Author: Benjamin

Today is the inauguration. It is going to be a day of complicated turbulent energy in the world I inhabit, and probably the one you inhabit as well.

I believe a substantial majority of Americans have misgivings about Donald Trump. Obviously the people who voted against him–a majority of the people who voted, let’s remember–are, to put it mildly, uncomfortable with him. But I strongly suspect a substantial percentage of those who voted for him are troubled by him as well. I believe that most people are decent and try to do good in the world, so I suspect that Trump’s shenanigans–the sexism, the appeals to base racism and xenophobia, the tendency toward pettiness and vindictiveness, the lack of impulse control–have created some apprehensions for most people.

(Now please don’t take that to mean that I think most or even many Trump voters regret their vote. They could have misgivings about Trump and still legitimately prefer him to Hillary Clinton. They may still feel he has the potential to be a good president. I’m merely suggesting that a substantial percentage of Trump voters probably have some ambivalent feelings about the man.)

What’s more, the people who lack those reservations are proving to be the people who feel empowered by the basest elements of Trump’s rhetoric to behave in ways that most of us, irrespective of political affiliation, surely condemn.

And today the man who is the focal point of these emotions and energies will, amid great pomp and circumstance, formally take over the office of the Presidency of the United States, the most powerful office in the world.

So then, what is likely to be the feeling in the collective energy as we ceremonialize this transfer of power? Among those who strongly opposed the man and hate that he got elected, there will be great negativity. Among many of the rest, there will be not celebration but uncertainty. And the ones celebrating are the sort of people who thrive in conditions of dissonance. Add it all up and we can expect today to be a challenging day for most of us.

So how might we approach today so that we survive the day with as little energetic disruption as possible? The strategies I outlined a few weeks ago are as critical today as they’ve ever been. Avoid media of all sorts as much as possible, and avoid social media like the plague, which today from an energetic perspective it is likely to be. If you are inclined to follow Trump’s inaugural address, consider reading a transcript of it after the fact rather than watching it. That way you can best divorce the content from the energetic complexities of Trump himself, as well as the not-exactly-neutral energies of the media. Eat well today, avoiding foods that tend to push us out of balance like refined sugar and alcohol. Spend some time exercising. Spend some time meditating. Should you find yourself feeling agitated during the day, pause, center, close your eyes and take a few centered breaths. And, if at all possible, get out into nature. Trees and rocks and rivers and oceans will never be particularly disturbed by the gyrations and perturbations of humans.

In short, do your best to be a point of equanimity amid the chaos. In turbulent times, which the Trump years almost certainly will be, every person seeking to balance the collective energy rather than distort it is an asset. Be that person.

And just like that, six-time champion Novak Djokovic is out of the Australian Open.

I turned on the match midway through the second set, with Denis Istomin holding a 4-3 lead and Djokovic serving. At that point, Novak was down a set, and Istomin was fighting him toe-to-toe. After one of Istomin’s shots was called out, giving Novak the game, Istomin took a long look at the spot where the ball had landed. “You think this is clay?” Novak shouted petulantly. This is not the invincible Novak of 2015 and the first half of 2016, I thought.

At 4-5, Novak fell behind 15-30, and then double-faulted to give Istomin two set points. Novak at his best always found a way out of this sort of problem, and here he did it yet again. A forehand winner erased the first set point, an ace the second. Two points later and the score was 5-5. In the next game, Novak quickly went up 0-40. Istomin saved two break points, but a Djokovic backhand winner sealed the break. At that point, Djokovic seemed to have reestablished the imperiousness we’ve come to expect from him. He won his next service game at love and, with it, the set.

It was now almost 11pm my time, and I have grown so accustomed to Novak erasing his opponents when he hits his stride that I went to bed. (The Australian is a tough tournament for U.S. fans to watch. Most of it happens during our late night/early morning.) I figured Novak would win the next couple of sets comfortably, in the typical Novak way.

His loss was so unexpected that initially, when I saw the score, I read it the other way: Novak in five. But no: Djokovic comfortably won the third, but Istomin took the fourth in a tie-breaker and won the fifth 6-4.

So this morning, I watched the second half of the fifth set, wondering if I could figure out what’s happened to the Novak I knew. There’s nothing clearly wrong with his game, it’s just that it’s not right. There’s an indifference to his play, a distance from the experience, as though he doesn’t particularly care. And that’s the kind of sentence you write and then immediately question. Like, “Wait, can that be? Novak Djokovic doesn’t care?” Because during his period of invincibility, Novak was the personification of will-made-manifest. He seemed almost trans-human, his play fueled by human desire shorn of all human weakness. There’s a reason “machine-like” was the adjective so frequently used to describe him during this period.

After his victory at the Australian Open last year (which featured, you might remember, a somehow-he-found-a-way-to-win-despite-100-unforced-errors fourth-round victory against Gilles Simon), I wrote this:

It’s well known that Djokovic wants more than anything to complete his career Grand Slam by finally winning the French Open. I wonder: if he wins there, does the need for a little mental relief, plus the signs we saw here that his attention is flagging, mean that he can’t quite be at 100% at Wimbledon a month later? At the Olympics, a month after that? At the U.S. Open just a few weeks later still? As great as he clearly is, there comes a point when he simply has to let down. It will be fascinating to see when that happens.

That he made the finals of the US Open obscured just how indifferent his form since he won the French has really been. A third-round four-set loss against Sam Querrey at Wimbledon. A second-round exit at the Olympics. A semi-final loss in the Shanghai Masters, and a quarterfinal exit from the Paris Master. One wonders, now, if his appearance in the U.S. Open final should carry an asterisk. Consider these matches on his path to the final: a second-round walkover; a third-round retirement after only six games; a quarterfinal retirement (by Tsonga) after two sets; and the strange semi-final against Gael Monfils, whose play in that match John McEnroe described as “disgraceful.” (In the press conference afterwards, Monfils defended his play by saying that he simply can’t beat Djokovic when they play straight up. To which I would point out that you certainly will never beat any player you don’t believe you can beat.) Which means that, of the seven rounds at the US Open, Djokovic only played three matches against players even modestly equipped to beat him–and one of those he lost.

We all thought he was back after his epic win against Murray a couple of weeks ago in the final of the Qatar Open. But after his display yesterday, it seems he’s still failed to regain his form. How long will it be, and what will it take, for him to find it again?

They come to me like stars as night falls, first one, then a few, then many, then more than I can count. And they sing to me like the stars do, bright twinkling melodies in the dark. So many songs!

I think of a piece of advice a friend of mine gave me once. He said, “Don’t let that you can do anything keep you from doing anything.”

Thus the space I seek in my writing and publishing: instead of being overwhelmed by cacophony, I seek to create choirs.

I watched a lot less football this season, and the football I watched, I watched with some misgivings. This summer, I read a bunch about CTE and how furiously the NFL attempted to blackball the researchers who first raised the alarm about head injuries in the NFL, and those readings made it hard to be a participant in a system in which people are asked to destroy their brains and their futures for my entertainment.

But I’ve also been a Pittsburgh Steelers fan for my whole life, and apparently that’s a piece of my identity that I’m reluctant to give up. I watched the Steelers beat Miami (a game that included two brutal helmet-to-helmet hits by Steelers linebacker Bud Dupree on Miami quarterback Matt Moore) and I watched the Steelers beat Kansas City (a game that included Steelers safety Sean Davis’ brutal helmet-to-helmet hit on Kansas City wideout Chris Conley). On Sunday, I will surely watch as the the Steelers play New England in the AFC Championship game.

Why am I telling you all this? As introduction to this.

There are unexpected pleasures to being a ski instructor.

Yesterday afternoon, I got put on lesson support, which means riding the chairlift with little kids to help their coaches get their classes to the top of the hill–for reasons that should be obvious, we don’t let the little ones ride the chairlift without adult supervision.

My first ride up of the afternoon was with a little girl. The very first words she said to me, without any prompting whatsoever, were, “I’m four.”

“Oh yeah?” I said. “When did you turn four?”

“Well,” she said, “It’s kind of a long story.”

Back in the late summer of 2015, Jerry and I started the TTW project to test our hypothesis that using centering and other energy techniques would enable us to develop potential within ourselves that had previously laid latent. We spent a year playing with these techniques in the sports realm (mostly golf and tennis), and we saw real improvement. With our hypothesis thus confirmed, we began developing a program to teach to others.

And then the election happened. The world went completely out of balance, and Jerry and I both felt called to respond. Most of our work over the past two months has been in response to that call.

For both of us, it felt quite natural to write about our experiences and our responses to them, but this led to a question: what are the common threads between the work we were doing on the golf course or tennis court and what we’ve been doing since the election?

In two particular areas, the parallels are very clear. In both cases, everything starts with the practice of centering and exploration of the centered breath. Centering engenders a state of flow, grounds our energy into the earth, and enables us to move through the world in a more embodied state, so we can feel and respond to what’s around us while lessening the distortions caused by an over-reliance on our minds’ thoughts and opinions.

Secondly, in both realms, we bring an intent to use the centered state to enable and strengthen the foundation for change. In the world of athletic endeavor, centering gives us the opportunity to feel our way through the blockages that get in the way of improvement and excellence. Within the greater space of our lives, centering provides us the means to experience barriers to flow not as some vague, subconscious disquiet, but as a reality felt consciously within the body.

On the golf course, the tennis court, or the ski slope, the means to measure change is easy. We know what higher-level performance looks like in each of these arenas, and we can measure ourselves against it. But in the greater world, things aren’t so simple. The breakdown in our system is so great that we’re well past the point of any simple fix. We’re going to have to build something new from an entirely new consciousness.

The centered state creates the space for that change. As a society, we find ourselves without a map for how to proceed. Our political history tells us where we’ve been–tribalism, empire, feudalism, democracy–but it’s no longer clear where we’re going. All we can do is open to the energy of the situation. By using the practice of centering to move toward greater flow, we can begin to find the new truths that our present situation demands.

We need to seek flow not just in the gym and the playing fields, but in all of our day-to-day activities, from the conversations we have throughout the day to the types of information we allow into our minds and bodies.

We’re facing a great crisis–and a commensurate level of opportunity. We simply must seek and cultivate a state of flow. Our well-being, indeed, that of our entire world, depends on it.

Despite the NFL being an organization that puts profits and public relations waaaaaaaaay ahead any sense of responsibility to its players–without whom there is no product to sell–I’m gonna give them a Better Idea for free. Today’s a Thursday, so let’s talk about Thursday Night Football.

I like Thursday Night Football as an idea, but, as Seattle’s star cornerback Richard Sherman noted, the product on offer is “an absolute poopfest.” Football is a brutally demanding sport, and there’s simply no way player who play on Sunday can come close to fully recovering by Thursday. Playing on Thursday then radically increases their chance of injury and makes it impossible for them to play their best. While putting player safety aside in the name of revenue is nothing new for the NFL, the inferior product on display is costing the NFL their fans’ goodwill. It’s no coincidence that ratings have been sharply down this year.

Here’s a Better Idea, and a simple fix for the problem: Teams get scheduled for Thursday night only if they had their bye-week the week before. Then the players will have had a week-and-a-half to recover from their last game, and will have a week-and-a-half to recover until the next one. Player safety improves, the product on offer improves, and the NFL gets to keep Thursday Night Football. A simple solution, and everyone wins.

I promised doggie pictures, and I keep my promises.

(Presented in clickbait-friendly list form. I expectantly await a concomitant surge in readership. It’s too bad I don’t take advertising.)

1. Having three weeks of pieces scheduled (the two weeks of sabbatical and all of last week as well, to prevent coming off sabbatical and finding myself immediately behind the eight ball) felt great. My stress levels fell, my days felt wonderfully open, and my vision of how I might focus my writing got both clearer and more expansive.

That settles it. I will make this kind of forward preparation into a habit, a practice.

2. My sabbatical rule was that I didn’t have to write, not that I couldn’t. Nevertheless, when the time came, I chose to reject the writing urge, thinking that doing so might prove deeply recharging at the end of my weeks off. It worked. I had no problem at all staying comfortably on top of my drafting last week. It was easy, and I found myself working on more ambitious pieces than I do when I have imminent deadlines.

3. I didn’t write, but I did scribble down the myriad ideas that came to me, ideas that tended to be substantial. I see the potential for a great deal of exploration within those ideas, and I’m excited to dive into them.