kind of spontaneous spiritual practice.
Steve Taylor, author of Waking From Sleep
, is a researcher in transpersonal psychology at Liverpool John Moores University. Visit www.stevenmtaylor.com.