Starting from Silence

George Mumford has worked as a mindfulness coach and sports psychologist for three decades, and he has taught meditation in a wide variety of settings, from the US prison system to the NBA. Weaving together Buddhist teachings and positive psychology, he has trained elite athletes at the top of their game, including Michael Jordan, Kobe Bryant, and Shaquille O’Neal. 

In a recent episode of Life As It Is, Tricycle’s editor-in-chief, James Shaheen, and meditation teacher Sharon Salzberg sat down with Mumford to discuss how his history of addiction brought him to Buddhism, the importance of beginner’s mind in the process of recovery, why he believes freedom is a state of mind, and how we can cultivate mudita, or sympathetic joy, in our daily lives.

James Shaheen (JS): To start, what first brought you to Buddhism?

George Mumford (GM): Today is my fortieth year of sobriety, and that’s what brought me to Buddhism because when I got clean, I discovered I had chronic pain in the form of migraine headaches and back pain. As you might imagine, when you enter recovery and you’re dealing with life on life’s terms for the first time, there’s a tremendous amount of stress.

I was part of an HMO in Cambridge, Harvard Medical, and they had a program on managing stress run by Joan Borysenko. At that time, she was one of the three psychoneuroimmunologists in the world. They had this experiment that I was part of that wanted to help people deal with their stress by lifestyle changes, self-regulation, and self-responsibility. That was the first time I heard that the mind and body were connected, and this idea of mind-body medicine was just coming out at that time. One of the ways to facilitate that was to learn how to meditate.

One thing led to another, and she suggested that I go to IMS [the Insight Meditation Society] to do a retreat. I went there, and that’s when I really started practicing in Buddhist centers. From there, I discovered Cambridge Insight Meditation Center and ended up living there for six years. So that’s how I got into it.

Sharon Salzberg (SS): You describe addiction as a creeping thing, where you think you have it under control until you don’t. Could you say more about that?

GM: Yes, it’s interesting because it ties into the grief process. Elisabeth Kübler-Ross talked about the five stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. When you think about substance abuse, denial is built into it. I can remember forty years ago, one of the sayings that I heard all the time was “Denial is not just a river in Egypt.” When you’re in denial, how can you receive the truth? How can you accept that you have a problem?

I saw this with my dad. He was an alcoholic, and at first he always drank on the weekends, and then he started getting drunk on the weekdays and anytime he could. I remember one day he didn’t have a drink, and I saw him going through withdrawal. I had been watching him drink for decades, and at some point it crept up to him.

You don’t know you have a problem until you have a problem. It’s gradual, like walking in the mist: You don’t realize you’re walking into the mist until you get to a saturation point where you can feel how wet you are. Substance abuse is like that. It creeps up on you, and all of a sudden you get smacked in the face.

JS: You say that you couldn’t think your way into proper behavior, so instead you behaved your way into proper thinking. What do you mean by that?

GM: My best thinking always got me into trouble. When I got into recovery forty years ago, it looked very different than it does now. There were smoky rooms where everybody was smoking and drinking coffee, and they basically said to me, “Take the cotton out of your ears, put it in your mouth, and sit up front and act like you don’t know anything.”

What they were really espousing was beginner’s mind and realizing that my thinking was based on my experience, and my experience was not all inclusive. I was thinking a certain way because I was at a different consciousness level. I had to behave my way into something so I could understand it. 

We learn more when we learn unconsciously, when we’re not trying to learn, when we’re just paying attention and observing things. I learned how to ride a bike, and I couldn’t think my way into learning how to ride a bike—I had to ride the bike. Once I rode the bike, then I could talk about it.

When I left the detox, I saw my street for the first time. I saw my house for the first time, because I was seeing it with this sense of not knowing, coming from the silence and being open to what was happening.

You have to behave your way in proper thinking, because the thinking is getting in the way. For me, I had to start with a blank slate and act like I didn’t know anything, trying things and seeing if they worked before I judged them. Back then, when someone said “Do this,” I would say, “I’ve tried that before. I don’t think that’ll work,” and I would get stuck in my thinking. There was a Zen master who said, “If you open your mouth, you’re wrong.” There’s something about silence—it’s like being in the eye of a hurricane. When we can be still, when we’re not trying to figure it out, there’s a knowing and an intuition that we can connect with.

To me, it seems like things are changing so fast that the only way I can keep up with it is to go in like I don’t know and just be quiet and allow myself to be. If people say, “How’d you do that?,” I say, “I have no idea, but I wasn’t doing it. I got out of the way.” If I think about it, then I get lost. But if I just allow things to express themselves, there’s a rhythm. There’s a flow. And that’s what I teach in performance: how to be in the moment and embrace the moment as it is because even though you train for it, it’s unknown. And so it’s the ability to be comfortable being uncomfortable, being comfortable not knowing, being comfortable dealing with anxiety because anxiety is the other side of freedom.

It really is about this adventure of living in the moment and realizing that we’re wired to be able to figure stuff out, but sometimes we figure it out by doing rather than by thinking our way into it. Wisdom begins in wonder. T. S. Eliot talked about how we can explore life in a way where we’re seeing things as if for the first time. This is what happened to me: When I left the detox, I saw my street for the first time. I saw my house for the first time, because I was seeing it with this sense of not knowing, coming from the silence and being open to what was happening.

JS: You’ve said that one of the most important lessons you learned in recovery was learning to pray for people who annoyed you. Could you tell us about this practice?

GM: Yes. That was one of my first spiritual practices, because at the time I had some people that were really, really challenging for me, and I was told that I should pray for them. When someone suggested that to me, part of me felt like, “How dare you, they should be praying for me!” But once again, that was my thinking, and so I had to let go of that and just do it. What I found was I couldn’t believe how much the person changed [after I prayed for them] even though I had not had one conversation with them.

Here’s the thing: Self-talk is happening all the time. Your self-talk is a reflection of your mind. The brain doesn’t know the difference between what it experiences and what it imagines, so when you visualize it and have a conversation with someone in your mind, you’re actually reprogramming yourself. By entertaining wholesome thoughts and thinking about them in wholesome ways, you will see that person change. So when I’m praying for them, I’m actually changing my relationship to them, even though they don’t know it. As I change and I see them differently, it totally changes everything.

This excerpt has been edited for length and clarity.