I just got back from seeing a few Spring Training baseball games in Florida. What a treat to be in these smaller stadiums of more human proportion, and to be closer to these outsized major league professional baseball players! Baseball is probably the only sport I understand, only because I have played it since childhood. There’s something in the intimacy of participation that offers us a deeper understanding of just about anything!
There can be moments of individual greatness in a baseball game, and that can be inspiring, but there is no way that any one person can truly carry a game alone (not even Shohei Ohtani)!
The same is true for our meditation practice. You may think you’re doing it alone, or that it’s all on you — or even all about you. In teaching MBSR for almost 15 years now, I continue to see how the best teaching does not come from me at all. It comes from the group. It comes from the generosity of people doing their best to practice, showing up each week, and describing their unique experience. Each experience shared inevitably touches another person somehow. And somehow, this expands the experience, bringing more insight, more compassion into the room. We leave each class much larger in mind and heart than we arrived.
Spring Training for Major League Baseball has a casual feeling –it’s just practice! And yet, it’s also a place where rookies get called up and bring their very best to each moment, to benefit from the experience of others, and live their aspiration. If you look, you can see all the people, all the beings who are making it happen — who are participating. It can happen there, and it is happening everywhere.
Maybe it’s the extra dose of Vitamin D talking, but I am super-excited to teach this Spring’s MBSR class, starting this upcoming Tuesday.
Enjoy this Virtual Choir Orchestra’s rendition of Take Me Out to the Ballgame! Put together in the summer of 2020, a beautiful example of how much greater we are together.
