I recently traveled to the beautiful state of Oregon for a family vacation. It was my first visit to Oregon and home state of the world headquarters of Nike. I did inquire with my Uber driver about the possibility of doing a tour of the Nike campus but it was closed for the weekend.
However, my parents and I visited the Portland Japanese Garden which was a great reminder of the art of practicing mindfulness and meditation. The stones, waterfalls and fauna all created a sense of calm that Jon Kabat Zinn once spoke about during a lecture I attended in Boston’s Arlington Street Church.
Visit to Portland Japanese Garden Photo Credit: T.Mohammed
Mindfulness and meditation are methods of coaching that are very much in the news and being written about by academics, medical professionals and sport researchers. Amy Baltzell recently published a book with several authors on Mindfulness and Performance and Sam Parfitt leads the True Athlete Project which both reinforce the sporting applications for mindfulness and meditation. The science behind meditation and mindfulness is helping with the evolution of sport for development and peace as a form of daily practice to aspire towards.
Explorations in Sport for Development and Peace 