This concludes our weeklong series!
In a recent episode of Dana Carvey and David Spade’s popular Fly on the Wall podcast, their guest, Jerry Seinfeld, discussed how he has worked with a sports psychologist to help quiet the negative voice in his head during standup routines. Golf, tennis, and comedy, Seinfeld says, are three avenues where that negative voice is loudest, probably because of the incredibly personal nature of these pursuits.
This is one of the great benefits of sport in our society. It can provide a pathway for developing mental and emotional strategies for navigating the negative voice. Many of the athletes we will watch in the Olympics this summer have learned how to quiet their own negative voice and excel in the face of it.
I have coached high school golf in Charlotte for almost a decade. Golf brings to the surface one’s relationship with performance and results—so often the origin of that negative voice for each of us. Golf is a sport in which one’s performance is plastered on the scoreboard for all to see. In golf, like a standup routine, it’s all up to you. You’re on the stage. When you bomb (which is an inevitable part of the process, by the way), it can feel like you’re suffering alone. Maybe you’re not a golfer, but my guess is that you have something in your life that takes on the same personal dimensions.
Many times I’ve looked into a player’s tear-filled eyes after a tournament and reminded them, “You’re too kind to define yourself by a score” or “You work too hard to let this one round affect you” or “I don’t care what you shoot; I just love to watch you play.” One of my girls once smirked, “I wish I liked watching myself play.” Humor is a good sign that you’re not taking yourself too seriously.
I don’t play competitive golf anymore, but these days I can sometimes place my identity in my performance as an artist. I can label myself a failure because the book I wrote hasn’t lived up to my expectations. I can mistakenly think that art owes me something because of my work ethic. When I slip into comparison or “future-tripping,” I’m looking up at that proverbial scoreboard again, as shame tries to rise up within me, as the negative voice takes over. A typo used to ruin my week. I once submitted an article to a popular magazine and, while writing about toxic spirituality, accidentally wrote “self-defecating” instead of “self-deprecating.” Talk about toxic. But the fact I’m smiling writing this is a sure sign of integration.
Life may as well give us some laughs while we trip over ourselves. I often tell my student-athletes after a tough round that it’s unlikely they’ll remember their score a month or a year or a decade from now. But they may remember laughing with their teammates on the bus ride home.
After reading the Bhagavad Gita a couple years ago I was stirred to implement the philosophy of “karma yoga” not only in my own life but also within our high school golf programs. According to Gita translator Hari Chetan, the definition of Karma Yoga is “performing dutiful action without expectation of favorable results, and dedicating the action and its results to the Supreme Lord, without attachment to results.”
This is golf. This is life. All in, let go. All in, let go.
The world’s top golfers, as we’ll see in Paris this summer, are present with each shot—what Krishna describes as one’s “duty”—bringing the fullness of their hearts, minds, and physicality into the challenge before them. But then, almost immediately, the best golfers—which is to say the mentally strongest golfers—accept the results of that shot and let go of the outcome so that they can get back to the present moment. This process helps quiet the negative voice—in golf and in life—and requires a lifetime of inner work. Seinfeld recently shared on a podcast that he has been doing transcendental meditation for decades.
There must be some kind of an anchoring for our burgeoning dreams and passions. As an artist, the more I invest my heart and mind into a project, the more I tend to attach myself to the results, and, therefore, the louder the negative voice can grow, which then requires me to let go of the “results” to silence the negative voice. The Gita calls this sacrifice. The Christian word for this is kenosis: radical self-giving.
The Franciscan way has much to offer us theologically when it comes to the negative voice. Most people are already too hard on themselves. They likely would not talk to their best friend the way they talk to themselves, or, if they did, they wouldn’t have any friends. Religion, unfortunately, has often amplified that negative voice. Christian theology has historically gone astray in its obsession with sin as a way to conjure up formulas for salvation or, at its worst, manipulate church-goers. Franciscanism, while not denying the realities of sin and the brokenness it can cause in one’s life, concludes that the incarnation would have happened even if humans had not sinned. Why? Because the radical self-giving of love, goodness, and beauty (kenosis) has been flowing like a fountain from the beginning, as the prologue of John’s gospel suggests. Not even sin can stop the flow, only our awareness of it.
Maybe this sounds like theological nonsense, but this simple concept has profound psychological implications. If love, grace, and acceptance are the undergirding force of reality, why would we begin with our own judgments and self-condemnation in our own perception of ourselves? Through this lens, karma yoga is essentially the ability to constantly get oneself back to the present moment, where grace and beauty is abundant. This grace-filled metaphysics provides a structure for reality in which love and acceptance is central.
Seinfeld once told Judd Apatow that he would keep photos from the Hubble Space Telescope on the walls of the Seinfeld writing room. The images were a way to remind writers not to take themselves too seriously, but also, it seems, of the beautiful universe in which we live and the wonder this evokes, something Francis of Assisi intimately understood. Vastness has a way of obliterating self-consciousness. In this divine-soaked world, results have no bearing on who we are, which, quite literally, allows us to “play” with freedom and passion on the course of our lives.
2 thoughts on “Spirituality & Sport: All in, Let Go”
It is very good to see the Franciscan Spirit Blog return. I have missed it.
I just read this wonderfully centering meditation that artfully uses the metaphor of sports and spirituality to shake me loose from the comparisons and self-judgements that suppress the spirit of the game, the game I’m being called to live with joyful abandonment. So grateful for this!