What meditation is all about

There are now many different techniques that claim to be meditation. One study lists over 20 different meditation methods, concluding that there is no single “meditation,” but rather various groups of techniques with different effects. Etymologically, the word meditation comes from the Latin “meditatio” (“thinking, reflecting, pondering”) and the ancient Greek “medomai” (“thinking, pondering”). These terms are also reflected in a Google image search for “meditation”: people with closed eyes immersed in silent contemplation. But this is a misleading image. Outwardly, we see pensive people, but inwardly, it is precisely this “thinking and pondering” that we want to change. It is not the goal of the practice. Most people believe they are meditating but are merely thinking with their eyes closed. The problem is not the thoughts themselves, but thinking without realizing that you are thinking.

Common meditation instructions are often oversimplified. Instructions like “Explore the sensations of your body and mind and let them go” illustrate the difficulties in implementation. Such instructions are comparable to surfing instructions: 1) Get a board as big as you, 2) Paddle to the breaking waves, 3) Lie flat on the board, 4) Jump up when the wave catches the board, 5) Stand relaxed, 6) Repeat. It’s clear that progress with such instructions is limited and few will stay with it.

The term “meditation” does not describe what lies at its core. Meditation is a science, a systematic process to train the mind. It is the mental muscle trained in the mental gym. It’s about exploring and changing your consciousness. The goal is to expand mental abilities, break free from old thought patterns and behaviors, and integrate new, more suitable patterns. To live consciously and creatively and to make the most of our minds, we must understand the raw material we work with and know how to shape it. We do not need a strong spiritual guise for this, but absolute focus on the core of mental training.

Meditation in the context of competitive sports serves as a tool for self-exploration, self-regulation, and self-awareness. The expansion of awareness through meditation includes the enhanced perception of physical and mental processes as well as the ability to change these processes. For me, meditation means training the mind in the midst of life, not just as a formal practice separate from the rest of our lives. If the skills and insights learned during formal practice do not flow into our daily lives, progress will be slow. Thus, meditation is the experience and development of an intuitive understanding of our minds and lies at the intersection between consciousness and the subconscious.

Meditation is a form of mental training aimed at improving a person’s fundamental psychological skills, such as attentional and emotional self-regulation, as well as body awareness and self-awareness. These skills are especially relevant for athletes. Therefore, techniques from the field of meditation fit particularly well with the challenges athletes face in training and competition situations.

The simplest form of meditation is focusing on your breath. At first, this task seems ridiculously simple – but after just a few seconds, you feel a strong urge to do something else. After a few breaths, you lose attention, you get bored and your thoughts wander. Next, you practice not being distracted by thoughts. This requires awareness. This is an important factor in creating a mental training effect by repeatedly triggering the so-called response inhibition: we do not jump directly from a stimulus to a reaction but create a space in between.

By consciously focusing on your breath, you have formally done something you may not have been aware of: You have meditated. Maybe only for a short time, but you have meditated and trained your mind, possibly even neurophysiologically changing it.

In meditation, we form and hold a specific conscious intention, such as focusing on the sensations of the breath or another meditation object. Whenever our mind begins to wander – and it will wander to more mentally attractive places – we learn to recognize this and bring the mind back to the meditation object without judgment. By continuously and repeatedly connecting the mind with the meditation object (e.g., the breath), we create stability and mental strength.

As in sports, frequency and repetition help lay the foundation here. Once we have developed the ability to become aware of and focus on the breath, our ability to concentrate on other objects or tasks is strengthened. You improve your response inhibition by systematically suppressing your automatic reactions repeatedly. This is the moment when a process that requires your conscious working memory is transferred to the subconscious level and becomes a more lasting trait.

In fact, all our successes come from intentions, even if this is not always obvious. Intentions maintained over many meditation sessions lead to frequently repeated mental actions that eventually become habits of the mind. Intentions lead to mental actions, and repeated mental actions become mental habits.

Experiences with increasing meditation practice unfold gradually. At the beginning, it is about perceiving and overcoming obstacles such as restlessness, boredom, distraction, motivation, or concentration problems. After just a few exercises, increasing relaxation sets in, characterized by increased well-being, more even breathing, growing patience, and mental silence. These effects are initially focused on the exercise window and fade with increasing time distance. This changes with further practice when improved attention, awareness, mindfulness, as well as balanced emotions and an inner center become noticeable even outside of meditation exercises. Over time, essential qualities such as clarity, connectedness, acceptance, gratitude, and humility emerge, which are goals of various meditation techniques. Finally, more spiritual qualities develop, such as thought silence, oneness, emptiness, boundlessness, or a transcendence of subject and object.

Our goals within this program are qualities that play out on the upper levels. These are necessary to better design our training, regenerate more purposefully, achieve optimal performance in competition, and maintain long-term joy in sports. With increasing practice, you will move along this depth situation. However, the boundaries are fluid, and even during basic exercises, you will have experiences from almost all areas. These are not yet permanent but serve as a taste of what is possible. It is enough for us to have occasional experiences and enrich our mental abilities as athletes.

At the beginning of the meditation practice, the difference between ordinary experiences and what is considered mindfulness is not very clear. It takes practice to learn the difference between being lost in thoughts and recognizing thoughts. In this sense, learning meditation is like learning any other skill: it requires many repetitions.

I will be honest with you: Until you reach a certain level of stability, the practice will mainly consist of mind-wandering, physical discomfort, drowsiness, and frustration. This should not discourage you because you know this from physical training. Professional sports and meditation share a common element: It is about ambitious intentions and mastering execution. Therefore, meditation practices fit perfectly with sports. The instructions are simple, but the implementation is hard.

Meditation means recognizing thoughts as thoughts. A common observation when starting meditation is that it becomes even more challenging to stay attentive without getting lost in thoughts because you realize how distracted you are. This is completely normal and should motivate you as you see that you are on the path to transformative change. Meditation teaches basic principles like how perception mechanisms work. Believe in progress: It is more about the process of perception than the event of perception. Mindfulness is like a muscle. It gets stronger and more flexible the more you use it.