I learned to just be." I asked George what he thought Kobe meant by that.

Well, he's really talking about coming from the eye of the hurricane or, or, or your masterpiece.

You want to call it Buddha consciousness or Christ consciousness or divine spirit, you can call it whatever you want.

But when you can be still and know, when you can just come out of that space, Joseph Campbell talked about it a little bit in The Power of Myth when he said when an athlete is in championship form, there's a place of rest inside of us, that when you come out of that, you're not compelled by desire or fear.

You hold your center, and you just, you're in the moment, and y- you do what you know to do.

You express yourself honestly in that moment.

You're not worried about the result.

I just can't do it," what would he say to that athlete?

I learned to just be." I asked George what he thought Kobe meant by that.

Well, he's really talking about coming from the eye of the hurricane or, or, or your masterpiece.

You wanna call it Buddha consciousness or Christ consciousness or divine spirit, you can call it whatever you want.

But when you can be still and know when you can just come out of that space...

Joseph Campbell talked about it a little bit in The Power of Myth when he said, "When an athlete is in championship form, there's a place of rest inside of us that when you come out of that, you're not compelled by desire or fear.

You hold your center, and you just, you're in the moment, and y- you do what you know to do.

You express yourself honestly in that moment.

I just can't do it," what would he say to that athlete?

He's quoted on George's website as saying, I asked George what he thought Kobe meant by that.

Well, he's really talking about coming from the eye of the hurricane or your masterpiece.

You want to call it Buddha consciousness or Christ consciousness or divine spirit.

You can call it whatever you want.

But when you can be still and know when you can just come out of that space.

Joseph Campbell talked about it a little bit in The Power of Myth when he said when an athlete is in championship form, there's a place of rest inside of us that when you come out of that space, You're not compelled by desire or fear.

You hold your center and you just, you're in the moment and you do what you know to do.

What would he say to that athlete?

Yeah.

And he says, and then the grandson gets really concerned and says, "Grandfather, which wolf is gonna win?" And the grandfather says, "The one that I feed." And so- I love that ...

you know, my work in the medical center, you know, working with the autonomic nervous system and whatnot, we can get into trying to change things or just realize that...

And this guy named Robert, uh, Bruce Lipton, he wrote a book called The Biology of Belief.

Mm-hmm.

And he said, on a cellular level, the cell is either in survival mode or growth mode.

It can't be in both.

Mm-hmm.

Let's start there and then we'll pull the timeline forward a bit.

Yes.

So I attended the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and I was an aspiring student athlete.

I went to play basketball, but I wasn't on a basketball scholarship.

So I would have been what you call a walk-on.

And it was my sophomore year and I was rooming with Julius Irving, who's known as Dr. J, we call him Doc.

And I was going out for the, basketball team and we were having what they call in some circles, they call it an OTA or organized team activity.

So for those that are watching and listening right now, you've given some great examples here, but for a top athlete, how does mindfulness help them improve their game or be able to see things differently? If they're already at the top of their game, just give an example of how mindfulness would help someone in that particular position.

[laughs]

So you learn a lot.

And going on the book tours and talking to people and I, and I realized that people were-- I just learned a lot.

So that learning and also, uh, the couple of things that I wanted to do differently.

I wanted to be really explicit about, about the idea of the threefold tr-training and some other things.

And I wanted people to have a direct experience of what I was offering, and that's always what I'm-- that's one of my, my goals is to have people have a direct experience.

It's one thing to talk about it, it's another thing to experience what is being talked about in a way.

[laughs]

If you've got someone, they've done the prep work, they're there, but then that voice in their mind says, you know, "What if? What if? What if?" How do you coach that voice?

Yes.

So I was working with the Lakers, and they were playing the Celtics in the championship.

It's a Sunday game, and I'm, and I'm going in to work with the, the guys.

They're gonna, um, you know, they have their film session.

We eat, and then they have film session, and then we do a little thing and, and I'm going in there and the voice inside of my head was saying, you know, "They don't want to hear from you.

You got nothing to say." And so it was, it was this, it was some trauma got triggered.

Mm-hmm.

Es difícil a veces realmente dar un paso atrás y tener sabiduría y observar o estoy en ese agujero.

A menos que tengas la costumbre de hacerlo y a menos que seas capaz de sentirlo en tu cuerpo y alejarte y salir de la mentalidad.

Pero eso es todo.

Es crear esta capacidad de observar las experiencias, sin importar lo desafiante que sea, desde este testigo silencioso y no hacer nada, sino solo observar y preguntar: ¿qué es esto y cómo se está manifestando? Así que tienes toda la razón.

Por eso tienes que salir del modo de supervivencia y entrar en el modo de crecimiento.

Si estás reaccionando a las cosas, no hay manera de hacerlo porque no hay espacio para hacer nada más que reaccionar.

Pero si reflexionamos sobre ello y luego lo miramos y reflexionamos y decimos: reaccioné, ¿qué entrenamiento necesito hacer? ¿Qué aprendizaje y práctica necesito hacer para que la próxima vez pueda crear un poco más de espacio, un poco más de espacio? Entonces, una vez que creo el espacio, puedo ver realmente.

La presión.

Like, like-

Yeah.

No, it was, it was-- And I talk about it in, in my other book, um, The Mindful Athlete: Secrets to Pure Performance.

Uh, so just to give you an idea, so fast-forward, this is, this is 1969 and, um, and I'm going to University of Massachusetts at Amherst, and it was the last, uh, orientation weekend, so the weekend just before classes started.

So it was, so it was that Labor Day weekend.

So it started, I think Thursday, Wednesday, Thursday, whenever it was, and so I stayed on campus and didn't have to...

And so we, we, we were playing, me and a couple of my friends, we were playing... pick up basketball.

How-- I mean, I know the story, but I want the audience to know, how did it come about working with Michael Jordan?

How do you help people create space when they are lining up for a game or a race, when they feel like their self-worth and their identity is fused to the performance.

Well, the self-image psychology, that's this whole idea of Malcolm Maltz.

Not Malcolm Maltz, but Matthew Maltz, I think is his name, but he wrote a book, Psycho-Cybernetics.

And this idea of the self-image is like a foreman.

It says, yes, you can do that.

No, you can't do that.

So you are not what you think you are.

Can you talk about having a world focus in mindfulness and thinking about purpose as we move through our goals? Yeah.