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How Unprocessed Experiences Affect Your Sports Performance

Unprocessed experiences color your perspective, feelings, and actions, whether they are positive or negative. To optimize your sports performance, it’s crucial to process these experiences.

 

In this article, you’ll learn about what unprocessed experiences are, their consequences, and how to process them.

 

Contents

  • Zen and Unprocessed Experiences: Bubbles
  • The Consequences of Unprocessed Experiences
  • Zen and Processed Experiences: Dots
  • The Solution: Meditation
  • Focest for Freedom of Thought and Action

 

Summary:

  • Both positive and negative unprocessed experiences can hinder your sports performance.
  • Unprocessed experiences can manifest both physically and mentally.
  • If you meditate twice a day for twenty minutes, you’ll process experiences.

 

 

 

Zen and Unprocessed Experiences: Bubbles

In Zen, unprocessed experiences are called “bubbles.” Bubbles arise when experiences are not emotionally processed adequately. The memory of the experience is accompanied by emotions such as anger, sadness, frustration, as well as joy or enthusiasm.

Bubbles influence your thoughts, behaviors, physical reactions, tensions, and feelings. In other words, they affect and cloud your thinking, feeling, and actions.

Thus, unprocessed experiences can hinder your sports performance and experience. This applies to both positive and negative unprocessed experiences.

For example, consider a transfer from one club to another. This can be extremely positive. However, if you don’t process this experience and start acting arrogantly, or fail to process the many changes (moving, new group, new club culture), it will lead to a dip in your development.

Bubbles can arise from recent experiences. Additionally, you may be dealing with unprocessed experiences from your childhood. This can become a blueprint that continues to challenge you throughout your sports career.

When you process an experience, you release the emotional charge attached to the memory. A processed experience in Zen is called a “dot.”

Having fewer unprocessed experiences allows you to think, act, and play sports more clearly and lightly.

A Zen teacher once said:

“The more dots, the wiser; the more bubbles, the more stubborn.”

Summary: Unprocessed experiences are referred to as “bubbles.” These influence your thinking, feeling, and actions. Releasing the emotional charge attached to a memory turns a bubble into a dot.

 

 

 

The Consequences of Unprocessed Experiences

Unprocessed experiences affect you in three areas:

  • Physical
  • Mental
  • Emotional
Physical

The title of this #1 New York Times bestseller sums it up nicely:

The Body Keeps the Score.

If you don’t process experiences, your body stores them. This can cause tension in your shoulders or lower back pain, for example. Processing the experience will allow your body to let go.

Mental

How you see and experience the world around you is influenced, among other things, by bubbles. This also has a direct impact on your actions. Did you sprain your ankle a year ago with a bad landing and not process it? Then you might avoid heading duels or tense up when you have to make that movement again.

In addition, bubbles can lead to limiting beliefs, such as:

If I lose, I won’t have any sponsorship contracts anymore.

I have to be the best, otherwise I’ll disappoint my parents.

If I lose, I’ll lose my status.

They boo me, I’m not good enough, I don’t belong here.

Such beliefs can cause stress and unrest, which negatively impacts your sports performance and experience.

It can also lead to self-sabotage. For example, a tennis player who plays poorly and masks it by blaming everything outside themselves, like the bad court and the referee. If the match isn’t going well, they might smash their rackets and get disqualified. This way, you haven’t really lost, but you’re sabotaging yourself so much that you distract from your poor play.

 

Emotional

Bubbles affect your emotions. For example, if you were treated disrespectfully by an opponent and didn’t process that experience, it could lead to a default hostility towards your opponents. This drains energy, which is a waste. You could better use that energy to win the match.

Summary: Bubbles affect you physically, mentally, and emotionally. This can hinder your sports performance and experience.

 

 

 

Zen and Processed Experiences: Dots

Good news: you can process bubbles. They don’t have to influence you for the rest of your life.

The moment you realize what colors your experience, those bubbles become transparent and thus ‘dots’. Dots are processed bubbles.

You can think of dots as insights or facts without emotional charge. You can consciously work on releasing that emotional charge, but it often happens that bubbles become dots through your subconscious.

Giving your sports career a boost involves turning bubbles into dots. For example, it gives you insight into your relationship with your sport. Are you playing the game for yourself? Or did you get here because your father is the world’s biggest handball fan and has pushed you in this direction?

Another example is the preplay and replay of a game. Bubbles cause you to experience ‘perceived stress’ sooner than ‘real stress’, as shown in the table below. When your bubbles become transparent, for instance by processing the rough start of the previous game, you’ll experience less ‘perceived stress’.

[Insert Graph]

Only when you can perceive these processes in yourself does your true potential emerge. And there’s absolutely nothing wrong with playing for the entertainment of the audience or for your parents.

In fact, once your bubble becomes transparent, you can use it.

Summary: When you process bubbles, they become ‘dots’. This removes the emotional charge from a memory.

The Solution: Meditation

As Helen Keller said:

“Although the world is full of suffering, it is also full of overcoming it.”

Meditation helps you process experiences. When you think about processing experiences, you might picture lying on a couch with a therapist and endlessly talking about your ‘problem’. Meditation, however, works differently.

During meditation, you focus on your breathing. It’s precisely because of this focus that various thoughts come to mind. For example, a memory of waiting in line at the checkout that afternoon or an argument with your mother from years ago.

That’s the paradox of meditation: as you try to focus on your breath, thoughts and bubbles (unprocessed experiences) from your subconscious surface.

When these thoughts arise outside of meditation, you often engage with them. You keep repeating the story, feel the same sadness or anger again, worry about what you should have done differently, and so on. This actually gives the bubble more charge.

During meditation, when a bubble surfaces, you do nothing with it. You simply observe it briefly, without judgment, and then return to focusing on your breath. This way, bubbles will lose their emotional charge, require less energy, and have less influence on you.

This is how you consciously process your bubbles. Meanwhile, this process also takes place unconsciously during meditation.

It often happens that a bubble becomes a dot without you realizing it and without actively working on it. For instance, a Zen teacher with extreme fear of dogs (the bubble) suddenly noticed during a walk that he calmly passed by a group of dogs. That bubble had unconsciously become a dot.

Through meditation, you process your bubbles both consciously and unconsciously.

 

 

 

What you’ll notice as you process bubbles:

– You have more confidence

– You focus on factors you can control

– Criticism is no longer taken personally

– You overcome your limiting patterns

– You become more effective (less reactive) in your behavior

These benefits help you perform more authentically in your sport. A great example of this is Richard Krajicek’s experience. Just before winning Wimbledon, he read the Zen book “Nothing Special” four times. This helped him quickly let go of a mistake and fully concentrate on the next ball.

Want to learn more about the positive effects of meditation on your sports performance?

Download the free whitepaper.

Note: Everyone has bubbles, and meditation can help you with them. Seek professional help for processing traumas.

Summary: Through meditation, you process bubbles, both consciously and unconsciously.

 

 

 

Focest for Freedom of Thought and Action

Bubbles cloud your actions, your thoughts, and your experience of what’s going on.

As an athlete, you can’t reach your full potential if you’re hindered by bubbles.

As you’ve read in this article, bubbles can become ’transparent’. Then, they become dots.

As long as bubbles aren’t transparent, they can be difficult to recognize. It’s challenging to see, feel, and experience what a bubble is and its nature.

That’s why, during a program at Focest, we dedicate time to your bubbles. Through meditation, they will become transparent. Because this process is our specialty, we provide guidance and coaching.

Curious about how Focest can help improve your sports performance?

Schedule a consultation without any obligation.

 

Summary

Unprocessed experiences cloud your thinking, feelings, and actions, whether they are positive or negative. In Zen, these unprocessed experiences are referred to as ‘bubbles’.

A bubble signifies that there is still an emotional charge attached to a memory.

These bubbles can hinder your sports performance and experience. Therefore, it’s important to transform these bubbles into ‘dots’.

When an experience becomes a dot, you have released the emotional charge attached to the memories, and they will no longer influence you.

Through meditation, you can transform bubbles into dots. To optimize this process, you can collaborate with a coach who can help you gain insight into your bubbles.

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