“I just love it. It's like a washing machine for your brain. It's beautiful. It's graceful. It's exciting. It's delicious. It's one of the great sounds of all time to be, and to hear that water rush by you, either in a boat or standing in it.”
—Henry Winkler, Emmy Award–Winning Actor, on the meditative qualities of fly fishing
My college roommates and I, having seen Caddyshack more times than we care to admit, have been quoting Chevy Chase's character since our freshman year: “Be the ball, Danny.” In the context of this hilarious comedy, the line induces laughter. It's delivered a little tongue-in-cheek, and yet it is also the underlying theme to the entire film. Danny Noonan, who works as a caddy to Chase's Ty Webb, carrying his bags around the course for some pocket cash, really wants to be a pro golfer himself. While the movie is full of quotable lines and amazingly funny sequences, it has held up over time because underneath all the laughs is a meditative message about letting go of the pressures society has placed upon you and allowing yourself the space and relaxation to fully take advantage of the gifts you have at your disposal.
The trends have changed immensely since Caddyshack debuted in 1980, particularly society's view of eastern philosophies and practices. While I can't recall any pro athletes pointing to meditation as part of their training regimen when I was a kid, today I can point to Steph Curry's 2017 commercial for Kaiser Permanente in which he lays in a float tank, visualizing himself performing all kinds of feats with a basketball. Or superstar quarterback Tom Brady's TB12 method, which stresses practices like stretching, deep-tissue massage, and abstinence from sugar, alcohol, and caffeine, as well as ample of amounts of hydration and sleep. While such practices had a reputation of being “unmanly” back when I was a kid, they have rapidly shifted into the consciousness of the mainstream in recent years. The reason for this shift is simple: meditation and relaxation produce results that cannot be denied.
“I was just as skeptical as you and I came to this so reluctantly. I literally had miraculous results with my daughter when she was very, very sick. She had an immunological condition.”
—Amy Budden, Meditation Teacher and Certified Hypnotherapist
If you are shifting uncomfortably in your chair as you read this, you are not alone. My own relationship to meditation and relaxation, if visually charted on a graph, would resemble that of a rollercoaster ride. Being a product of a traditional East Coast upbringing, surrounded by many people who have gone on to successful careers in industries that could be described as more tangible than mine, I was resistant to meditation when first introduced to it. Only in looking back do I realize I was studying and practicing aspects of meditation long before I had a term to apply to it. Acting, in many ways, borrows so many principles from meditation. Without realizing it, I already was utilizing certain techniques that are very much in line with what I have since been exposed to through meditation practitioners I have interviewed and befriended. And yet, when I first attempted to meditate in the traditional sense, I had one recurring thought: “This is not for me.”
Because of this rocky relationship, I feel qualified to serve as a bridge between meditation proponents and those who have never dabbled in, or can't envision themselves ever benefiting from, meditation. If, on the other hand, you happen to have a firm meditation practice in place, feel free to skip ahead.
Take me with a grain of salt, and please refrain from judging me if you're a traditionalist, but I believe there are many ways to meditate that do not involve sitting in a pretzel-like position on a yoga mat. In fact, a more relaxed interpretation of the art espoused by the popular app Headspace is what got me meditating in the first place. Full disclosure: as of this writing, I have not used Headspace for any significant amount of time and I do not engage regularly in what I would call a meditation practice. However, I do employ a bastardized and personalized version of meditation every day of my life. In many respects, that's the point of meditation: practicing it in a way that works best for you.
While there is a part of me that is ashamed to admit that I don't spend an hour every morning and evening meditating, I feel that admitting it to you is actually part of my meditative practice. This is because, at least in my simple understanding of the art, at its core meditation is about accepting things as they are, not as we wish them to be. So if we have a thought that could be labeled as “not good,” rather than judge it and lacerate ourselves for having that thought, meditation encourages us to breathe and release it. The image that made sense for me was to imagine my thoughts as constantly floating down a river, each like a small boat. Just because they float by, we are not required to jump on each and every one. In fact, it's probably a good idea not to jump on the ones that will likely send us over a waterfall. In the same way, rather than hiding my lack of practice from you and presenting myself as someone who “has it all,” as I'd love to see myself, I am choosing to show you the way I really am. The truth is that, while I may someday engage in a more rigorous daily meditation practice, right now I do not. And that's okay. We can just chalk it up as another of my 10,000 “no”s. And wherever you happen to be in your practice right now is also okay. But maybe in learning more about this, you will add it to your ever-growing evolution toward becoming your best self.
One of my first acting teachers in New York City was Terry Schreiber. I studied with him for four years and learned many things about the craft of acting, and myself, at his T. Schreiber Studio. Terry introduced me to a warm-up exercise that is rooted in the same fundamentals as meditation: breath work. Terry also encouraged me to look at myself in a way that was different than I had up until that point. My real education from Terry, however, came via something he said to me repeatedly that backed up the principles of meditation that were practiced in those breathing exercises. Terry's recurring statement, to me specifically, in that scene-study class was, “Don't try to be such a straight-A student.”
Something I've come to know, after seeing and assessing many performances over the years, is that bad acting can often be traced back to an actor attempting to present themself as having it all figured out. When I catch glimpses of it in my own performances, causing me to cringe, I remember why Terry worked so hard to break me of the habit. What he was doing, while it wasn't called by this name, had its roots in meditation. It started with the physicality and relaxation that was trained in the exercise I'm about to describe, so I'll begin with that and work my way forward from there so you can see the link. You can then choose to apply some or all of the principles to your own life.
Hopefully you can see that one of the lessons of this exercise is linked directly to the image I presented earlier about not attaching ourselves to every thought that passes by as it floats down the river. In this instance, the burning in the thighs is no longer in control of shutting us down. We can acknowledge it, but also let it pass by while we instead focus on our breath, relaxation, and grounding. It is an exercise in accepting what is and carrying on regardless.
Much in the same way, Terry's advice, “Don't try to be such a straight-A student,” was his way of telling me to accept my whole self. What he noticed in my work was that I was only revealing the aspects of myself that were strong and smart and “together.” He explained, “We don't come to the theater to see that. We want to see what's underneath. What are you struggling with? What's complicated? What's unresolved? We want to see you work that out right in front of our eyes. Don't hide behind this persona you've created of this guy that has it all. That's not very interesting. And, more importantly, it's not truthful.”
Another acting coach, Kim Gillingham, whom I mentioned in an earlier chapter, had her mantra, “You are enough.” She would often say that the root of bad acting is an actor feeling that they are not enough on their own, which prompts them to overcompensate and give a false and overdone performance. These principles may apply to acting, but they also apply to anything and everything. Every entrepreneur I've sat down with on 10,000 NOs has stressed that, underneath all of the various systems they may come up with to run their business, there is a simplicity to their success: find something that people need help with, and figure out a solution. That requires really looking at a situation as it is: the good, the bad, and the ugly. Each cancer survivor, and other guests of mine who have suffered some kind of trauma, has expressed the same sentiment: it was only when I finally accepted my new circumstances as they were, that I was able to start moving forward again.
“You don't need Stage IV cancer … everybody's got somewhere on that scale, right? And if you think you're at the worst end of your scale? That feels the same as the worst end of my scale, so it's never a comparison of, ‘Ew, my tragedy beats your tragedy.’”
—Rob Whitaker, on his fight with Stage IV colon cancer
All of this covers the acceptance portion of meditation, but there is a whole treasure chest of tools available to us, which I have yet to fully access but hope to over time. This is the reason meditation has grown so much in popularity in recent years; just as my entrepreneurial friends stated their need to serve people in order for their company's services to be valued, meditation has increasingly served more people, particularly in the area of performance. While Western civilization used to, and in many cases still does, have a bias against Eastern philosophies as being “woo-woo” and “touchy feely,” more recent studies, such as the one by Sara Lazar, a neuroscientist at Mass General Hospital and Harvard Medical School, have unearthed the science behind meditation and relaxation. Brain scans of control groups revealed that meditation practice has the ability to physically alter the grooves in our brain, thus altering our experience of the world and our ability to succeed. According to Brigid Shulte in “Harvard Neuroscientist: Meditation Not Only Reduces Stress, Here's How It Changes Your Brain” in the Washington Post (May 26, 2015), Lazar's study found that, “Long term meditators were revealed to have an increased amount of gray matter in the insula and sensory regions, the auditory and sensory cortex. They also found they had more gray matter in the frontal cortex, which is associated with working memory and executive decision making.”
“Sara Lazar is a Harvard neurologist. She did before-and-afters of the brains of people who had never meditated, fifty years old and up, to people who had meditated nonstop for twenty-three minutes a day for eight weeks and their brains changed.”
—Suze Yalof Schwartz, Founder/CEO, Unplug Meditation
In the 1970s, Richard Bandler and John Grinder studied brain chemistry and the effects of language and behavior on the brain. With their 1979 book Frogs into Princes, they began what was eventually known as NLP, neuro-linguistic programming. When it first emerged, many leaders in the medical field in the United States laughed it off as being practiced by kooks on the fringes of society. But results have a way of silencing critics and making their way to center stage when they are undeniable, and that's what has happened with NLP.
“I meditate every day. I do it in the mornings for about 10 to 15 minutes. I think it's important because it sets me up for the rest of the day.”
—Kobe Bryant, NBA Superstar
That Kobe Bryant meditated may not seem surprising to you if you're under the age of 30 and grew up with athletes speaking this way about meditation. In my childhood these trains of thought could not have been further away from how the best athletes generally looked at self-knowledge, or at philosophies with even remote ties to what was considered the more “feminine” side of our nature. More typically, male athletic prowess was presented in a way best summed up by NFL superstar Jack Lambert: “I believe the game is designed to reward the ones who hit the hardest … if you can't take it, you shouldn't play!”
In fact, it was only in writing this book that my own memory was jogged about a book I read in junior high that had a profound effect, though I had long since forgotten about it. It was all-star basketball player Kareem Abdul-Jabbar's autobiography, Giant Steps. Looking back, I now remember that his story, and the way he framed it, resonated with me as I was going through puberty. He writes of feeling like an outsider who was trapped in his own head, a victim to his thoughts and intellect. But he found salvation, and incredible results, through his study of martial arts. The same principles of meditation and relaxation discussed here were then an integral part of what he took with him from his martial arts practice and translated into his prolific career on the basketball court.
“I can do something else besides stuff a ball through a hoop. My biggest resource is my mind.”
Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, NBA Superstar
I wish I could present myself as the guy who is levitating at his keyboard while writing this, but that would not be true. Besides, I believe you'll learn more from my failures than successes, so I'd like to revisit a story I first covered in the chapter on risk. The way I presented the period following my stint on The Sopranos, when I convinced my new bride to quit her job and follow me west for pilot season, it may have sounded like I was the victim of terrible luck as I rifled through wedding money and returned to New York forced to bartend once again. But let's assess that trip through a different lens.
At the end of 2002, I was coming off my biggest successes up until that time, both professionally and personally. Success can feed the ego, even if we are cognizant of this tendency, as I believed I was at the time. If I could go back to 2003 and interview 30-year-old Matt Del Negro, I would have found him to be humble and hardworking. However, if I were to really look at him closely, I would have discovered he was scared, anxious, and possibly too ambitious for his own good. Success, in the traditional sense, implies some kind of external validation. Both being part of a hit show and marrying a kind, beautiful woman are an excess of external validation. Without realizing it, I was being set up for a fall because my appetite had been whetted by the success I had attained, and I wanted more. Results became more important to me in that period of time than process. That is a dangerous way to live and, in retrospect, I now realize that meditation and relaxation would have served me immensely through that period.
I believe it was mostly fear that drove me. I felt like the iron was hot and I needed to strike. Auditions and meetings were flying at me at a much more rapid pace than I had previously experienced. And the mood toward me, and my value as an actor, was noticeably more receptive than ever because I was now associated with a well-respected show. This combination created a frenzy mindset that was the opposite of meditative. While I don't fault myself for mistakenly relying on my grind rather than my flow, I see now the error of my ways.
Had I used the Special Forces mantra I recently learned of—“Slow is smooth and smooth is fast”—and taken the slower, smoother route in 2003, perhaps I would have had more success that spring. If you're thinking I'm being too self-critical and it was just a matter of bad luck and unfortunate timing, you could be right. But that interpretation renders me powerless by forcing me to think of myself as a defenseless victim who is at the mercy of the whims of the universe.
While we are susceptible to the forces that bang up against us, we are also capable of incorporating practices that aid our chances of success. In this case, examining my actions and acknowledging where I could have made different choices without judging myself or going against my character, I can use the principles of meditation to let some of those previous habits and choices flow down the river so I can choose new ones the next time I'm in a similar situation.
“If I kept busy, if I kept myself in perpetual motion, I wouldn't have to answer, I wouldn't have to look into my soul. And so the universe gave me about three warnings. And, in the end, went, ‘Oh, okay, girl. You are gonna be slapped down and slapped down hard and now you have to face it and now you have to deal with it.’”
—Sue Hollis, Named One of Australia's Top 10 Female Entrepreneurs by SmartCompany
The simultaneous beauty and curse of meditative practices is that we never graduate from them. Even the most enlightened individuals are engaged in consciously detaching themselves from results for the rest of their lives. So maybe the next time you do attempt to pull out a yoga mat and follow a meditation app, an actual teacher, or your own breath, you will go easier on yourself and accept wherever it is that you are in that moment. From experience, this is not easy to do, but it is a necessary part of anyone's journey toward success in any field, as well as anyone's fulfillment in this life. Believe it or not, sometimes stopping to smell the roses will get you to your destination faster than sprinting as fast as you can, ignoring what's around you.