The Joy of Sox Movie

What's wrong with Big Papi? (5/21/09)

2009-05-22T17:36:00.003-04:00

As every member of Red Sox Nation knows, beloved slugger David Ortiz is mired in the longest slump of his career. Until last Wednesday night, he had gone almost 150 at bats without hitting a single home run. His blast that night was his first homer of the year, and triggered a huge round of cheers from the fan. That moment probably would have generated the highest RNG computer ratings at Fenway in a long time.

The question is, what’s wrong? There are several main theories being bounced around, and I’d like to present them here, and then see what you folks think. In no particular order, the possible explanations are:

1. Age – Ortiz is nearly 33, an age at which many other sluggers have seen their skills disappear, sometimes almost overnight (ie, Jim Rice). It’s possible that Ortiz is already in the twilight of his career, short and explosive though it was during his heyday from mid-’03 through mid-‘08.

2. Injuries – he missed a lot of last season with a wrist injury after being hit by a pitch, and when he returned to finish out the year, his power never came back to previous levels, though his batting average was still pretty decent. Maybe his resilience is gone, and his power will never return. If that’s true, he might recover to become a decent, but no longer feared, hitter.

3. The “S” word – other players have seen their performance dramatically deteriorate after the off season, often when mandatory testing for steroids begins. It’s hard to imagine, but it’s not impossible that Papi is in the same boat as Mark McGuire, Sammy Sosa and his ex-teammate Manny Ramirez. Difficult to contemplate, but it has to be included in what doctors call the differential diagnosis, the possible causes of his symptom of poor batting performance

4. Emotions – David is certainly in a funk these days. The former life of the party is now actually declining reporters’ requests for post-game interviews. Obviously some of that moodiness comes in response to his slump, but there have been hints that outside events might also be weighing on him. We’ve seen how family matters can weigh on players minds (and bodies) in recent years – Jason Varitek’s divorce and J.D.Drew’s son’s health problems come to mind – so maybe there’s something else going on that we don’t even know about. Whatever the sourcee, emotional distress can certainly ruin anyone’s hand/eye coordination.

5. Fan mojo – is it possible that the fans of RSN aren’t boosting him effectively anymore? If our cheers are coming from an attitude of desperation or pity, they won’t have the same coherence and impact as if they came from the state of excitement and enthusiasm. If we amp it up, will he respond?

6. Something else - What other factor(s) did I leave out? Let me know.

So those are the main possibilities that I’ve heard about. I tend to go with #4 (after all, I’m a psychiatrist), with a little bit of #5 thrown in (after all, fan mojo is the theme of this whole website). Apparently a quick visit from Ortiz’s father (ie, Papi’s papa) helped him the day before he hit his first home run. Dad advised David to “go out there and have fun”. They played with David’s son, and “it was loose at home”. Maybe that’s all it took, reconnecting with what he loves, at home and at the ballpark.

VOTE: So what do you think? Cast your vote (one vote per reader, please) in the comments section, give us your reasons why, and then suggest your solutions (if there are any). We’ll tally up the votes, hanging chads and all, and report back with the results.

The flickering aura of RSN (5/11/09)

2009-05-11T14:10:00.003-04:00

It’s not just the economy that’s tanking – Red Sox Nation (RSN) is taking a hit, too. The team continues to do well, playing solid ball and working out the kinks in this still-new season. However, several recent peripheral events have shaken up Red Sox Nation’s collective psyche, with unknown impact on our ability to generate distant mojo. Within a three day span last week, we learned of the death of a Sox icon, the steroid scandal of a former star, and the health crisis of a beloved announcer. Any one event alone would be sad, but the combo gives one pause. Here are some thoughts:

1. The illness of Jerry Remy – former Sox shortstop, long time TV announcer and current President of Red Sox Nation Jerry Remy stunned listeners last week with his announcement that he’s taking a leave of absence to recover from lung cancer treatments. Widely loved, and a ubiquitous media presence, the 56 year old “RemDawg’s” news triggered a flood of get well cards and good wishes. It was also a reminder of mortality - Remy’s, ours, and the Sox’s legacy’s.

2. The death of Dom DiMaggio – the 92 year-old centerfielder was a WWII-era teammate of Ted Williams and Johnny Pesky, one of “The Teammates” that David Halberstam wrote about. He is remembered for being a talented ballplayer and a humble human being, “a class act who brought out the best in his teammates’ (Kevin Cullen in today’s Globe). His death leaves Pesky as the last link to an earlier era when players willingly gave up several years of their career to serve in the Armed Forces, when steroid abuse hadn’t been invented, and when egos seemed to be smaller all around. The contrast with item #3 couldn’t be greater.

3. The suspension of Manny Ramirez – the severest steroid abuse penalty in Major League Baseball history was just dropped on our former outfielder, slugger Manny Ramirez. Given the positive urine tests, his initial claims of innocence will surely go the way of all the other superstar denials, and leave his reputation just as sullied. This was one incident that can’t be dismissed as “Manny being Manny”, just the naïve actions of a quirky hitting savant. He tested positive for a female hormone that is often used to get players’ natural steroid production back on track after finishing a cycle of injected steroid use (the same hormone, HCG, is actually the compound detected by home pregnancy kits).

So questions are now being asked about when he used steroids. Was it just during the last part of last year, when he posted outrageous slugging numbers after his trade to Los Angeles? Or was it during his time with the Sox, including our World Series years of 2004 and 2007? And if Manny used back then, was he alone? Even the unthinkable questions are now being asked – is David Ortiz’ current horrendous slump due to a lingering wrist injury, or did he stop his steroid use in the offseason, when drug testing and scrutiny got tighter? I for one believe it’s his wrist, but the Manny scandal certainly puts a little tarnish on the Red Sox aura.

The combination of these three stories is starting to drain the team’s mystique, the force that was such a key part of their appeal, and their success (if our movie’s concepts are to be believed). And if this steroid scandal develops any further to implicate past Sox teams, we may have to change the name of our movie to “The Joy of Juice” (“juice” is the players’ slang term for performance enhancing steroids)!

Head Coach of the Boston Buddhists (5/2/09)

2009-05-11T13:31:00.005-04:00

Boston was fortunate enough to host His Holiness the Dalai Lama for four days recently, the latest installment in a 10 year tradition that now includes an annual conference on Buddhism and the Science of Mind. This year’s events also included an outdoor public address at Gillette Stadium. I attended the latter event for two reasons – to see and hear the Dalai Lama, and to make some computer RNG recordings of the crowd. I thought that 20,000 people in a state of quiet heartfelt attention might cause some significant blips in the computer recordings.

To be honest, I planned poorly in several ways. For starters, I waited until two weeks before the event to order my tickets and by that time all the inexpensive stadium level seats had been sold. All that was left were the VIP and near-VIP seats at ground level. So I dug deep and paid $75 for tickets that would put me only 10 rows away from HHDL. In football lingo, these seats were not only “on the 20 yard line”, they were ”ON the 20 yard line”, right in front of his mid-field ceremonial speaking platform.

Also, I didn’t reckon with the high level of security at the event. Turns out that no electronic equipment larger than a camera was allowed inside the stadium, which meant that I couldn’t smuggle in my RNG laptop. I opted for the arrangement below, in my car in the parking lot (the PC is posed on the roof for this photo, but it was locked inside during the talk).

I turned on the program and headed back to the stadium, unsure whether the corwd’s vibes would spread an additional 100 yards out to the parking lot. As I walked back towards the entrance, I was struck by the clusters of Tibetan people in attendance, many in beautiful ceremonial clothing, and sitting in clusters for picnic lunches before the afternoon session. The depth of their devotion was obvious.

The talk was great, for he is a wonderful human being with a contagious laugh, speaking about such topics as the importance of a mother’s love for every human being, and the impact of compassion on our brain structure (he both teaches and learns at those conferences). He sought protection from the Spring sunshine by donning a New England Patriots cap; this photo of his image on the Jumbotron screen makes him look like just any other football coach, though his team – the Boston Buddhists – is in a league of their own.

I was struck by his answers to the written questions from the audience. He said that all humans deserve to be relieved of suffering, even the Chinese. What better way of illustrating the triviality of sports rivalries – we have trouble seeing the humanity of the Yankees, who are our opponents in a game, yet he can see the humanity of people who are actually committing murder and genocide.

I was sitting close enough to the dais that I was in the small group given pieces of paper to write questions. I asked about competitive sports and compassion – since we were in a stadium that often sees 55,000 people cheer when heads get knocked, I wondered how he viewed that huge expenditure of emotional energy. But apparently my intentionality mojo wasn’t in full force, as my question didn’t get asked. Still it was a great day. I’m waiting for the analysis of the RNG data – my guess is that the moments when he entered and left the stadium will show coherence peaks at least as high as “Sweet Caroline” created in Fenway last year!

How to maximize your fan energy

2009-04-24T06:57:00.001-04:00

Whether you’re at Fenway or rooting from home, your energy affects the game. Here are some specific techniques to help you get in the energetic groove, so that your invisible energies can make a difference:

Step away from your routine for a minute, to get focused. Fridays at 7pm is our chosen time slot just before the start of the regular Friday night game, to make it easy for fans to get into a regular rhythm.

Let go of other concerns for the moment, and focus on the Sox for just these 5 minutes. Whenever other thoughts surface (and they will!), just patiently bring your focus back to the task at hand.

Meditate, if you have prior experience. Take a few minutes to use your favorite approach to help your mind get more focused.

Breathe when you’re ready. Take one or two slow deep breaths as a way to release the past (literally and figuratively) and take in the present moment, because the present moment is your point of power.

Focus your attention on your energetic heart center, right in the middle of your sternum (not off to the left, where your physical heart lies). Imagine that the air is coming in and out of that point during your next few natural breaths.

Remember and recreate the feelings of appreciation and joy you have for the Red Sox in general, and your favorite player(s) in particular. Feel the feelings in your body, rather than just think about them in your head.

Imagine beaming this energy directly to the team and players, from your heart to theirs. And imagine or sense how their aura expands and shines when you make this energy connection.

No need to push them into specific actions (ie, a home run by Ortiz), just send the positive encouragement that your distant energy brings.

Just let it go after a minute or two (5 minutes is actually hard to sustain). Get back into watching and enjoying the game, and release your energy to work its magic.

A weekly test of Fan Power (3/21/09)

2009-03-21T11:04:00.002-04:00

Spring is officially here, Spring Training is almost over, and it’s time for us to start practicing what we’ve been preaching. Group intentionality isn’t just an esoteric topic for a documentary film, it can also be a key ingredient in the upcoming Red Sox season. We fans can harness this intangible factor to give our boys an extra boost, but only if we follow these two main guidelines:

Quality – We can send the most potent positive vibes possible to our team, by learning the “Joy” techniques of energy activation.

Quantity – We have to get as many members of Red Sox Nation on board as possible to participate in this group project. There’s strength in numbers, and your help matters.

Here’s the goal - We’re going to enlist thousands of Sox fans to do a weekly experiment in distant group support. We’ve chosen Friday nights at 7pm EDT as the time slot for a regular 5-minute group meditation, since that’s just before the 7:05pm start of their regular Friday night games. Everyone on our email list will be getting instructions on how to generate positive energies, and by going viral with our email list, we’ll generate a critical mass of supporters to help the Sox win.

Going viral is the first step. We’ve already got 1000 names on our mailing list, but 10,000 would be even better. So your job, dear reader, is to contact one or two of your closest Sox fan-friends, and send them to our website so they can sign on to our mailing list and learn how to join in the fun.

Be creative – Tell all your FaceBook friends, and ask them to spread the word. My Space, too. Twitter, YouTube, whatever. Mention this project on your own website, and tell your faith community (after all, intercessory prayer is pretty similar to what we’re doing here). You know who your die-hard friends are, so invite them on board now!

How to do it – The most important point we’ve learned is to be positive with your rooting. “Go Sox!” is actually more effective than “Yankees suck!”. Let your feelings come from the heart, and let yourself get into that sense of enjoyment and eager anticipation. Future blog posts will provide more details, like how to overcome doubts and worries, how to focus in on your favorite players, and other related tips to improve your energetic impact. But for starters, these are the key points.

Is it working? We’ll keep track of the Friday night games during the season, especially the first innings. Wouldn’t it be cool if the Sox developed the habit of outscoring their opponents in the first innings, jumping out to an early lead they never relinquish? And we’d be the only ones who knew why!

So let us know what you think. Send us your creative tips for growing this project, and we’ll keep you up to date with new information on distant intentionality and how to use it in your daily life – to benefit the Sox, and to benefit you.

One degree of separation (3/14/09)

2009-03-16T09:50:00.012-04:00

Dubbing Matt Damon into our teaser last month reminded me of the many near-misses that we’ve experienced, times when we’ve come within one or two degrees of separation from signing on some very heavy hitters. Here’s our list. It’ll be followed by a very sobering conclusion:

- Matt Damon – I’ve spoken with his High School history teacher, and got his PA’s email address from his Mom(!), but we still haven’t gotten him to sign on the dotted line (or even to reply to an email).

- David Ortiz – the son of my work colleague is the BMW dealer whose exclusive client is Big Papi, but he (understandably) didn’t want to bring this outside stuff into their relationship.

- John Henry – the cousin of the wife of a scientist interviewee winters with the Sox owner in West Palm Beach, but for some reason JH never followed up with a call to us.

- Stephen King - I sat next to Stephen King's doctor at a book signing (no one in my line, 20 in his), and he agreed to contact Mr. King about being interviewed for our film. I thought he'd put a nice supernatural spin on things, but no dice.

- Larry Lucchino – I did bump into the Sox co-owner at Spring Training in ’07 and we had a nice chat. He helped make some arrangements for us, but he hasn’t answered any recent emails.

- Manny Ramirez – our producer has worked with the sportscaster for the local Spanish network, a guy who interviewed Manny all the time. But by the time the possibility of an interview with us got around to being discussed, Manny had become a Dodger.

- Mariel Hemingway – she’s very into holistic projects, and a physician friend of hers met me at a conference and said he’d pass on the project info to her. She’s not a Sox fan, but a Hollywood connection couldn’t hurt.

- Theo Epstein – his Mom runs a local boutique where the wife of a colleague shops all the time, and… (this one shows how desperate I am!).

Bottom line – if it happens, it happens. But listing these near-misses helped me realize that it’s time to look into Plan B for fundraising – using the strength and breadth of Red Sox Nation to drive our finances, rather than hoping to find one or two wealthy sugar daddies to bring home the bacon.

So we’ve devised a new strategy that will implement a grass-roots approach that puts into action the very principles of manifestation that our project is researching. I’m still working out the kinks, but the next blog post will show how we can harness the intentionality power of our readership to benefit the Sox during the upcoming baseball season, while at the same time solving our fundraising challenges as well. Stay tuned!

The teaser (2/23/09)

2009-03-16T09:02:00.001-04:00

My son David and I had fun last month putting together a very rough mock-up of the first segment of our film. The 16 minute sampler is called a “teaser” for obvious reasons, and it was exciting to do, because it helped me get a real sense of how the film’s story might actually come together in a fun and informative way. We took some liberties in editing, using some unlicensed clips from MLB and pretending that we’d been able to sign up our dream narrator, local Sox fan Matt Damon. We used a photo of Matt in a Sox cap along with a voice-over by David to capture the mood (sort of), but because Matt hasn’t signed on to anything, we obviously can’t distribute this sampler. Still, it helped us to envision more clearly what we really want, and to feel the enthusiasm that a clear vision creates. And those are very important steps in the manifestation process.

Mid-winter musings

2009-02-23T09:33:00.009-05:00

I’m too sun-deprived to come up with the usual long, coherent (they usually are, aren’t they?) blogpost essay, so here are some random musings along the trail. Hopefully, this’ll help clear my brain for the Spring Training stories that are starting to arrive from Florida.

1. Gabe updates: in case you missed the last newsletter, our boy Gabe Kapler made Major League Baseball’s Play of the Year for 2008, according to a poll of MLB.com’s readers. Go to this link at MLB.com (This Year in Baseball, 2008), and click "Play":
Unfortunately for us, he was signed by the Devil Rays in the off-season, so when he returns to Fenway, it’ll be as an opponent. That means there’s a chance he’ll make another catch like his award-winner at Fenway, maybe to rob David Ortiz of a home-run. Ironically, the Rays are our Opening Day opponents, but Gabe was too booked that weekend to stop by for any Joy of Sox fundraiser we might whip up in his honor.

2. The Super Bowl – yes, there are other sports besides baseball. This year’s football finale was intriguing for several reasons. One, our Patriots didn’t make the playoffs, despite a better regular season record than one of the finalists (but that’s another story), so it was noticeably harder to care about the game. That put at least this one local viewer into a different frame of mind, hoping for a well-played game without caring who actually won. And in fact it was a very exciting game, with a rousing final quarter that ranked with the best of ‘em. The underdogs almost pulled it out at the last second, and I found that you don’t have to be a partisan to appreciate excellence in sports.

Oddly enough, that’s one of the key points in “Joy” – emotions like appreciation and joy and enthusiasm are most contagious to the players, and are more helpful (in a distant intentionality sense) than anger at the opponent. So for fans to have the most impact, they shouldn’t be attached to any particular outcome. This is a Buddhist approach to cheering, and I’m not sure many Sox fans are up for such a high-minded approach to cheering. But at least that one time it was fun!

3. The science of Joy - It was gratifying to receive my copy of the Winter 2009 issue of the scientific journal called Subtle Energy and Energy Medicine, because it included the write-up of our lab demo done with the HeartMath Institute last Spring. That test showed that emotions can be spread by invisible forces, with heartfelt appreciation being the most powerful emotion. See the May 2008 blog entry for a summary about the HeartMath system, or click on the small lab photo on the homepage for a link.

A write-up of the other science fair project – random number generators at the ballpark – is still being shopped around to find its proper home in the scientific literature. I’ll let you know when it gets the “thumbs up”.

4. Spring is here - we may still have 6 inches of snow outside, but the sap has started to flow in our maple tree, so the light at the end of the tunnel is now visible!

Manifesting Gabe Kapler (written 11/23/08)

2008-11-23T20:30:00.006-05:00

In some ways, former Sox outfielder Gabe Kapler has been the patron saint of JoS. He was the first Sox player we ever had contact with, starting way back in 2006 during a long spell on the disabled list with an Achilles heel injury. The Boston Globe did a feature article on him that highlighted his independent mindset and insightful approach to sports and life. It caught my eye, and made me wonder if he’d be interested in our concepts. So we tracked him down (some people actually read their fanmail!) and started a very enjoyable online, and ultimately in person, connection.

He has supported us by helping us get passes to Spring Training, by letting us interview him at length in his hometown of Tarzana, and by lending his visibility to the project. So, along with the rest of Red Sox Nation, we’ve shared his career ups and downs, from the high point of being on the field when the Sox won it all in 2004, to the low point of leaving the Sox after the 2004 season to play in Japan, to spending the 2007 season as the manager for the Sox’ minor league affiliate in South Carolina, to returning to the big leagues last year as a backup outfielder for the Milwaukee Brewers.

But something interesting is cooking now. The Sox have recently traded away Coco Crisp, their 4th outfielder, leaving a hole in their roster for someone who could be a dependable backup if/when one of the regulars is hurt. What better choice that fan favorite Gabe? The offseason months of November and December are when deals are made behind the scenes, and so I jokingly emailed Gabe about a possible return to Fenway.

His reply? “Manifest it!” In the spirit of our JoS belief in the power of intention, he was asking us to help bring it about. And not surprisingly, he’s also OK with this next crazy idea – harnessing the force of our entire readership to generate some positive energy around the potential for his return to Boston. So here’s the idea – each reader who wants to see Gabe back in town can use our principles to magnetize that possibility.

Here are the key steps:
1. Start by connecting with positive emotions like fun, appreciation and joy (duh!). Use your own memories of times when you felt these feelings, and then take a few deep breaths to help you feel them coming alive inside your body, as warm fuzzies, tingles, or whatever.
2. Staying in that positive state, vividly imagine future scenarios with Gabe as a Red Sox, and let these images become as real as possible.
3. If/when you notice doubts and worries creeping in, acknowledge them and then put them aside as you consciously refocus on your preferred outcome.
4. After a minute or two (that’s all it takes), simply step back from your imagery and let the Universe take it from there. But please help the Universe by making this effort go viral - email a link to one and all.

How can we tell if this works? Just keep your eye on the sports section of the Boston Globe!

Weird science updates (written 11/7/08)

2008-11-23T20:15:00.005-05:00

Here are three brief updates on the science behind The Joy of Sox:

#1 – We’ve done two weird science experiments so far, and recently I’ve been writing them up for a scientific audience. The blog entries for 12/15/07 and 4/08 have brief summaries of the Fenway Park experiment with the random number generator (RNG) in my laptop, and the HeartMath Institute study of contagious group energies, respectively.

Unfortunately, the Red Sox study (the one where my ratings of emotionally key game events were matched to the computer’s measurements of crowd non-randomness) did not meet with favor from the editors of the Explore: A Journal of Healing and Consciousness. They rightly pointed out that my data was uncontrolled, and subject to probable bias because I subjectively decided which game events were important based on my own indefinable standards, in order to see whether they corresponded with peaks in the computer’s output. The editors suggested that I conduct a repeat study in which many evaluators were assessing game events for their emotional significance. Their averaged ratings would even out biases from any one individual rater (like me!). It’s a good refinement to my protocol, but the editors didn’t suggest how I should go about setting things up with the Sox and Fenway!

I had better luck with the second paper, which described the HeartMath test. That was the one where I was a guinea pig and found that my heart rhythm shifted when I was surrounded by a group of meditators focusing on feelings of appeciation and joy (of Sox). Translated into medicalese, that became “The influence of group heart rhythm on target subject physiology: case report of a laboratory demonstration”. The Journal of Subtle Energy and Energy Medicine has tentatively accepted the paper, subject to revisions that make it clear that we don’t really understand how these interactive effects come about, whether it’s by magnetic fields or whatever. I’ll set up a link from this website to the article when it finally comes out, probably in early 2009.

#2 – Scrolling down a few posts to September 8, 2008, you’ll see an unusual photo of a computer next to a harp. That shot was taken at the Boston Conservatory, where we were trying to measure RNG fluctuations in the presence of beautiful music. The results are in, and, to be honest, it’s hard to tell what they mean.
As you can see from this graph, there was one big blip that occurred right in the middle of the half hour performance (from 11:30 am to 12 noon). The timeline is very coarse, with data points averaged over four minute intervals, so it’s hard to pin down exactly what was happening at any given moment, but we did detect a deflection every bit as large as the one at Fenway when the crowd did the Wave – so something was going on during the harp show! Harpist Sarajane Williams will be describing these results in her upcoming documentary film called “The Healing Harp” (details at www.harptherapy.com).

#3 – In the post written on 9/19/08, I forgot to mention that the group of health care providers who heard my slide show about JoS also joined in a brief group energy cheer for the Sox after the lecture. That happened at 9:30 pm on the evening of a playoff game, and so it was easy to check and see what impact our group energy had on the game. There were about 20 of us in the circle, in a Boston office near North Station (the game was at Fenway, only about 3 miles away). We weren’t watching or listening to the game, but I later found out that we started our meditation just when relief pitcher Mike Timlin entered the game and began warming up. For 6 minutes, he was able to hold them at bay, but at 9:36 pm the floodgates opened, and Tampa Bay rallied to beat the Sox. So either our mojo was only good enough to help for 6 minutes, or we had no real impact.

Nothing conclusive one way or the other, but it’d be fun to do a larger and more organized sort of group energy circle for the Sox next year. I’m sure there are already plenty of informal Sox prayer circles scattered across Red Sox Nation, but this one could utilize all the properties of intentionality and manifestation that we’ve been learning about. A similar Internet-based test has been going on for a while, though not focused on sporting events. Check out www.TheIntentionExperiment.com for details.

The end of the 2008 season (10/30/08)

2008-11-02T19:34:00.002-05:00

The 2008 baseball season is over. The Sox were eliminated by the young upstarts from Tampa Bay, who then lost the World Series to the Philadelphia Phillies. Honest Sox fans will admit that we went about as far as we could this year with such a battered lineup, but our failure to repeat as Series champions raises a challening question for Joy of Sox readers. Have Boston’s sports fans finally lost their mojo? Is our amazing recent run of championships finally coming to an end? Remember, it wasn’t just the Sox in ’04 and’07; we also had the basketball Celtics in ‘08, the football Patriots in ’01, ’04 and ’05 (as well as two Super Bowl losses), and final round near misses by the soccer Revolution in ’07 and ‘08). Most cities are lucky to get one or two major championship teams in a decade – we’ve had 7 in 7 years.

If I’m at all typical of Boston fandom, then we’re all finally ready to take a break from this nonstop state of being on the brink of yet another crucial series. Fans can get burned out, just like players. I for one confess that I still haven’t fully come to terms the Patriot’s Super Bowl upset in February or digested the Celtics’ win in March. My wife says that I eat my meals too quickly, but I definitely like to savor my championships. It sounds like time for the Sox to regroup as a team, and for Red Sox Nation, in fact all of New England’s sports fans, to regroup energetically around the principles of Joy of Sox.

Consider this: it’s only October, but already three star Patriots are out for the season with injuries (the leading running back, the defensive team captain, and the star quarterback), the eading scorer of the Rev is out with a concussion, and the Sox season ground to a halt with injury concerns about Ortiz’ wrist, Lowell’s hip and Beckett’s shoulder. The players all seem to be getting ground down, and maybe it’s because we fans are no longer providing them with enough of an energy cushion to bounce back from all their hard knocks.

Maybe the Patriots are showing a new model for how to win titles. With their system, it’s not the individual players who count, but the schemes and the play calling and the coaching. The players start to resemble interchangeable parts - if injured 2007 MVP Tom Brady can be replaced by a backup QB who hadn’t started a game since High School, and have the team still be 5-2, then maybe Coach Belichik’s alternative model can also work. He’s emphasized players who subordinate their ego to the team, and who aren’t “characters” that attract media attention.

They’re each a little harder for the fans to love (apart from the 3 or 4 stars), and so they may have found a way to replace fan energy by being so mechanically efficient. Not that they’re robots, but the Pats players each fit a mold more than the Sox of ’04 did. And that might be the model of the future.

JoS goes public 9/19/08

2008-09-23T10:06:00.001-04:00

Last night was my first opportunity to talk at any length about JoS with people who aren’t directly involved with the project. It was a coming out event of sorts, and it was a blast. For the last year or so, I’ve been participating in a brainstorming group of clinicians from the Boston area, called the Collaborative Medicine Working Group. They’re holistically oriented and are finding ways to bring integrative medicine into the mainstream. Each session has an educational component, and yesterday was my turn to present.

The first clue that things would go well came during the preparation phase at home, as I tried to squeeze some of our JoS material into the PowerPoint format. I really enjoyed the process of finding the right visual image to convey the science points, and ended up with a pretty lively 30’ slide show. Much to my delight, the crowd of 20 or so clinicians at the meeting also loved it. Many were already solid Sox fans, but all were attuned to the invisible energies that our film focuses on and that their therapies are based on. They laughed at the right spots, made great suggestions, and asked questions that I had never thought of (after all, that’s one of the reasons for making presentations).

One nurse was struck by the notion of conditioned spaces, where elevated thoughts and emotions trigger enhanced physical responses. She remarked that she works in the opposite kind of place, an Intensive Care Unit, where the atmosphere is truly deadening and fear-laden (a “de-conditioned space”?). We talked of ways to clear her workspace of emotional negativity, and she came away with some practical suggestions about how to do just this (no, not by having the doctors and patients do “The Wave”!). A couple of good connections emerged – with a therapist who’d given massages to Sox wives at the Pan Mass Challenge, another who once led Manny in a private yoga session (it was the morning of the day he went ballistic against the Yankees in the 2003 ALCS and attacked the pitcher! Apparently the yoga released some latent anger that was locked in his sore hamstrings.), and another whose longtime favorite Fenway moment is singing “Sweet Caroline” (she was pleased that the RNG’s validated her experience).

And that was the main theme, how nice it was to have sophisticated equipment validating inner experiences that we’ve all had. How spirit and science can be reunited, and how JoS can function as a Trojan Horse to spread these ideas into the mainstream. I even got four invites to give a similar talk at other medical settings. More proof that we’re on to something!

Harps and computers 9/8/08

2008-09-23T09:59:00.003-04:00

At an energy psychology conference last year, an attendee at my lecture came up to me afterwards to ask whether a random number generator might detect the beneficial influence of her favored intervention – therapeutic harp music. It turns out that she’s the editor of a national journal that documents the clinical benefits of listening to harp music (The Harp Therapy Journal) and Sarajane Williams was persistent enough that her long expressed wishes to have a laptop recording RNG data alongside her harp finally came true last week at the Boston Conservatory of Music.

She was there to film several demonstrations for her own documentary “The Healing Harp”, and we did one set of RNG measurements while she was plucking away. To the listener, it was easy to be transported to a place of comfort and relaxation (and hopefully of non-random computer output). My son David and I also got to witness a demonstration of two reconstructed classical Greek instruments, the lyre and the kithera. Both had been made of natural materials by Chris Pantazelos, a local luthier, based on the images painted on ancient Greek urns and vases he’s seen at museums around the world. It was musical time travel.

The harp data hasn’t been analyzed yet, but here’s the link to Sarajane’s website: www.harptherapy.com.

"...and batting cleanup, Elvis Presley" (8/3/08)

2008-08-04T14:50:00.004-04:00

Maybe it’s just me, but this year my interest level in the Sox’s performance has nosedived. I’ve been plenty busy with Sox stuff like analyzing RNG measurements and producing the film, but I haven’t followed the team’s standings very closely or watched them much on TV. I feel like a loyal fan who got his reward: two World Series victories after that 86 year drought. It’s someone else’s turn now - maybe the Chicago Cubs, who haven’t won for 99 years. But apparently the rest of Red Sox Nation hasn’t lost any of its intensity, and the proof was on display yesterday in the studios of Hopkinton’s community access cable TV station, HCAM.

JoS had put out a casting call for fans with interesting Sox stories to tell – coincidences, superstitions, rituals and the like. Out of the scores of responses we got, Producer Karen Webb trimmed the roster to a dozen finalists, who trooped out to the studio Saturday morning to tape some interviews. And they bowled me over with the undiminished intensity of their passion.

We saw the whole gamut, from a women whoseprayers to her deceased daughter broke the 86 year curse, to an ex-con describing how difficult it is to collect on jailhouse sports bets; a female Elvis impersonator singing The King’s homage to the Red Sox ( a song which, for some mysterious reason, was never recorded by Elvis), several fans who took responsibility for single-handedly losing the 1986 World Series (who knew that popping the champagne cork too soon could be so costly). There were several kids who were already caught up in the rivalries and superstitions at a very tender age (can you say “cult”?), and one savvy grandpa who’d learned that life was about more than winning or losing (like giving a foul ball to the yearning kid in the next row rather than the grandson at home).

One fan’s prized possessions included a sample of dirt from the runway track, an authenticated slice of Fenway’s old wooden bleacher benches, and even a well-behaved terrier named Fenway. Someone else brought a Yankee beanie baby, complete with a noose. Sadly, the confirmed vegetarian who still eats Fenway franks wasn’t able to make it, but we definitely saw a lot of Boston’s self-professed #1 fan, a man whose gaudily decorated and quite massive belly (not a 6-pack ab but a kegger ab, as he pointed out) is a familiar sight to bleacher regulars.

As a psychiatirst, I couldn’t help but notice that this crew’s psychological focus seemed to be skating on thin ice at times, but their passion was never in doubt. And that’s part of the secret to being an effective fan, so all I can say is – Party on!

Take Home Point: even if my affection for the Sox is waning as they trade away the wild and crazy characters I loved, that hasn’t stopped the fanbase from staying inspired, energized, passionate and focused on their collective goal – and that’s the key to the power of intent.

Manny, the alchemist (8/2/08)

2008-08-04T08:39:00.002-04:00

Another day, another dramatic demonstration of one the key points from “Joy of Sox” - team chemistry is just as important as individual talent. This time, the Sox chose Kumbaya over Babe Ruth (that’s a reference to a sound bite from one of our science consultants), when they traded Hall of fame slugger Manny Ramirez for someone who won’t make up for his bat power, but whose presence should quiet down the decidedly unquiet vibes that have recently been emanating from the Sox clubhouse.

In a nutshell for the non-baseball fan, Manny Ramirez is one of the most talented batters to ever play the game, and will certainly end up in baseball’s Hall of Fame someday. During his last 8 years in Boston, he was a key ingredient in the celebrated 2004 team’s chemistry, exuding an attitude that has been characterized as goofy, child-like, nonchalant, yet showing such talent that he was called a batting savant, because he’s so oblivious to all the other factors that matter outside the batter’s box. Trouble has been building slowly for a couple of years, with the team usually excusing his sudden absences, mysterious ailments, and frequent lack of hustle by invoking the mantra “That’s Manny being Manny”, ie, loveable and unpredictable, but what a great hitter.

In the past few weeks, though, he’s crossed the line – sitting out a key game against the archrival Yankees (and getting MRIs of both knees, to ensure that he didn’t profess confusion about which knee needed the scan), even knocking down the team’s 60-something traveling secretary who couldn’t provide last minute tickets for a game. These events were affecting the team, leading to a recent slump that included a host of lowlights - poor play execution, missed cut off throws or pick off attempts, the small things that have to go right for a team to win.

And then, minutes before the League’s annual trading deadline, the deal was done and Manny was gone. His replacement was pretty good, but not great. And yet, who was the hero of the next two games? Newcomer Jason Bay- scoring the winning run in the 12th inning one day, then hitting a two run homer in his next. His positive reception by the Fenway crowd had a lot to do with his great performance, as he got standing ovations at his at bats and coasted on that wave of positive energy. Even his teammates admitted that the personnel change had to come or else the Sox would have disintegrated from within.

So for a team that values numbers and statistics above all else (remember, the principal owner is a hedge fund trader, and they have an official team statistical analyst who consults with their MBA whiz kid general manager), this dramatic late season move was more proof that they understand the value of chemistry. Sadly, of the few remaining veterans from the ’04 “lightning in a bottle” crew, only one has that lovable, outgoing, happy-go-lucky nature that made that team so special – David Ortiz. The other alchemists are long gone (Millar, Damon, Lowe, Martinez and Arroyo were the ringleaders), leaving behind a team of good guys and solid citizens, but with not a single real “character” among them. I fear, too, that the Sox’s talent pool has been depleted to such a degree this year that even good chemistry wouldn’t be enough to compensate. I don’t see them in the World Series this year, because you need both Manny/Babe Ruth and chemistry/Kumbaya, and unfortunately, we have don’t have enough of either.

Wimbledon, and the end of Joy (7/9/08)

2008-07-24T09:14:00.006-04:00

This week, yet another sport helped to illustrate the “Joy of Sox” principles – this time, it was tennis. Sunday’s Wimbledon men’s finals has already been widely acclaimed as the greatest Wimbledon match ever. It featured flawless tennis stretched over nearly 7 hours (4 hours and 48 minutes of actual tennis, plus a couple of lengthy rain delays), ending in the end of an era: Roger Federer’s 5 year monopoly at Wimbledon terminated at the hands of his young usurper, Rafael Nadal. The connection between tennis and baseball’s “Joy of Sox” is simple – these two men played the game at such a high level of excellence for so long with so much at stake, that the crowd ended up cheering for the glory of tennis as much as for any individual winner or loser. This was the seemingly impossible frame of mind that so many of our researchers had felt would be the most effective in eliciting sterling performances from athletes – and at Wimbledon, it was!

If we’d been able to set up our RNG devices at Centre Court, the readings would have been sky high by the time the match ended at 9:15 PM GMT, a few minutes away from being postponed til Monday due to darkness. Even though the fans seemed evenly split between Nadalians and Federerists, their cheers transcended simple Good Guy/Bad Guy rivalries – they were for tennis itself. That’s because those fans experienced the joy of sports at its most exalted and were elevated beyond the world of duality. I know I was. So any sport can do it, and that’s why sports continues to thrive in a world that’s become enmeshed in “Us vs. Them” thinking. And in times like these, sports is anything but trivial. Hopefully, the upcoming Beijing Olympics can live up to the true Olympic ideal, and similarly showcase the excellence of skillful athletes at their peak, without getting too caught up in nationalistic medal counts. In fact, there will be RNGs monitoring the Olympics: go to noosphere.princeton.edu
and click on “results” for ongoing updates. The Grecian ideals are not likely to be attained anymore in these days of media saturation and the commercialization of everything, but it’s still a grand aspiration.

On a less exalted plane, back on the home front, there’s been one more sign that Red Sox Nation is getting corrupted by its own success. The original team embodied democratic ideals (with a lower case D) and notions of fun, fair play, cameraderie and teamwork. But the signs of sellout have been growing in recent months (see my recent post called “The Tipping Point” for the gory details), and the latest one may be the most troubling. It takes us back to the thorniest ethical dilemma in sports: how far would you go to win? Steroid using athletes showed us just how far individuals would go in order to win, and some recent trade rumours are showing how far Red Sox, Inc. might go.

Due to the extended injury-related absence of slugger and team metronome David Ortiz, the search is on for a replacement for the second half of the season, in case he doesn’t bounce all the way back. Sox scuttlebutt has it that the team has been holding off-the-record talks with the sports agent who represents the most notorious of all present-day ballplayers – Barry Bonds. For the non-fan, he’s a hugely talented player whose all-time record for most career home runs will be tainted by the asterisk of steroid use (never proven in court, but with mountains of circumstantial evidence). He’s been persona non grata around the Major Leagues since his last contract ran out, despite still having the ability to hit well. And if the Sox are in fact pursuing him, that would be clear proof that they’ve sold their soul to the Devil. The ends would justify the means, just about any means, despite all the rhetoric about integrity we’ve been hearing from Sox corporate management over the years.

It’s still only a rumour, and there might be nothing to it. We’ll probably never know for sure, espeically if nothing actually materializes. But the fact that such a deal could even be considered a legitimate topic for speculation is one more sign that this team is fast losing its bearings in its quest to sell more tickerts and obtain any player to win at any cost. The “Joy of Sox” is becoming the “Ploy for Jocks” (a bad pun, but the end justifies the means!). It’s also become the American way, as sports continues to function as a microcosm of society as a whole, reflecting back to us our worst faults and our highest ideals.

Regional intentions (6/17/08)

2008-06-23T13:42:00.001-04:00

With any luck, the Boston Celtics will win tonight’s National Basketball Association championship game. And they have the Red Sox to thank for that – sort of. What I mean is that cities, and regions, share a collective mindset or culture, and the attitude shift undergone by New England sports fans after the Sox win in 2004 opened the doors to tonite’s game, and to Boston’s recent run of regional successes in so many sports. We’ve had a glut of local world champions in Boston, world champions in that peculiarly American sense – champions of a sports league based in America, with no foreign teams allowed to participate, despite worldwide popularity of the sport.

For example,since last fall, four of the five professional sports played in Boston (baseball, football, ice hockey, soccer and basketball), have reached the final championship game. That sort of streak that’s unheard of in professional sports in America. While the Red Sox are the only team to have actually won their championship – in November 2007 - so far (that may change in a couple of hours!), no other American city has ever had such a run. For example, when New York City’s teams won titles in three separate sports in 1969, that streak was tainted by the fact that New York was big enough to host two teams in each of the major sports. Boston is too small for that luxury, so we have our one and only in each sport. In that sense we’ve been very fortunate. But the question arises: is this run of success any more than just a lucky streak? I think so.

The Sox’ amazing 2004 World Series win didn’t just end their interminable 86 year championship drought, it also enabled the fans of New England to believe and visualize and imagine that other championships in other sports were equally possible. And the victories began to happen, with a football Super Bowl win in 2004, reaching the Major League Soccer finals in 2005, ‘06 and ‘07, and a basketball final tonite. It’s not that our other sports teams magically sprang out of the woodwork after ’04 (the football Patriots had started their own little dynasty with a Super Bowl victory in 2001, for example). But the sense of possibility has been much more a part of the local air than it had ever been. New Englanders had been notorious for our tendency to wallow in pessimistic Calvinistic beliefs about our inadequacies and unworthiness when it comes to sports. After the Sox won, attitudes changed, and our sports fans finally released their congenitally skeptical mindset after the Sox won. I believe this cognitive restructuring (as the psychologists call it) has facilitated the region’s ability to successfully manifest its sporting dreams.

The same manifestation process operates for individuals and for groups. People tend to focus on their own doubts and worries, rather than risk disappointment if their dreams don’t come true. But that’s the crux of positive intention. The more we focus on what’s possible, and the more we fuel it with a sense of enthusiam, the more likely it is to actually happen. So now, with some positive recent history at our beck and call to assuage doubts, the individual Boston athletes and the collective fanndomof New England can all be tuned to the same positive wavelength of success.We’ve finally learned how to hold positive intentions, combined with joyful emotions, to enhance the process of pulling desired events into reality.

So here’s my call, with two hours to go before game time: Celtics 101, Lakers 84.

Addendum: The final score was 130-91, Celtics. This was the most lopsided final game in league history, and was remarkable for the fact that after three close games played in Los Angeles (it’s a best of 7 game series), this game back in the friendly confines of the Boston Garden clearly showed the power of the home court advantage. After a tentative first quarter, the home team Celts played a flawless second quarter to surge ahead for good. They were clearly propelled by the excitement of the fans – their shots were uncannily accurate, their opponents got sloppier and sloppier, and even random bad bounces of the ball seemed all to go their way. That’s often a good barometer of how the tide is turning. The momentum lies with the team that gets all the loose balls, favorable calls by the refs and has the fluke plays go their way.

The Celtics teamwork had risen to another level altogether at home, as they were now playing like a synchronized dance troupe rather than a collection of very large male jocks. This game was the most vivid example of home field magic that I’ve ever seen, more proof that joy is the difference-maker in sports (the Joy of Jocks?). Even sports columnists from out of town remarked on the beauty of the Celtics team cohesion, and found themselves rooting for excellence in the sport itself rather than for any one specific team to win or lose. That was the Platonic ideal of rooting that our researchers had been telling us about, and we were fortunate to have had a brief glimpse of what it’s like. And since sports is just a microcosm of the rest of society, it stands to reason that joy – individual and collective – can be the key to succesfully creating our own lives as well.

I’ll finish with a quote from one of my favorite teachers about the process of manifestation, or what the being Abraham calls “the science of deliberate creation”. A popular workshop leader and author, he talks here about the importance of fans and players being in alignment with their source in order to attain peak team performance. By “source”, he means a person’s deepest inner wisdom; he also uses the terms “upstream” and “downstream” to denote thought patterns and actions that either go against or with the natural effortless flow of energy and events.

A quotation from Abraham (from a lecture given in November 2006)
“If you were involved in a team, even as a fan of a team, if only you could come to understand that the way you feel as you are rooting for your cause is everything. It isn’t what you say, it isn’t who you say it to, it isn’t when you say it. It’s: “Is the way I feel really and truly downstream or upstream?” Because if it’s downstream, then your heart is singing, then you feel enthusiasm, then you feel enthusiasm on your way to the championship - even in the middle of the game when it doesn’t look like you’re winning.

But what happens with so many, they’re quick to take score so soon along the way. And every time they take score, and the score isn’t the way they want it to go, they turn upstream, and they have no idea how defeating in nature that is. People who are involved in sports actually understand the law of deliberate creation and the value of energy and attitude more than almost any other body of people on the planet. Because they have, through trial and error, shown themselves what their better-feeling attitude accomplishes for them personally. In other words, any athlete who is individually focused can certainly feel the power that comes into his physical apparatus when he’s going with the current of his source, as compared to when he is going against the current of his source.

The agility, the clarity, the ability to hit the ball, the ability to even connect with it, the ability to have to power to put it where he wants it to go precisely- all of that is about alignment with source, you see. And those who are involved in sports are understanding that more and more.”

The power of negative intentions (6/8/08)

2008-06-17T19:47:00.002-04:00

I was riding high after our high-tech HeartMathematical triumph in Santa Cruz, so the Fates apparently decided that it was time for a fall. It’s actually worth going into all the gory details of what happened, because they illustrate some surprising but important principles about the power of intention. So here goes.

The first signs of a downturn came on my “day off” at the La Costa resort near San Diego, with two weeks of conferences and meetings finally behind me. I thought I’d catch up on emails and writing projects, but apparently someone else had other ideas. My laptop was totally dead, and I couldn’t even get it charged up via the outlet at my hotel room’s desk. I was pretty sure that the problem didn’t stem from when the iBook fell off the plane seat a few days ago– it was in the carry pack, and it still worked for a day or two after that mishap So after ascertaining that the hotel’s IT crew had the whole Memorial Day holiday weekend off, I made an executive decision to go to the beach, and forget about all this electronic faff. And it was a truly wonderful Monday at the beach in nearby Encinitas, at the so-called Swami’s Beach. Yes, that’s actually the name – in honor of Yogananda, the Indian guru who moved to the US almost 100 years ago to bring yoga to the West, and who donated some land near his headquarters to local beachgoers.

The Swami and the surfer – Southern California in a nutshell

I figured I’d fly home the next day, fix my laptop and get caught up with all things electronical . So I got back home on Tuesday night, but I wasn’t able to get to the local Mac store until Saturday (I got by with the hospitals Pcs until then), where one of their junior MacGurus quickly recharged my laptop’s battery. We figured out that the hospital’s powerstrip wasn’t working, and that’s why my laptop had run dry; no damage had been done by its fall in the plane. So I took my revived iBook home and went online, got caught up on some emails, and began to prepare for Monday’s upcoming bi-monthly conference call, a chance for JoS’s Big Three producers to catch up on things.

I got a little worried when I suddenly and mysteriously lost email access Saturday night and a bit more worried when we lost phone service altogether on Sunday morning. But a friendly neighbor put in a service call to Verizon Sunday noon when I discovered our loss of service. Verizon was able to get our phone line going again by 8am on Monday morning, in plenty of time for our 10am conference call. Oddly, my hospital pager had gone off at 5am in the morning, signalling that its battery had nearly run out. So I put in a new AA, figuring that I now had my back-up contact link securely in place (true confessions – I don’t have a cellphone).

After breakfast, I found that the DSL internet/email link was still out, so I tried calling Verizon’s tech support. Their guy led me through a lot of guided connecting and disconnecting of jacks and powerups of modems, with me having to shuttle from room to room because the battery on our cordless phone (our family’s cellphone equivalent) had run out during a day away from its charger. But to no avail. A serviceman would have to come to the house later that day, but only after our conference call. I scooted over to the Public Library and did a few quick email catchups, and got back home in plenty of time to set up for the call. Everything went well for the first 10 minutes or so of our talk, but then my ear must have inadvertently pressed too hard against the phone receiver, pushing the disconnect button and cutting me off. It was a poor design feature that I had silently cursed several times before, but had never remedied with a simple phone upgrade. So there I was, with a dead line, and no way to tell the others that I was cut off.

I know – get a cellphone! But in the meantime, I could only hope that my two partners would telepathically (if not telephonically) figure that I had gone silent because of a phone glitch, not because I was being extremely thoughtful. I wasn’t sure, though, if they’d figure out to hang up so that I could re-dial and start the con call process over again. Oh well, hopefully they could still have a fruitful call without me.

Again, events were forcing me to take a break from business, since there was nothing else to do but wait. It was warm and sunny out back, and the rhododendrons were at the height of their glory (see photo for proof). It was clearly time for some deep meditation (a process my wife sometimes confuses with a cat nap). I woke up refreshed, with a non-trivial question to ponder: “What’s the message here?”

I believe that all life events are like dreams, and have both a literal and a symbolic meaning. So I obviously had to take a look at what was going on. The common theme of all these glitches seemed to be disconnection, running out of power. Hmmm… My best guess is that I’m running a little low myself, since I haven’t had time to unwind yet after a very busy but very productive couple of weeks on the road. My deeper intent must have been to stay away from electronics for a while, and take the time to recharge my own batteries first, before I bothered to recharge my computer. I guess I felt too guily to admit that after 2 weeks in such beautiful climes, I was still in need of some downtime.

Addendum (3pm): The Verizon guy came by (I called him with the neighbor’s phone) to fix both problems - the lack of dial tone and the missing DSL access were both caused by a corroded main cable down the road. J&K did – eventually - notice my silence on the line yet had a good conference call despite (because of?) my absence . And no – I’m still not ready to get a cellphone. But I will heed that inner voice that was urging me to rest, or meditate, or whatever, even though my mind was loudly declaring that it knew better. These mixed motives had seemingly attracted a string of symbolic glitches into my life, until I finally got the message. The power of intention and the process of manifestation were still working, but they were harnessing my deeply mixed feelings, not my surface wishes. It’s a lot more fun to create you life when you’re clear about your goals and your motivations!

Heart math (5/23/08)

2008-05-30T21:54:00.009-04:00

Today was my day to be a guinea pig, and it looks like I’ve got what it takes. I was at the HeartMath Institute in the Santa Cruz foothills of California (on the day of a raging forest fire only 20 miles away – was that an omen?) to meet with some pioneers of energy medicine. Dr. Rollin McCraty and his team are the folks who proved that a novel heart-centered meditation process has a different effect on heart rhythm and nervous system function than seemingly similar processes like muscle relaxation or mindfulness meditation. Their theory goes one step further than describing this mind/body interaction. They believe that mental focus on emotions like compassion and appreciation alters the heart’s rhythm and also creates a magnetic field that is strong enough to affect nearby living things. Because they’ve studied the mathematics of these cardiac effects, they’re called the HeartMath Institute (www.heartmath.com).

The HeartMath researchers have done a few individual demos to illustrate these field interactions, most famously showing that a boy in heart coherence can entrain the rhythm of his dog’s heart (heart coherence is their term for a heart rhythm that’s optimally synchronized with the nervous system). But nothing on a larger scale has ever been done, something of the sort that might validate our JoS theories about how crowd energy influences team coherence. So I proposed a test for the HeartMath people, to see whether a group of people focused on their inner sense of appreciation could affect the physiology of a test subject – namely me. I took a seat in their lab, and was hooked up to their computer system that monitored my heart rhythm. I then used my rudimentary skills in heart coherence (5 minutes of previous practice) to try and enter that magical state of coherence. I was then joined in the room by 6 other people who were highly skilled in the art of heart coherence, to see whether my rhythms became entrained via sympathetic resonance with their magnetic fields, the same way that tuning forks resonate with each other.

The kicker in this setup was that I was blindfolded and ear-plugged. That way, I wouldn’t know when the other meditators joined me in the room, and my conscious expectations and reactions wouldn’t be a factor affecting my physiology. The only change in the situation would be my exposure to their group “vibe”; any changes in my heart rhythm would result from having been “tuning forked” by the meditators. And so, with help from Chief Scientist McCraty, the room was set up to allow me to meditate in my own little cocoon of sensory isolation, surrounded (as shown in this photo) by some pretty impressive equipment for psychophysiologic monitoring (the gizmos reminded me of the infamous Monty Python scene in “The Meaning of Life”, when the hospital administrator is duly impressed his encounter with “the machine that goes ‘Bing!’ “).

As luck would have it, our experiment actually worked. Midway through my 10 minute trial meditation, I began to feel a sort of lightness in my chest. After an involuntary sigh of relief, I settled into a nice inner state of heartfelt appreciation and gratitude for way my life was unfolding. It was the state I had been striving for earlier, but it suddenly seemed much easier to enter. Amazingly enough, and unbeknownst to me, the computer monitor showed that at the very same moment, my heart rhythm (or my heart rate variability, to use the technical term), entered a state of high internal coherence, to match the rhythm of the HeartMath meditation team. The team’s pulsating magnetic field had apparently pushed me into a state of higher coherence than I could achieve by my own independent efforts, and the machines had captured this event.

The photo here shows the computer monitor, with the graph in the lower left corner showing the degree to which my heart is in a coherent pattern – a few blips at first, and then zooming up off the charts.The upper graph shows my actual heart rate, in beats per minute, throughout the 5 minute experiment. The sudden uptick just past the two and a half minute mark represents the moment when the team entered the room; I remember feeling a swish of air as they walked by, and getting nervous that “it” might now be starting. Close scrutiny of the bottom left chart shows that my upsurge in coherence begins a little over three minutes into the test; in other words, just around the time when the group would have finally settled into their own coherent groove.

Dr. McCraty and I were both blown away by the size of the effect we’d produced, because the demo clearly showed that a small group of people holding a positive intention can affect the physiology of one person in their vicinity. It seems obvious, then, that if 35,000 people are focusing positive vibes on their favorite player in a coordinated way, his performance could be lifted into the stratosphere. As Dr. McC. noted, the emotion of appreciation is the most powerful emotion to use for influencing others. It’s even more powerful than the emotion of anger, though maybe not as popular among fans. He said that fans could use appreciation to lift their teams when they’re in a slump, but they shouldn’t waste their emotional energy on booing their opponents. Booing disrupts everyones’ vibe, and brings everyone into an unsynchronized state. It’s far more beneficial to use fandom’s emotional energies to encourage their own team by showering them with love, kindness and appreciation. Come to think of it, we could all benefit from that kind of emotional outpouring.

The tipping point? (5/1/08)

2008-05-30T17:44:00.005-04:00

I hate to sound ungrateful, but signs are cropping up everywhere that Red Sox Fever might have gone a little too far for our own good (I’m presuming to speak on behalf of all Bostonians here). Over the last year or two, I hadn’t really made much of the ever-growing list of Sox sponsorships (official jeweler of the Sox, official sports drink, etc. ) but two recent newspaper articles seem to offer proof that we’ve finally gone off the deep end.

Here are the headlines: “Sox-Yankee rivalry cited in New Hampshire fatality”, and “Final reward: Loved ones’ ashes find their way into ballpark soil”. Which one is more troubling? You decide.

Item #1: A 41 year old New Hampshire woman was recently arrested after driving her car into a crowd of Red Sox fans who had begun shouting “Yankees suck!” after spotting a Yankees bumper sticker on her car. There was alcohol involved, as well as an earlier argument outside a nightclub, but the baseball jeering seemed to be the last straw that triggered her to drive her car into the cluster of fans, killing a 29 year-old man. Not much commentary is needed on this tragedy; as the lawyers say, res ipse loquitor (the thing speaks for itself).
www.boston.com/sports/baseball/redsox/articles/2008/05/06/
sox_yankee_rivalry_cited_in_nh_fatality/

Item#2: A few years ago, the Sox gave a local family permission to scatter their son’s ashes around home plate, as a tribute to his devotion to the team. But the Sox have had to discontinue the practice because of the high volume of similar requests they continue to get. Yet even that regulation hasn’t stopped determined family members. Lou Gorman, the Sox’s former GM, was recently quoted as saying: “Many times you go out there after a game and you’ll see ashes on the grounds. I went out there last year twice, and twice I saw it on the warning track…It’s almost like a burial ground of Red Sox Nation.” So in the minds of many, Fenway Park is holy ground, sanctified territory – it’s hard to get more devoted than that. I’m sure these diehard (!) fans wouldn’t appreciate Bill Lee’s reminder to me last summer that Fenway Park is built on reclaimed swampland, and its location has zero intrinsic magic.
www.boston.com/sports/baseball/redsox/articles/2008/05/04/final_reward/

And another thing: To finish off this little rant, consider another Red Sox oddity that was revealed on a stroll through Boston’s Arnold Arboretum during last week’s Mother’s Day/Lilac Sunday festivities. One of the Morris Dance troupes did a performance that included a bat-thwacking dance arrangement to the tune of “Take Me Out to the Ballgame”. There’s nothing wrong, in itself, with setting a 16th century British dance performance to a 20th century American sports song, but in the context of these other absurdities, it just felt like more proof that we’ve finally reached the tipping point.This’ll sound like heresy, but maybe it’s time for the collective membership of Red Sox Nation to get a life.

Marathon Monday

2008-04-28T19:46:00.010-04:00

Today (4/21/08) was the 105th annual running of the Boston Marathon, America’s oldest and largest annual such event. 21,963 (fool)hardy souls ran the full 26 miles and 385 yards up and down hills and valleys, fighting warm weather (61 degrees) and a headwind (5 mph) but spurred on by the cheers of an estimated 1,000,000 admirers who lined the route from suburban Hopkinton to the finish line in downtown Boston. A good time was had by all (the fans, anyway), and it was historic stuff for track devotees, but what, you may ask, does it have to do with the Joy of Sox?

Only this – crowd emotions at most sporting events are typically split between two competing teams, the hometown fans cheering for their local favorites, opposed by supporters of the visiting team. The ratio between the two sides can vary anywhere from 50/50 at a typical High School football game to 95/5 at home games of wildly favored pro teams (like the Red Sox, where visiting fans would have hundreds, if not thousands, of miles to travel). And that’s been one explanation for the difficulty researchers have had in getting solid results with random number generators at sporting events: the emotional field of the audience is split, and high levels of coherence can’t be obtained because the competing vibes cancel each other out. So it would be nice to be able to take measurements at a sporting event where everyone is rooting for the same person or people. And that’s where the Marathon comes in.

That’s because marathon crowds everywhere, not just in Boston, are so uninhibitedly supportive of the runners. Their admiration, and bewilderment, is expressed by a torrent of cheers, whoops, and, today (courtesy of Saturn autos), cowbells for all. Even the slowpokes, the runners who have been reduced to a walk, or whose wobbles suggest that dropping out is imminent - they all get huge doses of fan support, as well as whatever invisible energy comes with that. So what would the RNG output be like in a setting where all the fans are “on”, all the time, and for the same cause? We’re about to find out, because today’s files are already en route to Scott the Stats Guy, who has completed his move to Florida and is once again ready to crunch some serious numbers for us.

At today’s race, I set up shop near the halfway point, where the leaders usually arrive in a pack of 10 or so, pursued by a steady trickle of dozens of high level runners, soon followed by a true flood of thousasnds of everyday runners that stretches for miles. But I didn’t pick just any spot – I chose a setting that is legendary for its powerful cheers. For I had plunked down my laptop by the main entrance to Wellesley College, an all-girls school that is almost as famous for its cheering prowess as for its academic rigor (and for an alumna who is favored to win the Democratic presidential primary in Pennsylvania tomorrow).

I was not disappointed. As the photos above and below show, it was possible to set up the equipment so that RNGs would be generated right in the thick of things. I didn’t cushion the computer on a foam pad this time, which is too bad – skeptics will say that the crowd noise was so loud that it might have shaken the computers and altered the data. The only reason I was able to survive the full 30 minute recording segment was because I had two very high quality foam earplugs stuck way up into my Eustachian tubes. Otherwise, my ears would still be ringing. I enjoyed the show, and felt the stirrings of a mild case of spring fever in the process. Plenty of witty signs, many with a similar theme: “Kiss me, I’m a senior”, “I’ve never been kissed by a runner”, “Quick kisses here”, and “Kiss me, girls. This is Wellesley”. Plenty of takers, too. So I know the runners got a good buzz from the Wellesley college co-eds. We’ll find out soon enough whether the computer did, too.

Opening Day, 2008

2008-04-12T16:09:00.005-04:00

First off, I wasn’t there, so what I’m about to say is based only on second-hand experience – TV news reports, stories in the newspapers, etc. But unless I miss my guess, today’s 2008 home opener set a record for heart-expanding joyfulness when the first pitch to start the game was thrown out by none other than… But first, let me set the stage.

In the off-season following last year’s Series Victory, I (and other Sox observers) had become a little concerned about the behavior of Sox fans. Apparently we’d become more aggressive in our celebrations than fans from other cities, and we were starting to rub folks the wrong way in other towns throughout the league. We crow about our two recent championships, about our team’s apparel being the #1 seller, about the start of our very own dynasty. In other words, we’re not being very gracious winners.

The emotion behind this self-satisfaction isn’t hard to fathom – we’d been down so long, and down-trodden by others for so many years, that we felt a strong urge to tread down on someone else. It was the whole pecking order thing, with the abused now becoming the abuser. And that behavior bothered me, not only because of my British roots (well, not really roots, but having a British wife has exposed me to good sportsmanship and respect for the game in a way that Americans don’t really get), but also because it went against the core message of “Joy of Sox”.

What our scientists have shown is that a more powerful energy field is generated by harmonious emotions of appreciation and joy than by discordant ones like anger and revenge. So if we Sox fans want to do well by our team and serve them up with a more potent force field, we should be showing more of those higher level emotions – our cheer should be “Sox rock!”, rather than “Yankees suck!”. OK, fair enough, but what does this have to do with opening day today.

Turns out that the inspired choice for throwing out today’s first pitch was Bill Buckner, a Hall of Fame player whose stellar career was marred by one play – he let a groundball get through his legs in the 1986 World Series, allowing the NY Mets beat the Sox when the Sox were one pitch away from winning the whole thing. He was such a convenient lightning rod for fans’ frustrations that he was literally run out of town. He moved to Idaho to escape from the constant media references to that one play, and had not made a public appearance in Boston for 18 years. However, today the fans had a chance to shower him with acceptance, forgiveness, love, gratitude – all those warm fuzzies dissolved old enmities and frustrations, and would have sent my RNG computer into the stratosphere if I had only been able to go to the game.

To see a video clip of his prolonged standing ovation, go to: www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/04/09/bill-buckners-fenway-park_n_95844.html

One TV network’s post-game poll of 500 fans showed that 82% had forgiven Buckner; his news interview made it clear that his beef was not with the fans but with the Boston media, a notoriously vindictive lot. I haven’t seen the results of the media’s forgiveness poll yet (and I’m not holding my breath!). So here’s my prediction – the last remaining ghost of negativity has been exorcised, and the Sox fans are ready to generate an unprecedented wave of positive emotions that will life the team to yet another successful year.

But the real test of our emotional maturity will come next week, against the Yankees – it’s not as important that the Sox win as whether the fans let the inevitable “Yankees suck” chants die out quickly, or whether they get all their emotional juice from razzing an adversary who’s having a down year. Are we bullies, or winners with class? We’ll soon find out.

While Fenway Park gently sleeps...

2008-03-03T20:29:00.002-05:00

Actually, not so gently. They’re doing some major repair work on Fenway during the off-season, with cranes and hammers going at it for two 10-hour shifts, 7 days a week. I mention this because that hubbub might have an impact on the offseason computer recordings we’re making at Fenway. Or not.

The Joy of Sox theory is that Fenway magic is real and measurable, and is part and parcel of the Park itself. During the regular season, we documented that invisible energy exists during games, but we haven’t yet been able to show that any afterglow lingers when the park is empty. That would have to happen in order for Fenway to qualify as a true “sacred space”. But at least we now have the technique to make these measurements, and so our RNG laptop is back on the scene, generating random numbers just as rapidly in March as it did back in September.

It’s hard to predict what we’ll find. On the one hand, you’d figure that all that construction work would disrupt any subtle vibrations stored at Fenway. On the other had, if these vibes are real, they might exist at a non-physical level of reality, and shouldn’t be affected by a few loud noises and boisterous construction workers. But your guess is as good as mine. Hopefully our analysis will show that there’s still some magic at Fenway in the offseason, maybe not as much as during a game, but more than at some other nearby public space (I might set it up at the McDonalds across the street, as a comparison).

If it’s true, then we can actually monitor the waking-up process of the stadium, as Fenway recovers from its winter hyibernation and the vibes come alive over the next few months. As Spring Training gears up in Florida and people begin to think about baseball again, perhaps they unconsciously begin to reconnect with Fenway. There may be some delays in doing the statistical analysis, though, as Scott the stats guy is in the process of relocating from Colorado to Florida. But when the data is ready, you’ll be the first to know.

And here’s one other quick, but key, update. There’s no offseason for Joy of Sox, and recently we added on Karen Webb as Producer. She’s an experienced documentarian, and a mover and shaker, with great ideas on how to move this project to completion. She runs Pinch Hit Productions LLC (yes, she’s also a Sox fanatic!), and you’ll be hearing a lot more about her – including a new look for our website, and some tantalizing leads to some big names (we’re now only one degree of separation away from hitting a home run with our proposed celebrity narrator). But that’s all for now, with plenty more to come.

Parade photo #4

2007-12-16T17:40:00.000-05:00

I'm pretty sure this sign is in poor taste, but maybe these girls really are just innocent young high school kids who aren't into double entendres. For the uninitiated, Sox fielder Jacoby Ellsbury is Native American/Navajo.

Parade photo #3

2007-12-16T11:51:00.001-05:00

Here's a creative sign. It refers to the nationwide marketing ploy by Taco Bell, giving anyone in America a free taco that afternoon, thanks to Jacoby Ellsbury scoring for the Sox during a designated inning in the last game. Archnemesis A-Rod presumably has the free time to go get one now. For more on Ellsbury, see Parade Photo #4