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Of Mountains and Men and MINDFULNESS: Basketball's Coaching Legend Phil Jackson and The Soul of Success
Sun, 06/16/2013 - 2:47pm
This Father's Day, 2013, my third without having a living father on planet Earth to celebrate with in person, I was intrigued by Oprah's Super Soul Sunday being advertised. The guest today was NBA legendary coach Phil Jackson, who has written a book called Eleven Rings -- The Soul of Success.
Basketball was an interest of mine when I was a teenager. I started going to the junior high basketball games, when I could get a ride the three miles to the school. I was more than a handful of years younger than my only sibling who went off to college when I was still in elementary school, so it was not always easy for me to get transportation to things I was interested in. Thankfully I had a nice group of friends who had parents who were doing their part to contribute and often offered to have me go along. But my parents and I really 'got into' watching the Denver Nuggets for a while in the mid 1970s.
My friends had gotten me to try out for 9th grade basketball team but I wasn't selected; I had terrible eye-hand coordination because I needed vision therapy, which again, was a transportation problem as that was in Denver. So it went untreated and actually undiagnosed until about the time of this photograph of me with my dad in obviously a happy moment. ( I believe this was after I'd gotten chronic fatigue syndrome which lead to the eye doctor and vision therapy, which was age 29, in 1989, I'd gotten rollerblades for my 31st birthday I'd made such a terrific recovery at the end of my 29th year and the spring and summer I turned 30. So my father would be about 70 here.)
If you're a fan of the show South Park, creator Trey Parker grew up where I did, just a decade later. That helps people visualize where I spent the first 18 years of my life, and many weekends or sometimes weeks after, until the time of my father's passing in 2010. My parents bought a place down one canyon, his parents were up another direction but our school district literally had about a 10-20 mile radius by road. Lots of snow, lots of trees, lots of work and connection to nature, time to be insolutude and peace.
By the end of the show with Oprah and Phil Jackson, someone I honestly had never 'known of' until today, I saw something he and my father and I have in common, along with many, many others: "Finding ourselves" in the mountains. The show closes out with beautiful video of Flathead Lake, Montana, where he has been for 40 years, primarily in the summer, he said. I can vouch for the way the mountains help to center you, not only did I hike regularly for fun and exercise, I spend endless hours shoveling snow, cutting wood, building gardens, gardening and watering -- ALWAYS by hand not a stationary sprinker you move around. Very meditative. It just was almost a natural thing when my health club hired their first yoga instructor in 1990 or so, and I started 'practicing' these things. I reverted back, as Phil said most players did, and just took with me the mindfulness, finding that I had fewer problems with my body if I didn't do the yoga and weights which I loved.
My father had seen the mountains to the west of Denver, Colorado while changing trains at Union Station during World War II. I fortunately had purchased tickets for my whole family to go to the 'big top' that Cirque de Soleil put up around that part of LoDo (lower downtown) back in the late 1990s, when I was first an occupational therapist and working full time in Denver before 'the bust' happened when the government changed how they reimburse for Medicare services in skilled nursing rehabilitation.
As we were walking toward the big white top structure they'd erected, similar to what DIA is made of, he stopped dead in his tracks on the tracks by Union Station and said 'this, right here (and he pulled me a few feet as he walked to the EXACT spot), is where I looked up and said 'maybe after the war, I'll move to the Rocky Mountains.' And that is what he did in the middle 1950s after leaving the Air Force with full military retirement as a Major, after completing the 20 years serving in the National Guard. His duties there included helping plan the evacuation of Denver if there were an emergency; in that era it was naturally the fear of nuclear attack.
Not long after that day, my employer, Novacare, reacted to the upcoming changes from Medicare, as did all therapy providers, and I went from having overtime offered many weeks, or required, to having maybe eight hours of work a week. I had the sense to see there would be layoffs and I was proactive about finding a new dimension to work in and still use my new degree in occupational therapy.
I went to work for a Colorado Springs company with branches in Denver and west metro, at much lower pay, as they were an upstart and growing driving program which had gotten to the size they could use a full time person for patients who had difficulties with driving. Then after several years there, connections from the Springs had me on my way to Grand Junction, Colorado, which is across the Continental Divide from where his home was, where I spent many a Father's Day weekend.
Our family tradition was to always go on a hike and picnic, it was the one day of the year my mother would come with us, but typically I was the one who went hiking with Dad, if he was in the mood to take someone besides the dog or dogs with him. In other words, I was the only 'hiker' in the family, and I'm glad I inherited that interest from him. So I am thankful for those many happy memories to reflect upon. The skies were blue or they had clouds we'd need to run from as the afternoons built into thunderstorms on a regular basis.
At the house, it never reached 80 degrees in all the years, until around 2006 or 7, I remember calling and that being the big news one summer, the thermometer had gotten to 80. This was after winters in years prior to that of wildly swinging snow activity, just really 'unusual'. I noticed that was something going on around the world, it seemed, but naturally there's a lot of different opinion about such things. I try to stay fairly central and middle of the road politically, spiritually, physically, mentally. But my 'radar was up', so to speak. My 'interest was piqued'.
So, while I never saw my dad with a basketball, to my recollection, the sport is a significant part of my father's life story: he was struck down with what today is called 'chronic fatigue syndrome' in his first year of college, studying engineering at Purdue; it would have been the late 1930s or so. He didn't travel home for Thanksgiving and there was pick-up basketball being played around the dorms. He didn't stop for lunch, he kept playing, and that evening and weekend is when he was flattened by mental and physical fatigue and his life changed forever.
My dad, even until the day he died of Lewy Body Disease, had a good memory for details from long ago, and told the story throughout my life of how the doctor made a little slit in his neck/jaw/ ear area to remove a lymph node to look at, and from that said he had chronic mononucleosis. It was suggested he go to the desert and warm for the winter to recover, which he did, with the oversight of his mother, who was not the most capable or easy person to be with. She and her husband had adopted him as a three year old foster child that was living in their area of Chicago, Illinois.
They weren't set back too badly by the Great Depression, and he got really good medical care, which was helpful as he was sick a lot. Every disease that went around, he got and he got a dramatic case of it. He had been given some sort of religious blessing when he had one and half lungs filled with blood with whooping cough, he had said. He'd been tested in the 1930s with breathing oxygen to determine if he needed to take supplemental thyoid medication. He did, and he took it his whole life except for when he was in the Army Air Force in World War II, he was miserable and cold and pushing through fatigue because they wouldn't provide him with thyroid medication. That just wasn't something military medicine was doing, yet he'd had it from the civilian world. These were all little lessons for me that I heard growing up that helped me see the world with whatever accuracy (or not), that I had, and have built upon that professionally and personally ever since.
He returned to Chicago and went to the University there where the first nuclear "success" occurred, and he was saddened for the rest of his life, it was clear, when he told the story of a paper coming back from his engineering professor which said on the top in red ink "One of the best minds in the class but it's as if your heart's not in it." Nobody understood how he was "recovering from", or rather 'had' a chronic illness.
Soon World War II started, and as he said 'any self-respecting man volunteered', and somehow he ended up at UCLA in Southern California, in ROTC. He was in a fraternity and only once got 'drunk', and never did it again. That was just the kind of personality he had. He always told us he had a degree in math but it was actually a minor degree in mathematics, he'd majored in psychology in order to get out of college and into the Army Air Force as fast as possible.
Because that major, with a bachelors only, had set him up for difficulties finding a job when he got out of the Air Force some 12 years later, and it was his math minor which allowed him to get a menial bookkeeping job and then work his way through proving himself through his work, up to quite a high level in a fairly large US corporation, I was pushed to study the sciences and mathematics, and that is where my strengths definitely showed on the ACT tests.
However, my interests were with people and animals and health. So just as my interest in basketball wasn't nurtured, my interest in psychology wasn't as well. But the beauty of that was that my learning disabilities and brain injury 'stuff' lead me to get as far as I could in high school or college with things to do with math and science, and I was taking health electives and my advisor noticed I did well in those classes and not so much the business classes, a major that was our 'compromise' or basically what my father had told me I was to study when I went to college.
Once I was paying my own way I was able to change majors and strike out on my own direction and that occurred early on in my college, still in my teens I got a very good job with good hours typing statistical and mathematical scientific documents for Colorado State University and assisting with running the academic office. That lead to my future job assisting the 'instigator' of the research via the National Park Service and Colorado State University and many others which resulted in the Clean Air Act Amendments of 1990. It was in 1989 that my body gave out, same as my dad's had decades earlier, due to the myriad of stressors in my life, including the project completion stressors but also breating toxins from the new building that had been constructed for our growing project. State contract or Federal contract materials and furnishings, many things were outgassing VOCs. My mother died suddenly, a friend was murdered unexpectedly -- she had just gotten into medical school and was on vacation in Maui, yes it was a huge shock. And I didn't know about foods I was allergic to, that whole 'load theory' we talk about here at Lumigrate via Dr Marc Spurlock (MD, environmental medicine specialist).
And just as he ended up with chronic pain in headaches and back and hips and neck, etc., I've gotten to experience all that as well, more or less, in some form or another, most of the days and years between 1989 and now. So I've been increasingly proactive about finding out why, and fixing at least some of what I can fix -- eating well, taking supplements, exercising, meditating, balancing life, and living where there is less air pollution. Or so I thought I was, more about that later.
So by the time I was born, when he was about 40, he was onto different things, the hiking and skiing, we all learned as a family how to ski, and he skied into his 70s. I was well enough in 2008 to return to skiing in 2009 for a season, it was really fun. And since then I've just had things being a bit of a struggle for me and not going 'ideally' related to types of hormone supplemented, finding I was needing a LOT more Vitamin D and iodine supplementally, it's a lot to chase around and consider and 'do' on top of everything that 'everyone' has to do in life. And so for me, this interview I watched today was obviously, inspiring to me -- I'm writing about it, sharing it here with you if you care to read it.
I think my dad would have liked this show with Phil Jackson or possibly enjoyed the book as well. As they relate in the show, his parents were fundamentalist Christians, "bible thumpers" the kids were known as in school. His height and ability to play basketball earned him a scholarship to college in North Dakota, which is where my father's adoptive father's family was from, many Germans had settled there. It was at college in courses where he was presented with other information than he'd been presented with when he was growing up: Darwin, for instance. He started questioning what he'd previously believed or been asked to believe. And he simply shifted his paradigm.
There are three types of people, basically. Empiracle People, which I would guess Phil Jackson is, will look at information and evidence and change their mind if they're convinced. Paradigm People have developed a paradigm they navigate and see the world working and they wrap up in it, figuratively, and say "This evidence doesn't 'fit' with my paradigm so I don't even want to look into it'.
The final, third, kind of person are "Fearful" and "Wishful Thinkers". They won't believe something, they'll actually go out of their way to reject it and those who believe in that 'something'. It protects them from the anxiety that is produced from the 'fear'. People often are afraid of being criticized, ostracized, rejected, alienated, shunned if they speak out about something they believe that's not the way the people around them believe. They are also afraid of the inconvenience that will come from having to change how they live their lives. They can be afraid of the feelings that would come from really taking in and processing whatever 'it is'.
This can be the case when you've thought in the past that your country was whatever it was that was presented to you, something to be proud of, something we did better than anyone else in the world, we were told. Having to come to terms with that things have changed a great deal and are as they are today, is quite a lot to have on your proverbial plate. But I believe it has to be taken in and digested/processed.
Last year there was quite a lot of turmoil when a celebrated coach and team had it revealed there had been sexual misconduct with young people that the coach had perpetrated and the staff of the team and university hadn't handled honestly and ideally, protecting those involved and the institution. But their football team went out on a limb in terms of who they hired and brought in and the next season restored the spirit in NEW WAYS to the fans and players and all involved. IF they wanted to embrace that paradigm, that is. I'm sure even they have their naysayers or even 'enemies'.
Oprah asked Phil Jackson what his thoughts were when he was in college and getting into meditation, and the conflicts that might come from his religious and spiritual beliefs changing.
We need to build our mental strength as much as anything, in order to be in concert with each other in times of need. You can collect yourself and 'reset' after any kind of disruption. So he would teach his NBA players 'mindfulness', he'd introduce it in training camp and continue building it.
Same as what I have done for about 7 years with people I work with who have chronic illness issues of physical or mental/behavioral; that 'spritual' aspect is important. They tried Tai Chi and yoga and things that wouldn't 'stick', but meditation would stay with the players. He initially was doing this in Chicago, then he went on to coach the LA Lakers and he said there were some issues here and there, but overall the team allowed him to bring this to them and impart it to them.
Some questions and answers:
What is your definition of God -- The unseen. I am that I am, is the best definition that I have.
How far back did this start? -- He recognized he had a connection to something bigger than himself, he saw the spirit moving in the audience in a group of worshipers at church. He had been raised in Assembly of God, Pentacostal, protestant movement churches, and his parents were both ministers. He said when it got to be the late 60s, the movement in the country was for waking up and 'experiencing' things, and the effects of birth control pills. He'd talked with his mother when she'd sometimes basically tuck him into bed when he was an adolescent and he'd ask whey dancing was forbidden and it had to do with that opening things up that can't be squelched and leading to unplanned pregnancies. He really seemed to have a good handle on the history of his 'times' and sees how he has had some impact on things, up to now, within the basketball industry. I think this book will help more get the wisdom of this wise man.
What's the difference between religion and spirituality? Doctrine is the difference between religion and spirituality. Spirituality is living in it.
Do you meditate or pray? Meditation is his prayer, plus affirmations he believes in. A simple prayer -- "Oh thou, sustainer of our bodies, hearts and souls, bless all that we thankfully receive." It's a Sufi thing, he added.
What do you know for sure: I'm going to die. Death is waiting us all, and the best things we can do is live this life as best we can. Everybody's trying to do their best and sometimes they don't even know it.'
"I value this opportunity to explain this to people" he said at the of the interview. He had just said that physically, coaching is too difficult, but coaching coaches is something he feels he could do. Eleven Rings: The Soul of Success should be a great platform to help him connect with coaches who might want to take him up on that! I hope so, it seems he has a lot of GRATE things to share. As did my father, who I was fortunate to be visiting around the time of Father's Day on his last year before dying, and due to my medical background I was able to see what was baffling the hospital and others were seizures and that is the day the team said 'let's call hospice'.
And through the chaplain who became his ally despite Dad's initially resisting having any religious person on his team, because he couldn't change his paradigm of what the word 'chaplain' meant from his years long ago in the Army/Air Force, he was able to be coaxed to 'let me come back just once more'. Chaplains are extensions of the eyes and ears of the more expensive and hard to come by social workers, nurses and doctors, and actually do quite a lot of assessing of the situation. Death is a part of life and can be as natural as having a new life come to Earth, but too often we've not learned how to do that, us Americans, from The Greatest Generation. My parents both died at home; their parents all died in facilities. We are able to change and change back, as a society, but it isn't always the smoothest of transitions.
What hospice philosophy is 'about' has been misunderstood by most people I have found, and I fortunately had been well-educated in Grand Junction about hospice on more than one occasion, and I could call up the hospice experts that would be like a basketball coach calling up Phil Jackson and asking for guidance and oversight, training, and input for a certain situation. Because, ultimately, when you're on a team in your family or on a basketball team, at work or on Facebook or anywhere on the Internet, you're going to have all three types of people involved: Empiracle, Paradigmatic, Wishful/Fearful.
I'd actually reviewed a video to prepare this piece, on YouTube (I'll provide the link, below) by many psychologists related to the 9/11 beliefs that have been well traveled since 2001. As information came out that conflicted with what was officially reported through the government or the mass media, there was a lot confusion and angst. German and South Africa as nations had to heal after their countries had participated in atrocities towards races of people.
"Reconciliation" through finding the truth is a deep path to psychological recovery, and that takes some time. For anyone who has had a trauma done to them, such as someone harming them physically or emotionally, an investigation that leads to finding the answers, despite where it takes us is critical to recovery, and the three different 'types' of mental processing (empirical, paradigmatic, fear/wishful) will have different courses in that process, and some perhaps simply cannot face the facts and the truth.
And hence, you'll hear and see the diverse results. That includes in your live world and on social media, which has so dramatically changed in the last five years the way we communicate as Americans and beyond. People are now 'waking up' about GMO food, what's in the water (fluoride's the one we focused on in 2012 at Lumigrate), and what's in the air.
I've recently been creating new information at Lumigrate about my process just this month of June 2013 of 'waking up' about geoengineering and chemtrails, and now I'm back to where I was from age 24-32 with a focus on air quality and chemistry of what's in the air and what you're seeing and perceiving in the air. I am grateful to the genes and environment I had related to science, weather, mathematics that was greatly provided by my father. I also appreciate that my mother's intuitiveness and psychological and plain 'people' wisdom and skills were also something I steeped in literally and figuratively starting some 53+ years ago.
And so I dedicate this work today to my family of origin and all it has brought me through their passing and many, many hard times, but also just as many great ones. And ALWAYS Father's Day was one of the more wonderful days of the year as we'd spend it together out under the skies of the Colorado mountains. Skies which, back then, thankfully, were relatively free of the chemicals that are part of the mix and my greatest concern today.
In closing, I think you for reading this, and I ask that you pay particular attention here: There is a tendency to "pathologize the messenger" -- label them as pathological, in order to 'censor'/stop the message from going further. Some call it 'shooting the messenger' more informally, but I think it is really important for people to consider how and why it exists so they can hopefully not contribute to it if it applies to them, or if someone is firing at them or someone they care about they can navigate that without it burdening their body, mind, spirit and 'well-being'.
If there is an excessive sense of pride or a lack of humility, it can cause problems for people. I also am thankful for having had lessons in this and gotten my skin thickened up in the past for saying things that aren't well-received by people, as the photos I took this month, looking up to the sky have revealed to me something that was impossible to turn away from and not investigate and consider changing my opinion about chemtrails and geoengineering. I've already had one Faceplace/Crackbook 'friend' share what I'd provided about a worldwild march organizing for August 25th and said I was crazy and tagged my name even. What a bully and immature man!
One of my supportive friend calls him my 'little friend' and called him stupid. Well, that's not going to be setting a great example of adult, polite conversation but at least it provided me with a GRATE opportunity to attempt to again exemplify professional, mature conversation that is peaceful and will allow for those who might want to learn and grow and change opinions to do so. I'd like to say my family or origin was where I got this concept, and I believe my mother modeled that behavior well most of the time and my father did a lot of the time. He did his best, just as I reported above was said by the wise Phil Jackson. I hope people consider purchasing that book for the men in THEIR lives (or women).
Something I perhaps 'come by honestly' is my desire to be part of what will change the society in the way that I have the ability to do so. My mother was a contributor to our local elementary through really ground-breaking techniques for helping learning disabled youth, and I've given you a good synopsis of my father's career and life. May your Sunday be Super and Soulful and I hope this piece for Fathers' Day captures at least some people's minds and attention and inspires.
We are all in this together, after all.
If this or anything else is ShareWorthy, please tell others or get them the links, etc.
Link for the topic about chemtrails/geoengineering: There! Up in the Sky ... Is It a Bird? A Plane? Santa? Them Chemtrail Fairy? What do YOU Believe? www.lumigrate.com/forum/there-sky-it-bird-plane-santa-chemtrail-fairy-what-do-you-believe
Please consider going to the ^above^ link and finding the link I set up there to Marianne Williamson's amazing 20 minute speech at March Against Monstanto Venice, California, as she includes the chemtrail controversy in her message and I think is inspiring and it's a great 'pep talk' for these challenging times we are in. There is also a link to Dr Spurlock's topic "Are YOU Loaded?......" related to 'load theory' and what causes illnesses (loads of things, and he lists the overall things and some of the easiest things to do to reduce your load.)
Link to the YouTube video about Cognitive Dissonance using 9/11 theories as examples: www.youtube.com/watch
(I also found it via: December 21, 2011 at Conscious Life News. We need the truth in order to heal.)
And a relatively solid seeming website that had readable information about cognitive dissonance is TruthMove.org at: www.truthmove.org/content/cognitive-dissonance/
Live and Learn! Learn and Live Better!! LOOK UP AT THE SKY, Notice "What", and Wonder "Why" ~~ Mardy 
__________________
Live and Learn. Learn and Live Better! is my motto. I'm Mardy Ross, and I founded Lumigrate in 2008 after a career as an occupational therapist with a background in health education and environmental research program administration. Today I function as the desk clerk for short questions people have, as well as 'concierge' services offered for those who want a thorough exploration of their health history and direction to resources likely to progress their health according to their goals. Contact Us comes to me, so please do if you have questions or comments. Lumigrate is "Lighting the Path to Health and Well-Being" for increasing numbers of people. Follow us on social networking sites such as: Twitter: http://twitter.com/lumigrate and Facebook. (There is my personal page and several Lumigrate pages. For those interested in "groovy" local education and networking for those uniquely talented LumiGRATE experts located in my own back yard, "LumiGRATE Groove of the Grand Valley" is a Facebook page to join. (Many who have joined are beyond our area but like to see the Groovy information! We not only have FUN, we are learning about other providers we can be referring patients to and 'wearing a groove' to each other's doors -- or websites/home offices!) By covering some of the things we do, including case examples, it reinforces the concepts at Lumigrate.com as well as making YOU feel that you're part of a community. Which you ARE at Lumigrate!
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