01: Mindfulness in Leadership, Education, Sports, and Cancer Recovery with Doug Worthen

Jul 17, 2018

Think back to your high school days. How would your life have been different if Mindfulness was offered as a course? It’s mind-boggling, isn’t it? Believe it or not, there are numerous schools across the country that are seeing the need for this training and offering it as part of the curriculum. Today’s show is about one man who is making mindfulness an integral part of the curriculum at his school, and he’s working to bring it about in other schools across the US.

 

Doug Worthen is the Director of Mindfulness and Head Boys Lacrosse Coach at Middlesex School, an independent high school in Concord, Massachusetts. He is the first person to hold the title of Director of Mindfulness at a major independent school in the US. He also has an epic life story that he’s never before revealed so fully in an interview. Once upon a time, Doug was on a very different path. He went from being a national champion lacrosse player at the University of Virginia to sailing around the Caribbean for two years with a friend to working in the family business---all of this before a Stage 4 Lymphoma stopped him in his tracks and awakened him to a mindfulness practice. 

 

Relying on this practice is what got him through a very long and difficult recovery and an eventual relapse. That experience set him on a new path to following a dream to teach mindfulness practice at his alma mater and look for ways to help other schools expose their communities to the power of contemplative learning and practice. Doug and I met five years ago when I worked in Contemplative Studies at Brown, and we connected over a shared excitement about combining mindfulness practice and sports. Since then we’ve worked multi-week retreats together on leadership and a few week-long retreats on meditation. He shares his story because he genuinely believes that it can serve people.

 

What you’ll hear in this episode:

 

• What Doug does as Director of Mindfulness at Middlesex School
• How new students are required to take a semester of mindfulness and “are invited to practice in an atmosphere of healthy skepticism”
• The training available to faculty, staff, students, and parents through different levels of mindfulness
• How the program started at the school in 2009 and has grown each year since then
• Why mindfulness practice is a required course at Middlesex School
• Defining mindfulness: the ability to understand and stabilize attention and the relationships we have to what arises around us in experience and acceptance
• How empathy and self-compassion fit into mindfulness practice
• What Doug’s life was like at Middlesex School---way before mindfulness!
• Doug’s transition to UVA as a lacrosse player
• How pressure on the field and a book prompted Doug to mindfulness and helped his anxiety and athletic performance
• The idea to sail the Caribbean with a friend and what the experience taught Doug
• Why Doug went to Hawaii to scuba dive and teach others--but still wasn’t happy
• How his insight led him to Australia and then home to Boston and the family business
• With plans in place to attend business school in Hong Kong, he received a Stage 4 Lympoma diagnosis
• How mindfulness practice became a lifeline as Doug fought the disease
• Two years of full-blown treatment, including chemo, radiation, and a bone marrow transplant
• The lessons of isolation and learning impermanence
• How Doug’s calling became clear: to share mindfulness practice with youth
• The dream to have a Director of Mindfulness in every school, so everyone can be introduced to it as a teenager
• The teachers and retreats that have been most influential in Doug’s life
• The benefits of Maha Mudra practice in noticing thoughts, feelings, and contractions in the body
• A powerful week in December of 2009 that eventually led him to meet his wife
• How Doug weaves mindfulness into sports as Head Lacrosse Coach
• The challenges Doug has faced as a coach and how he teaches poise and bringing attention back to the moment at hand
• Doug’s vision for the future with mindfulness education and making it the norm
• The organization started by two former students that matches interested schools with experienced practitioners
• What a “no regrets” life looks like for Doug over the next 5-7 years
• Doug’s recommendation to get started in mindfulness: “Get started with a retreat. There is no substitute for it.”

 

Resources:

 

Email Doug: [e-mail]

 

Wherever You Go, There You Are by Jon Kabat-Zinn

 

Contact Doug through his wife’s organization: Inward Bound Mindfulness Education

See more at www.rhinomind.com