Mountain Biking and Meditation
In the mornings, my homeroom students and I take some time out each day to do a guided meditation. We get them from the UCLA Mindful Awareness Research Center, and most days, we pick one of the three or five minute meditations. Today, we had two quizzes (I know, I’m sorry!), and the student whose turn it was to pick chose, “Meditation for Working with Difficulties.” Apt choice. The audio is about seven minutes. We settled in, and afterward the kids seemed pretty calm and ready for the day, but it occurred to me that there was some wording that they might not have understood.
The speaker at one point, suggests that you keep 75% of your attention on a part of your body that feels good, or at least neutral, and with the rest of your attention, cast a “sidelong glance” at the part of your body being affected by stress or difficulty. They seemed to appreciate the calm tone, but they didn’t really understand this sidelong glance business, or putting part of your attention on the bad part.
This reminded me of something that I learned from mountain biking, and I explained it to them. When you’re riding on a path, you want some difficulty, it makes the ride more fun, but sometimes the difficulties can seem dangerous. As you’re riding, you’ll come upon a trail hazard, maybe a particularly gnarly rock to ride around — or over. There’s a best way to do it, and if you’ve been riding a while, you can probably find the smoothest path with your eyes, but that doesn’t always happen. You have a few options:
- You can completely ignore the rock. In our meditation, this would be doing your best to ignore the problems that are stressing you out. You might get lucky with this strategy, but sooner or later, you’re going to run into a particularly gnarly rock, and you’re going to crash yourself. This is bad on the bike, and in life.
- You can completely focus on the rock. In our meditation, this is the moment in life where you get bogged down in anxiety focusing on your difficulties. You are likely to crash. You might crash into the rock, you might become so wobbly getting around the rock that you fall over. Again, this is not a good strategy.
- You can take a glance at the rock, scan around it for the smoothest pass, and let your eyes track on up the trail. This is what the meditation was talking about with the sidelong glance. You want to acknowledge the trouble, but you want to focus on the path through, and just as much the path you’ll be on after the difficulty. The crazy thing is that on a bike, you seem to magically clear the hazard without effort when you ride this way. I’m not guessing that our troubles will magically go away, but I know that when I pay attention to my goals, I do seem to weather them a lot easier.
- The last option, and this one doesn’t connect to the meditation as well, is to assess the rock, and say, “Oh, no, that is way more than my ability level.” Get off your bike and walk past the rock. Doing this, you may figure out how to do it next time, but you’ve kept yourself on the trail, and not headed to the hospital for the day. While the meditation doesn’t acknowledge this, in real life, it’s essentially saying, “I can’t handle this myself, I need help.” When a friend or loved one helps you past one of life’s obstacles, as you’re walking by, you may learn a little bit of what to do next time something like this happens.
So that’s it, it seems that obstacles are obstacles, whether they’re on a bike, or in every day life. Keep your eye on where you want to be, and don’t be afraid to ask for help in a pinch. And if you’re looking for a good tool to practice some simple meditations on your own, or with your students, that UCLA link is pretty great. Here it is again:
https://www.uclahealth.org/marc/body.cfm?id=22&iirf_redirect=1
