| Summary: | "This book documents all of the emergent trends for bringing mindfulness into the domain of sport in the modern era and evaluates their research base and reported outcomes. The authors also present their own mindfulness-based training program, the eponymous MSPE for athletes and coaches. Although MSPE is still relatively young, as the authors themselves emphasize, there is compelling evidence, just as there was in medicine 40 years ago, that bringing the discipline of systematic mental training into sports at all levels can not only enhance performance and outcomes but also catalyze a greater sense of deep connection and satisfaction and, at least in some cases, the merging of mind and body into a space that, at its higher reaches, transcends the very sense of a separate self who is doing the performing. This experience touches a domain of human performance where what we call" mind" and what we think of as" body" come together in that original beauty of the Greek ideal, embodied in action, in the timelessness of the present moment, an experience that--when it can be put into words at all, which it often cannot, except perhaps in Homeric poetry (see Scarry, 1999, pp. 93-94)--is described as "flow" (Csikszentmihalyi, 1990; see also Lambert, 1998, and Murphy White, 1978) or nondoing (Kabat-Zinn, 2005b). In essence, it is the same phenomenon as when a crew, as described earlier, experiences only one mind and one body in the boat and the boat seems to propel itself through the water, an experience known among rowers as "swing". May this book spark widespread interest in mindfulness within the domain of sport and sport performance at all levels in society, from occasional everyday athletic pursuits to the highest reaches of amateur and professional sports, both individual and team-based. And may it equally stimulate a generation of new and increasingly rigorous scientific studies to, as Thoreau said in another context, put a firm foundation underneath our dreams."--Foreword (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2017 APA, all rights reserved).
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