Abstract
Mindfulness, or the act of being aware of what is going on at the present moment for what it is without judgement (Kabat-Zinn, 1990), is a state that could be easily accomplished momentarily. The difficulty is in sustaining mindfulness continuously over the duration of daily life activities and in times of challenges. Accordingly, there is value in sustaining mindful attention, such as in supporting better human performance. The earliest and most prominent introduction to mindfulness in the western sporting world could well be due to the adoption of Eastern mindfulness practices in basketball coaching by former Chicago Bulls head coach Phil Jackson (Jackson et al., 1996). The first piece of research on mindfulness ever to be featured in a sport psychology journal appeared more than a decade later, when Kee and Wang (2008) reported their work on mindfulness, flow and mental skills adoption. Following which, mindfulness received frequent attention in the research and applied settings, culminating new knowledge and discussions in the field. More recently, Roychowdhury et al. (2021) reported that traditional, spiritual, and Eastern philosophical roots were absent from most mindfulness research in the field and called for the need to focus on authentic, culturally sensitive, and reflexive practices.
Indeed, there is a need for continual dialogue between the East and the rest of the world in exchanging ideas about mindfulness practices and research. Particularly since the Eastern culture has a very rich history in meditative practices, spanning across spiritual traditions such as Hinduism, Jainism, Sikhism, Buddhism, Daoism, and Confucianism (Eifring, 2016). As mindfulness research and applied practices continue to receive attention in the sport and exercise psychology domain, it is timely that the Asian Journal of Sport and Exercise Psychology (AJSEP) devoted this special issue for collating works on mindfulness that are relevant for the field. In total, four publications contributed by scholars from the United States, Japan, Australia, China and Singapore were accepted in this special edition.
More importantly, the variety of work presented speaks volume about the richness of approaches and thinking sport and exercise psychology scholars have on the issue. In the first article, Amemiya, and Sakairi (2021) investigate the relationship between athletes’ mindfulness and discrepancy in their self-evaluated and teammate-evaluated performance decrement over three time points, and concluded that athletes with low mindfulness are more likely to evaluate their own performance negatively compared to athletes with high mindfulness. In the second article, Hut et al. (2021) investigated whether a 6-week Mindful Sport Performance Enhancement (MSPE) training had a differential effect on younger (first and second year) compared to older (third and fourth year) college student-athletes in the various key psychological indicators. Their findings suggest that older college students tend to improve more than the younger students in terms of sport mindfulness. In the third article, Roychowdhury (2021) presented the case for adopting mindfulness practice as an approach to alleviate the detrimental health issues experienced during COVID-19 crisis due to confinement, physical inactivity, and sedentarism. Specifically, he provided step-by-step instructions for adopting the Mindful Breathing Practice and Mindful Mantram Chanting Practice. In the last article, Kee et al. (2021) introduced the concepts of wu-wei and non-striving in relation to how they are relevant for mindfulness practices in the sport context. Works on neuroscience, flow, motivation and motor control/learning are elucidated to illustrate the close links between wu-wei, mindfulness and peak performance.
In summary, the first two empirical papers showed that research interests in mindfulness intervention effects within the context of sport is alive and continues to be pursued both in the East and West. Efforts made to systematically examine effects of mindfulness practice is important in that such findings contribute to the overall efficacy of mindfulness interventions for athletes in the long run. The other two conceptual papers which focused on introducing Eastern concepts and practices related to mindfulness are important for advancing the field as they provide new insights from the East that are usually less accessible to certain audiences due to language barriers and other reasons. Indeed, both empirical and conceptual works go hand in hand in pushing the frontiers of mindfulness research and practice. We sincerely hope that colleagues in the field would continue to consider AJSEP as an outlet of choice for disseminating mindfulness research.
Keywords
Mindfulness
Author
Dev Roychowdhury & Y. H. Kee
Journal
Asian Journal of Sport and Exercise Psychology
Discussion