Video by Bryana Nguyen
Story by C Jackson Cowart
CHAPEL HILL, N.C. — One by one, they file into the conference room and find their places: some at the long wooden table, some on the floor; one in the windowsill, two on the couch. It’s a haphazard scene ahead of serenity — the storm before the calm.
It’s Meditation Monday for the North Carolina women’s golf team, the only time in which being is better than doing. Head coach Jan Mann takes out her phone and sets it at the head of the table, and the cramped room in the Chapman Golf Center fills with the soothing British tones of Andy Puddicombe, the co-founder and voice behind the meditation app Headspace.
“When you’re ready, just a nice big deep breath,” the voice says, “breathing in through the nose and out though the mouth.”
And so their Headspace journey begins. The players gently close their eyes and feel the contact between the soles of their feet and the floor. He tells them to be aware of the sounds around them: lips smacking, bones cracking, tears streaming down one player’s face.
Notice how your body feels, he tells them. Notice the sense of heaviness, or of lightness; stillness or restlessness.
“It doesn’t matter which it is,” the voice says. “The only thing that matters is being aware of what it is.”
Meditative practices have long been known around the world, but studies in recent years on the health benefits of meditation have spurred a surge of popularity. The UNC Program on Integrative Medicine says mindfulness is an “essential foundation for other stress reduction techniques” that can reduce blood pressure, fatigue and chronic pain, in addition to emotional and spiritual benefits.
Jeni Shannon, a clinical sports psychologist at UNC-Chapel Hill, uses mindfulness meditation with athletes in individual and team settings. Shannon is convinced by the benefits to life and performance — from reduced stress levels and better pain response to increased sensory awareness and control.
“For many of them, there’s no opportunity to slow down, to just be,” she said. “And for all of us, we need that.”
“Meditation Monday,” the women’s golf team’s 10-minute guided meditation every week, didn’t become a mainstay until this semester. But for Mann and her players, the journey began two years ago in this conference room. And it’s only just begun.
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It wasn’t but five years ago, Shannon says, that mindfulness meditation was still mostly removed from athletics, seen as a religious doctrine reserved for unconventional practice. But as more research linked meditation to improved health, it became the latest trend for athletes looking for a competitive edge.
In 2017, a study at the University of Miami found that a few minutes of daily meditation helps athletes withstand the mental stress of extensive physical labor. That same year, the University of Southern California received a $25,000 grant from the NCAA to develop a mindfulness training program for student-athletes. This year, Nike partnered with Headspace to integrate guided meditation into its running apps.
In recent years, Seattle Seahawks coach Pete Carroll and Golden State Warriors coach Steve Kerr led their respective teams to championships with the help of mindfulness training. Kerr first learned it from legendary coach Phil Jackson, known as the “Zen Master,” who won 11 titles across three decades while integrating meditation and traditional Buddhist principles into his coaching. He even impressed his teachings on Michael Jordan, the Hall of Fame basketball player and famed UNC alumnus.
“I think it’s helpful for every sport and every athlete,” Shannon said. “The application just looks a little different.”
Mann had done her own research on the usefulness of meditation in golf when, two years ago, she reached out to Barbara Fredrickson, a psychology professor at UNC who had written the 2009 book “Positivity.” Fredrickson referred her to Sumi Kim, a Buddhist chaplain at Duke who was assisting Fredrickson with a study on mindfulness.
Kim had never worked in athletics before, but she taught the team, anyway: a six-week course, one hour per week, on the power of mindfulness meditation. Each week started with a basic principles of a certain type of meditation — walking, eating, loving-kindfulness — followed by practice and reflection. It was embraced by some, resisted by others; why spend time counting breaths when they could be swinging clubs?
In those hours in the conference room, she planted the seed of mindfulness. Eventually, it would bear fruit on the course.
“Meditation training is exactly parallel to the athletic world …” Kim said. “If you want to be an enlightened zen master, you have to put in Olympic levels of training.”
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Heel up, lifting, floating, touching, pressing.
It’s the first “Meditation Monday” of April, and Leslie Cloots is back at Finley Golf Course, teaching her old teammates the five steps of walking meditation. She tells them to repeat the steps in their head, a reprieve from negative thoughts as they walk on the course.
“The slower, the better,” she says.
Two years ago, Cloots was the pupil, a top golfer on the team and chief skeptic in Kim’s six-week course. Mann would always tell her team to think about the now, to live in the present and forget about the past or future. But how, Cloots would ask?
The answer, she learned, was mindfulness. Soon after Kim’s course, Cloots joined the Carolina Meditation Club and went on a multi-day silent retreat with a dozen students she had never met. During her final two years at UNC, she’d get up 20 minutes early each day to meditate — focusing on her nostrils and the warmth in her lungs, the depth and direction of her breath. Her body was like a machine, she says, and she’d watch from a third-person view.
It translated to the course, where Cloots says her increased awareness and consciousness helped steady her golf game. Her stats backed it up, as she boasted the team’s best stroke average in her final three years.
“Golf, or any sport, is a meditation,” says Cloots, now a professional golfer. “It’s just a lot more physical and there’s a lot more going on than just sitting on a cushion. If you’re hitting balls on a range, there are so many fields that you can focus on. You completely forget time, you just focus on that.
“It’s the exact same thing … It’s exactly mindfulness.”
Now, back on this course for the first time as an instructor, Cloots is providing the answers to the younger golfers who missed Kim’s teachings.
Every morning, sophomore Mariana Ocano wakes up five minutes early just to let her mind wander. Brynn Walker, a fellow sophomore, does the same at night — counting her breaths as she falls asleep. It helps when the team travels through multiple time zones, an issue that plagues many collegiate athletes.
The players have integrated meditative practices into their pre-shot routines: one or two deeps breaths, visualizing the path of the ball, clearing out distractions. It also helps during the seemingly infinite lulls between each shot, when nagging fears clutter the mind.
“It’s not the absence of thoughts; it’s just letting them pass by,” Ocano said. “You’re just watching them pass.”
So far, it’s working. The Tar Heels finished ninth in the 2017 NCAA Championship, their best result since 2011. This semester, their first with weekly meditations, they’ve had five top-five finishes — most since 2011 — in a record-breaking season.
“We all see how we can get some benefit from it,” Ocano said.
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“Slowly bring yourself back into the space around you,” the voice says. “You can open your eyes in your own time.”
It’s over now, the heaviest 10 minutes of the entire week. One player wipes the tears from her eyes; two others wipe the sleep from their own. They’ve just finished the first 10 days of their Headspace journey, the voice says, but this is just the beginning. There’s so much more to explore within the mind.
You can see the relaxed state they’re in after each session, Mann says. They can feel the training pay off.
“We encourage them to do it beyond just golf, because it is a practice,” the coach said. “And the more you practice it, the better it is.”
Mann and associate head coach Aimee Neff purchased full subscriptions to Headspace and lend their logins to the players. Walker uses it on occasion; Ocano wishes she did more. Cloots, now a year removed from UNC, uses apps of her own.
Kim says she’s surprised more collegiate teams haven’t adopted mindfulness tactics in their routines. And while both Duke and UNC have robust mindfulness programs at their universities, Kim says, it doesn’t always translate to athletics.
But it’s slowly catching on, just as it has with women’s golf over the past two years. The football team and swimming and diving teams practice yoga, which shares principles with mindfulness meditation. Women’s lacrosse coach Jenny Levy integrates mindfulness into huddles during practice. Joel Berry, a star on the men’s basketball team, meditated in the locker room before games throughout his four-year career.
Shannon says it’s a skill that takes time to develop, but she sees it continuing to grow in the athletic community as athletes treat mental recovery with the same fervor as they do physical recovery.
“Virtually every athlete I’ve ever worked with performs their best when they’re in the moment,” she said. “And so I think that’s a good hook to say, ‘Hey, here’s just another avenue to do that.’”
