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It’s the most common thing in the world to forfeit a fulfilling routine when one’s schedule becomes more demanding.
A novice at any skill will fail to find meditation in the practice of that skill until he or she has achieved a level of technical expertise that makes the skill feel like second nature.
beautiful moments cannot always be planned.
Hitting a Major League curve ball is hard enough without attaching to it a personal agenda.
it’s actually in menial tasks that we find the best opportunities to practice stillness.
Concentrate on whatever you’re doing. Life is full of menial tasks, which means it is full of opportunity.
Rather than stopping thoughts, meditation is about shifting one’s awareness out of thought by focusing attention on something else.
Often, the simplest ideas are the best.
Desired mechanics were repeated in a place of stillness and thus ingrained, regardless of the force of the swings.
After mechanics are in place, the biggest challenge a hitter faces is timing his swing with the moving ball; inversely, the art of pitching is all about disrupting that timing.
Meditation, practiced in any effective format, trains us to exist and function apart from the mind and ego, allowing us to experience the present moment.
Perfection is not the point.
Meditating daily, we observe our minds, our egos, and our emotions from a distance, learning to watch ourselves as witnesses, no longer drowning in thoughts or emotions.
Being more emotional doesn’t equate to caring more.
My awareness, clouded by fears of failure or illusions of grandeur, perceived only my mind’s opinion rather than what was actually before me.
It’s amazing what we notice when we actually watch with full awareness.
The mind is always there, incessantly spinning its web of thoughts, and any moment of weakness can let it back into places where it is unwanted.
it’s important in any endeavor to know when to focus and when to relax,
responding rather than reacting
“Wisdom is not communicable. The wisdom which a wise man tries to communicate always sounds foolish … Knowledge can be communicated, but not wisdom. One can find it, live it, be fortified by it, do wonders through it, but one cannot communicate and teach it.”
I already understood what some players never figure out; baseball is a perfectly designed game.
it’s not uncommon to make the mistake of comparing where we are in our lives to where we should be. The truth is that there is no such thing as where we should be; we are where we are, period.
“Before enlightenment, chop wood, carry water; after enlightenment, chop wood, carry water.”
You can’t force a flower to bloom or fruit to ripen on the vine; it needs to happen when it is supposed to happen.
Psychologists call it a sustained peak experience.
Things happen when they’re supposed to happen. We may try to control and change the flow of life to fit into our own schedules, but life moves at its own pace. All we can do is chop wood each day, and make adjustments as needed, and remain nonresistant to life.
It takes discipline to keep your eyes on process rather than on results.
Superstitions are fun, but they don’t explain success.
Unlike superstition, a routine is an exercise of discipline, creating a space through which the zone can enter of its own volition.
the master warns him of the ego’s desire to become attached to the bow and its representation of accomplishments and advises that “… when you have passed beyond it, do not lay it up in remembrance! Destroy it, so that nothing remains but a heap of ashes.”
How could they get into my head if I wasn’t in it myself?
hanging onto resentment is no way to go, so why start now?
I need to be vigilant and disciplined with my daily routines and try to apply complete attention to every action.
my epic stretches were actually by-products of my bad stretches. The reason I had ten- and twelve-homer months was that I was willing to accept the three- and four-homer months.
Over the past few years, I’d succumbed to an image of myself as an antisuperstar.
by doing these things I was actually feeding a new identity that my ego had chosen for me, that of the enlightened, spiritually superior athlete.
Life isn’t about continually getting to the next level. Too many of us view life as if it were a school in which we constantly are trying to graduate to the next grade.
I was finished trying to live up to an image of who I wanted to be or who I thought I was. It is all too easy for any of us to get lost in such manufactured images. Often, the perceptions and expectations of those around us strengthen the weighty images of ourselves we already carry around. Habitually, we label ourselves and others, and before long these labels create a false sense of identity that we spend far too much of our energy trying to justify. Sometimes we habitually identify ourselves with our jobs, our possessions, our goals; other times we habitually identify ourselves with our
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Eastern philosophy proposes that you can never step into the same stream twice.
So does Heraclitus.
these frustrations had arisen out of my own preconceptions that were based more on how I thought the world should be than on how it actually was.
one thing about allowing yourself to acknowledge your emotions as they arise: Sometimes, it hurts.
mind was crowded with theories and ambitions,
no matter how idyllic a situation may seem, there are always difficulties. Such is life.
Competition fuels the ego, which insists that we always be better than others; it’s the part of us that’s never satisfied and yet is revered, not only in sports but in business and politics.
That’s how it is with good friends, years may pass and yet connections remain strong. Friendships transcend time and space. Being at home refers to a lot more than just being in an old, familiar place.
In truth, there is only ever the beauty of each moment.
“Sometimes you win, sometimes you lose, and sometimes it rains.”
I knew better now than to resist change, which is one of life’s constants
Maybe that’s why youth and pride so often go hand in hand; we need that push at that time to send us off to create our “personal legends,”
what matters is never so much the place as the attitude and mind-set you bring to it.
