Why Meditation for Cricket Teams?
India won the World Cup after a gap of 13 years (Photo Credit: PTI via the Hindu).
2014 Super Bowl Champions Seattle Seahawks, 2016 World Series Champions Chicago Cubs, , Patrick Mahomes, quarterback of 2023 & 2024 Super Bowl winning team, Kansas City Chiefs, and J. J. McCarthy, quarterback of the 2023 NCAA Football Champions University of Michigan Wolverines, all swear by the benefits of meditation on athletic performance. So impressed is McCarthy with meditation that he wants to promote the practice to the world. See this video clip.
This article explains why meditation has delivered such outstanding results in baseball and football and suggests that it should also be adopted by Cricket teams.
To elaborate, exemplary performance in any field occurs when the processes are designed well and operated in the best possible way and the emotional excellence of everyone associated with the chosen activity is high. In the absence of an adequate level of emotional excellence, the best of the best strategies do not and cannot deliver the best possible performance. Boost emotional excellence and the performance zooms.
High level of emotional excellence is indicated by the capacity of an individual to remain centered in the presence of extenuating circumstances that are part of life. See these two short video clips, ABC Road Rage Nation and Baba Shivanand Ji feeding monkeys and decide for yourself who has a higher level of emotional excellence.
To explain, human beings are endowed with two types of emotions: Positive emotions and negative emotions.
Positive emotions include unconditional love, kindness, empathy, and compassion.
Negative emotions encompass anger, hatred, hostility, resentment, frustration, jealousy, fear, sorrow and the like.
On a scale of emotional excellence, maximum positive emotions are at the top, maximum negative emotions at the bottom and all other combinations of the two somewhere in between these two extremes.
The pursuit of higher levels of emotional excellence is not an intellectual exercise. Do a thirty-day self-assessment and convince yourself that such is the case. The required positive changes have come about from within.
Positive changes begin to come when the focus of attention is enhanced as in deep contemplation. This is also the state where Type I discoveries can occur. Type I discoveries amount to connecting the dots in the ocean of existing knowledge.
When the focus of attention is further enhanced as with meditation, Type II discoveries can occur. In ancient jargon, Type II discoveries go by the Sanskrit name, Shruti, meaning revealed. Type II discoveries cannot be brought about on the basis of existing knowledge. Many profound discoveries of the ancient past such as the Vedas, Upanishads, The Bhagvad Geeta, etc., are all Type II discoveries.
A direct consequence of meditation is an explosion in performance in all aspects of life including mental and physical health, creativity and innovativeness, athletics, interpersonal relationships, discord and violence.
The extent of improvement in the individual self can be assessed because emotions can be estimated.
To explain how, there are trillions of cells in our bodies. If we break down the cells into even smaller parts, they are made of atoms. Atoms are not sold objects. They comprise of protons and neutrons in their nuclei and electrons that orbit them. Thus, we are all vibrating all the time. The Vibrational characteristics are our true nature. They tell us everything about us.
Unfortunately, our five senses cannot perceive these vibrational signals because they are too subtle. For measurement purposes, they must be stimulated and amplified.
In one approach based on the GDV (Gas Discharge Visualization) principle, a harmless electric signal is used for stimulation and amplification. Here, the user places ten fingers of both hands, one at a time, on the glass electrode of a device called Bio-Well, connected to the USB port of a digital computer. A harmless electrical signal is then applied to the finger. The finger’s response to this electrical stimulus is a burst of photons which are captured and analyzed with software. The intensity of the discharge and its area are used to produce a set of parameters that give us an estimate of the subject’s emotional state.
The measurement is simple, painless and noninvasive and takes only a few minutes to complete. See this short video clip showing how the measurement is made.
Principal among the results are pranic energy (0 to 100 Jx10–2), stress (0–10) and Chakra alignment (misalignment from the central vertical line, %). The desirable values of these parameters are Energy, 50–70 Jx10–2, Stress < 3 and Chakra misalignment <10%. See this article on pranic energy, The Life Force Of ‘Prana’ In Our First Breath To Our Last, India Currents, April 21, 2024.
The measurement instills a sense of confidence in the practitioner that the meditation practices are working and serves as an impetus to keep up with the practice regularly and diligently.
The cricketers will see that with practice, their parameters are moving in the right direction. Furthermore, the improvement in the performance on the field will be self-evident.
The author first published the link of emotional excellence and the performance in the external world in an article, The Secret of Exemplary Performance in BizED, now called Insights, in 2019. Insights is a publication of the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business (AACSB), the body that accredits Business school curricula in the United States.
In closing, the ideas and concepts in this article will have a far-reaching impact on the game of Cricket and should be embraced.
About the Author
Pradeep B. Deshpande is Professor Emeritus in and former Chairman of the Chemical Engineering Department at the University of Louisville and president of Six Sigma and Advanced Controls, Louisville, Kentucky. He is an author of seven books and over one hundred fifty articles in reputed journals that include Proc. Royal Society–UK, Chemical Eng. Progress, Ind. Eng. Chem. Proc. Des Dev, Chem. Eng. Science, among several others, and is a recipient of several international awards. Pradeep used to be Captain of the Cricket team in his college days in India. He is a Fellow of ISA. pradeep@sixsigmaquality.com.
