Meaning and Spirituality in Sport and Exercise

Psychological Perspectives

Noora Ronkainen, Mark Nesti

• Editore: Routledge
• Anno: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351591980
• Edizione: 1
• Argomento: Psychologie
• Categoria: Sportpsychologie

Despite the growing literature on spirituality and its positive impact on well-being in health psychology, education, occupational psychology and leisure studies, it has been less examined in sport studies. Meaning and Spirituality in Sport and Exercise: Psychological Perspectives examines the many forms of spirituality in sport from a psychological perspective, from moments of transcendence and finding deeper meaning and value to prayer before an important competition or in adversity, such as a career-threatening injury.

Based on the latest research and the Nesti's experience in applied sport psychology service delivery, this book covers a range of novel topics linking spirituality to athlete development, injury, exercise motivation, and ageing athletes, and offers applied, practical guidance for sport psychologists working with spiritual athletes.

Offering a unique contribution to the study of spirituality in sport, and to sport psychology practice, this book is vital reading for any upper-level student or academic working in sport and exercise psychology, religion and sport, or the philosophy of sport, and any practising sport psychologist.

1 Introduction

Noora J. Ronkainen and Mark S. Nesti

In his book, On the Unseriousness of Human Affairs, James Schall (2012) draws on Plato, Aristotle and Aquinas to argue that sport and play are important because they are ultimately “something done for its own sake” (p. 12). By this, Schall means that every level of sport, from the highest professional levels to the most unstructured, playful and recreational activity, is a testimony to means over ends. Even at the most significant events in the sporting calendar, such as World Cup finals and Olympic events, nothing concrete is created at the culmination of the activity. One loses and one wins – nothing of material significance is produced or made. That money, awards or status are accorded to the victors should not deflect us from the reality that sport, like singing, dancing, painting and many other human acts, is unnecessary. That is, as Pieper (1963) has said of genuine philosophy, these are things that are unnecessary and yet indispensable. We cannot survive without food, clothing and shelter; sport, quite clearly, does not fall into this category. Despite this we, at least in the Western world, commit huge amounts of time and money to sport at grassroots levels and community activity up to the world’s best.

According to Schall (2013), the reason these unnecessary things are felt to be so necessary is because these categories of human activities are, as Aristotle and Aquinas have said, about contemplation. In more familiar psychological language, we could say that sport is about contemplation because it is centred on being, not having and doing. It is, of course, quite possible to imagine other ways to approach a definition of sport, however, this account by Schall appears to capture a vital element of what makes sport sport, which could be described as its ethereal quality. Despite the physicality of most sports and that the human body is invariably involved, we would be unlikely to be satisfied if sport were defined in purely physical terms. There seems to be something else present that differentiates sport from work and the ordinary chores of life.

Aquinas writes that ludere est contemplare, that is, to play is to contemplate (Pieper, 1963). Although this claim by Aquinas might sound very strange and unfamiliar to us, we would suggest that, upon closer inspection, it may not be quite so difficult to understand. After all, Maslow, who is usually credited as the founder of humanistic psychology, emphasised the importance of being over having and criticised the technological materialistic modern world for apparently ignoring this. A close reading of what Maslow (1970) had to say about being reveals that it shares a lot of common ground with Pieper’s accounts of play and contemplation. Later, we will briefly return to the claim that what makes sport and play such a vital part of human life is because they are related to contemplation. At this juncture, it is worth mentioning that contemplation describes an act which is oriented towards thinking about the matter of human existence. According to Pieper (1989), the most important concepts regarding this concern are those of love, vocation and death. This list is shared with existential psychology, and as we shall see in later chapters, also involves some of the most important figures in the history of psychology. Ultimately, then, we are talking here about questions relating to existence, namely, why do we exist?, who are we?, and what is the purpose of our lives? These questions are related to meaning and every individual person faces these existential questions about meaning by virtue of our human condition (May, 1983). If we are going to assert (as we do) that sport has the capacity to help us to think more deeply about the meaning behind existence, the purpose of our choices and how we want to live our lives, then it will be necessary to look at the subject quite differently from the dominant perspectives in the psychological study of sport.

In considering what sport is, an important starting place is maybe to say what it is not. Although there are many types of sports, each with different technical, physical and psychological requirements, sport is always and everywhere something bodily which nevertheless is always more than merely this. Sport is embodied, and the body and physicality are of central importance to the sport act. At the same time, sport cannot be reduced to the body and its functions. As Chesterton (1908) pointed out, the best performers in sport, just as in the arts, music and drama, are more than their bodies. Put more simply, the great painters, athletes and musicians need something other than their bodies to achieve their expertise and virtuosity. This something other has been called many different names across history and across different cultures. Movement culture practices such as martial arts are often explicit about their grounding in philosophical and spiritual ideas (Jennings, Brown, & Sparkes, 2010). However, Nesti (2007) has argued that coaches and players often talk about their experiences in sport using words such as spirit, spirited, love and passion, even in secular Western professional sport, where the extrinsic rewards of fame and money are the highest. In any context, sport could more reasonably be described as a truly holistic enterprise, that is, where body, mind and spirit combine to produce a physical outcome. Although the physiological and psychological dimensions of sport and exercise are studied in numerous universities across the globe, the spiritual dimension of movement has been largely forgotten. This book seeks to fill this gap and restore an understanding of sport as a truly holistic activity.

Return to the questions about meaning and spirituality

Meaning and spirituality were central issues for many of early influential psychologists, including William James (1902), Carl Jung (1933) and Abraham Maslow (1970), who saw no reason to separate the spiritual from psychological inquiry. With these few exceptions, after becoming separated from philosophy as an independent discipline in the late nineteenth century, psychology increasingly sought to disengage itself from speculative philosophical ideas and to establish itself as a rigorous science employing experimental methods. The major paradigms of the twentieth century, including psychoanalysis, behaviourism and cognitivism, were not particularly accommodating approaches for the study of existential meaning and spirituality, and thus these topics of inquiry became marginalised (Plante, 2007). In sport psychology, the emphasis on cognitive skills and the strategies of athletes (e.g. goal setting, concentration and anxiety management) can be traced to the growing focus on cognition in mainstream psychology since the 1950s (Ryba & Wright 2005). Spirituality remains a somewhat exotic topic for sport psychology scholarship today, and only few scholars have addressed it in their work.

Outside of sport studies, however, a “spiritual turn” has taken place in various areas of human and social sciences (Dimitriu, 2010; Gidley, 2010; Morgan & Hartwig, 2013). Why are we now turning to questions about existential meaning and spirituality? Morgan and Hartwig (2013) argued that spirituality, meaning and values

have become urgent questions because humans have proved themselves as an intelligent species that has been content to live in a systematically stupid way. That stupidity has extended from the reproduction of economic poverty in an age of techno-scientific abundance to the construction of ways of living that are personally and collectively corrosive as well as environmentally destructive.

(p. 1)

The promises of constant progress and improvement in modernity have, to an extent, proved to be fallacious, and the global challenges surrounding environmental and moral crises have led to the emergence of questions of how we could collectively live our lives in more sustainable ways. In popular Western culture, the rise of ‘self-help’ and the turn to mindfulness and other spiritual traditions/techniques are evidence that many people are feeling frustrated, anxious or empty in their everyday lives. In vocational psychology, scholars have returned to the concepts of vocation and calling to address questions of why it is worthwhile to spend half of one’s waking hours pursuing a particular line of work (Dik & Duffy, 2009). The term spirituality appeared 40 times more often in the titles of psychology articles from the 1970s to the 2000s in the PsycINFO database (Oman, 2013), illustrating that spirituality is returning as a topic of serious psychological inquiry.

Although sport scholars have not often addressed their research topics through the concept of spirituality, similar concerns about ethics, values and meaning (or meaninglessness) have also been voiced in the world of sport. For decades, critical sociologists have written about the alienating tendencies of elite sport, the exploitation of athletes and the mechanistic logic that governs this world (Heinilä, 1982). While the official rhetoric champions fair play and ‘sportsmanship’, the media reports are full of stories of substance abuse, bribery and individual and collective cheating in the quest for international sporting success. Intolerance and discrimination in all levels of sport, based on gender, age, sexuality and ethnicity, remain deep-rooted problems which have not been tackled despite campaigns promoting inclusivity (Kilvington & Price, 2017). At an individual level, athletes’ mental health has become a new ‘hot topic’ in sport psychology with a growing number of studies reporting athlete depression, eating disorders and identity crises (Schinke, Stambulova, Si, & Moore, 2017). We might ask whether sport – at the elite and professional levels – is suffering an existential crisis. At the same time, concerns over the health of Western populations due to their sedentary lifestyles and their psychological ill-being (depression, anxiety, unhappiness) are increasing. The question of how sport could be a sustainable and meaningful part of living for all levels of participants is thus crucial for psychology in sport. In this book, we will look into movement culture practices beyond the ‘sport-for-winning’ and ‘exercise-for-health’ paradigms, suggesting that we should be focused on meaning rather than motivation and experience rather than outcomes.

Key concepts

Sport

In this book, we use the term sport broadly to describe all levels of participation from grassroots to the elite level. We will discuss amateurs and professionals, youth sport and Veteran sport, as well as mainstream and alternative sports, with the assumption that sport can be a deeply meaningful experience for anyone who chooses to take part. Furthermore, although many martial artists and alternative sport enthusiasts may not participate in formal competitions (which is often included in a definition of sport), our discussion is inclusive of these forms of physical culture. The commitment, long-term goals, sense of competence and belonging that often come with long-term sport participation could be seen as potential avenues for deriving meaning, as these themes frequently emerge as sources of life meaning (Baumeister, 1991). We recognise that exercise, too, can have these elements and has the potential to contribute to life meaning and carry a spiritual element. However, we predominantly focus on sport because we believe that it often provides the participant with a more identity-intensive life project, and more often involves elements of play and peak performance but also anxiety and suffering. These are some of the experiential realities of sport that will be explored in this book in connection with meaning and spirituality.

Meaning

In sport, many people would intuitively associate meaning with the concept of motivation. This book is not about motivation, that is, about what ‘drives’ people to take part in sport. Instead, we aim to explore how sport gives expression to basic human questions about existence and how it contributes to a life that is worth living. The meanings of sport that we will explore are inherently contextual, evolving and relational – that is, they cannot be pinned down as a single drive or set of drives that are at the heart of the concept of motivation. Since the distinction between meaning and motivation is an important one for this book, it will be explored in more detail later.

Our approach to meaning in sport primarily draws on existential psychology and its roots in existential philosophy. The existential thought, although comprised of diverse ideas and perspectives, describes self-awareness and the capacity to ask questions about our existence as the essential quality that makes us human. We are ‘thrown’ into this existence, which is not of our choosing, and thus we all start out with certain possibilities and limitations (Heidegger, 1962). We also face the task of choosing life projects (and thus rejecting alternatives) and making sense of how we should get on with the business of living. Some of the existentialist writers subscribe to an ontological assumption that we live in an inherently meaningless world (Sartre, Camus), and we simply need to create that meaning for ourselves. Other existential philosophers believed that meaning was something that we needed to discover, but was already latently ‘there’ in the world. Religious existentialists (e.g. Kierkegaard, Tillich, Marcel and Jaspers) wrote about the mystery of being, the human struggle of uncovering and understanding the inherent significance of life, and the role of hope. Our approach is underpinned by an openness to the possibility that there can be existential meanings that are more than culturally situated and created discourses.

Viktor Frankl was one of the first psychologists who consistently focused on the question of existential meaning. He saw it as the fundamental condition or a basic need of human beings that we need something for the sake of which to live, and considered meaning as something that was already there in the world but needed to be discovered (Frankl, 1987). Writing as a survivor of the concentration camps in the Second World War, he described how everything else could be taken from us except our final freedom of choosing how we relate to our given condition. Frankl believed that having a sense of meaning and purpose was a key element...