The Joy of Sox Movie

Our theme song

2010-03-15T13:21:00.000-04:00

I just had lunch with webmaster Adam Signore and the lyricist for our theme song, Dan Page. Dan had suggested getting together to brainstorm about how to use the song to create more buzz for the movie, and it was a great idea. We realized what a hidden gem the song was, with the link buried in a blog post of mine from last year. In other words, it was practically inaccessible to all but the most devout seekers. So our new plan involves everything from Facebook links with the studio musicians who produced the song, to embedding the song in several YouTube clips, to writing a Wikipedia article about the movie.

I think the PR types call it “synergy”, the combined energy of several key ideas being greater than the sum of its parts. That’s what the meeting felt like for us, as it generated some great ideas, renewed our enthusiasm, and suggested lots of possibilities to pursue. Once Adam sets up our free download system to access the song, you’ll be the first to hear about it. And then, let us know what you think.

Bland grapefruit juice

2010-03-15T13:15:00.000-04:00

Spring training is called the grapefruit league because that’s what grows in Florida. A recent column (3/17/10) by sportswriter Dan Shaughnessy was called “Grapefruit juice seems a little bland” because he wasn’t detecting much of a spark around the Sox as they start their preseason training in Ft. Myers. He echoed many of our JoS themes on the importance of fan energy, espeically honing in on the need to have loveably quirky players to help generate enthusiasm, rather than boringly efficient types like the current crew. He also made one statement that really caught my eye: “This is a theme with no statistical proof. You can’t measure the electricity around a major league team”.

I quickly replied with an email entitled “Actually, you CAN measure the electricity around a major league team”. I gave him a quick description of our work, and told him how we had used a computer to prove that invisible energy exists, and enhances a team’s performance. I invited him to get together for a chat when he returned to Boston. And so I was very excited to see his reply pop up in my In box the next day.

His response? “Thanks, Rick”. And so ended my latest episode of wishful thinking.

Two gigs (11/28/09)

2009-11-28T19:37:00.003-05:00

JoS recently gave two public presentations, with varying degrees of success and with various lessons learned.

On Sunday November 15, I gave a talk to the Brotherhood of my local synagogue, as part of their annual sports breakfast. I was honored to be chosen, since the speakers are usually former Celtics players or TV announcers. I started by proving my athletic credentials, dusting off an old High School yearbook photo of me on the tennis team (I'm the Roger Federer lookalike in the lower left hand corner). As an aside, we were pretty awful back then, and none of us would be able to make even the Freshman team nowadays.

But it was a fun talk, in part because I was able for the first time to include video clips from our interviews, by embedding them into the PowerPoint slides. My old computer wasn’t capable of that sort of cutting and pasting, so much to my kids’ delight, I went out and got a new MacBook Pro. In a word, it’s awesome. And the slide show is pretty good, too, so I think I’m ready to hit the road.

The best thing about the talk was the Q&A, which generated enough future research ideas to keep me busy for years – what effect does stadium size (and shape) have on fan energy, which sport generates the strongest energy, which emotions can our RNG computer pick up, etc. Someday, I hope to be able to answer all of these questions.

On Sunday November 22, Karen and I participated in joint fundraiser with a group called Movember (www.Movember.org). The name is a blend of the Australian slang for “moustache” (mo’) and November, the month during which they raise money for cancer research. The group started in Australia and is now international, with a focus on men’s health. Participants grow moustaches and then shave them for pledges, thereby “changing the face of men’s health” (their motto). We were contacted by local social media whiz Adam Zand about doing a joint event, one that would highlight how positive emotions help baseball players and cancer patients.

And while the attendance wasn’t as robust as we’d hoped (the photo shows the janitor on a ladder, draining accumulated rainwater from the ceilig before we could turn on the venue’s power and start the slideshow),

Adam generated some podcasts and a Twitter storm that led to a modest bump in our JoS website visits, if not in donations. The event gave us a glimpse of how JoS can use social media even more effectively than we have so far, to create buzz for specific events as well as for website traffic. We’ll be doing more of that buzzing, especially as two upcoming public presentations draw near – a talk at our local library, and a workshop at a local graduate school, both in the Spring.

Stay tuned for details.

Fan mojo experiment - final results (10/24/09)

2009-10-26T10:35:00.001-04:00

It's time to report on the results of our yearlong experiment in distant intentionality. Every Friday night, JoS followers were urged to spend a few minutes at 7pm generating positive emotional energy for the team before the game’s 7:05 pm starting time. We never knew how many people were actually participating, but it was easy enough to keep track of the results of the Friday night games to see what happened.

The final results for the 2009 seaon can be summed up in one word - unimpressive. The Sox won 13 and lost 12 of the 25 Friday night games this year. That’s a winning percentage of 52.0%, which is even lower than their overall record of 95 wins and 67 losses, a 58.6% rate. They did a bit better overall in first inning, when our mojo was presumably at its peak, getting out to an early lead in 5 games while trailing 4 times (the other 16 games had scoreless first innings). And even with home games on Friday night, they only had a 7 to 5 advantage. So there was no clear trend showing an impact from distant mojo. This could mean several things.

Maybe fan energy has no effect whatsoever on team performance, a definite possibility that scientists would call the null hypothesis. Or perhaps the positive effects of fan energy had been muted out by other factors. For example, there may have been too few participants in our Friday night experiments. We had over 1000 names on our mailing list, but there was no way of knowing how many “tuned in” every Friday night. And even if they all did, it’s still only a tiny fraction of the total membership in Red Sox Nation. What if a million fans had been rooting with us? Or maybe Boston fans have ineffective rooting skills – that’s a possibility, but not likely considering the fanaticism of our fans. And maybe our opponent’s fanbase had already tapped into the secret of energy-effective praying. Has someone else already written “Praise for the Rays” and ….. Or did the Angels really have angels in the outfield!

Next year’s revised version of this test could be much better, especially if we have 100,000 people joining in. That’s where you can help – just sign up one more person to our email list, and let it multiply. We might also add the option to focus on one specific player for each game, in addition to the overall team focus, so that we deliver a more concentrated impact, if such a phenomenon even exists. That’d be exciting if the player who’s in our weekly hot seat really shone.

Anyway, it’s time now to get my focus back on movie production and fundraising, and finishing up the companion book for the movie. No off season for me. Or for you – please post your thoughts, and get a friend or two to sign up on our mailing list (www.TheJoyOfSoxMovie.com/newsletter).

Best wishes to you all!

The party's over (10/17/09)

2009-10-26T10:34:00.001-04:00

And so another Red Sox season ends, not with a bang but with a whimper. No need to go into the gory details, but the Sox were swept out of the playoffs by a superior LA Angels team. Nothing clicked for us, and the mojo was clearly with the Californians. One moment stood out for me, and that was after things came crashing down in the last game, when closer Jonathan Papelbon was unable to protect our lead. As he left the game, he was met with boos from the Fenway crowd, not a full crescendo but enough to sense that it was coming from more than just a few yahoos.

What it meant, I think, was that Boston’s fans still haven’t graduated to the next level of psychological development, where winning or losing isn’t life or death, and where prior accomplishments can be remembered even in the face of today’s pratfall. The collective heart of Boston is still too vulnerable to be able to handle defeat graciously, so today there was more resentment and bitterness than gratitude.

Maybe someday….

Emmy (Vince, actually) 9/12/09

2009-09-13T13:27:00.003-04:00

We hadn’t had much luck attracting an established top level editor to help us make sense of our hours and hours of raw material, and have been using some young talent to help put together teasers and concept outlines (thanks especially to Ben and David!). And then, out of the blue, I met Vince Straggas. He had produced a video for the nursing home where my mother-in-law lived, and I was speaking with him about her involvement in the shoot. The conversation inevitably got around to Joy of Sox, and the timing was right – he loved the idea, and he was looking for a creative project to be involved with. I visited his website (www.flagdayproductions.com), and learned that Vince was also a very modest man.

Turns out he’d worked for 20 years at PBS, producing the Mystery series (and serving as in-studio contact for Dame Diana Rigg, the object of many of my adolescent fantasies), and garnering numerous awards, including an Emmy for production. He has agreed to consult with us about the editing process, and if we are able to raise enough money, he will roll up his sleeves and begin the actual cutting and pasting. So that’s another incentive to get rolling with the fundraising – a chance to have some major league talent do our editing.

Bottom line – with Abraham and Vince on board, out team is really blossoming.

Abraham (9/12/09)

2009-09-13T13:25:00.002-04:00

The leading teacher about the power of intention these days, in my opinion, has been Esther Hicks, a workshop leader who gives voice to the teachings of Abraham. Their books are bestsellers, their CDs and videos are funny and understandable, their live workshops are unforgettable. I was able to ask them their thoughts about baseball and intention in an October 2006 workshop; the 10/21/06 blog post called “Interview with a ghost” has some of those highlights. I’ve been trying to get their permission to use footage of that conversation in our film, but after having been burned by the movie version of The Secret (Abraham’s teachings inspired that #1 selling book and film, but Esther and husband Jerry felt their material was misrepresented in the movie, so they pulled out of that project).

I’m not a Taurus, but I didn’t give up when they rejected my original request back in 7/09. They said that their participation in the JoS movie felt “upstream” – their lingo for “not in alignment with their vision”, ie “Nyet!”. However, I kept up a nice correspondence with their video guy Mike, and when my son David and I put together a video mockup of how we’d use the Abraham material, that seemed to be the magic touch. Mike showed it to Jerry and Esther, and they said yes. We’ve succesfully completed the licensing agreements, and the Hicks’s were way easier to deal with than MLB! The upshot is that we have access to some extremely clear, insightful and funny, material about group intentions. And we also have an affiliation with one of the most visible teachers on the New Age circuit.

Check out www.Abraham-Hicks.com for more.

Abraham and Emmy join the team (9/12/09)

2009-09-13T13:09:00.001-04:00

Two very big developments have recently come to fruition, one intentionally and one accidentally (although, after all that’s happened during the production of this movie, I no longer believe in accidents), The quick summary is that we welcome aboard Vince Straggas as our Editorial Consultant (he’s a Boston-area producer/editor/director who, among other accomplishments, won an Emmy at PBS). We’ve also obtained unprecedented permission from Jerry and Esther Hicks to use video footage of an Abraham workshop in our film. The two posts that follow describe the how and why (and so what) of those two important pieces of information.

Smoltzie: The real story (8/31/09)

2009-08-31T08:43:00.001-04:00

Baseball fans just witnessed another example of how our Joy of Sox principles work in real life (I’m counting baseball games as real life here). This one had to do with a Hall of Fame pitcher that the Red Sox recently released. The team had taken a chance this Spring on rehabbing aging pitcher John Smoltz – 42 years old, recovering from shoulder surgery, and on the tail end of a great career that will eventually land him in the Hall of Fame. Our experiment didn’t go well this year, and after winning 2 and losing 5 (with an ERA of 8.32) in his brief stint with Boston, “Smoltzie” (as he was called by his mates) was released earlier this month.

The St. Louis Cardinals picked him, and in his first start with them on August 24, he pitched 5 scoreless innings, struck out nine (including seven in a row, something he’d never done before in his 20 year career), and looked like an All Star once again. So how’d he do it? Why was he a bust in Boston, and a star in St. Louis?

Here’s what he said in an interview after that game: “I made a conscious decision coming into this start to forget everything else, totally wipe out everything else, and try to go have a little bit of fun and not be caught up in story line and impressing everybody, and it worked”. That’s a great way of describing how to focus on the moment, not being distracted by the worries and judgements and scripts we all carry in our head, and letting enjoyment of the situation be the guiding factor.

It was interesting to read the analysis of the baseball commentators, where the consensus was that the Cardinals’coaches made a correction to Smoltz’s pitching style (his “mechanics”) so that he didn’t give away the type of pitch he was planning to make. This assumes that the Red Sox coaches weren’t able to pick up something so obvious that it’s always being scrutinized. The analysts’ misplaced emphasis shows that most folks have a hard time accepting that something as simple as emotional focus can be so powerful. But now we have more good evidence, thanks to Smoltzie.

A theme song and a TV feature (7/14/09)

2009-07-20T13:42:00.013-04:00

How's this for a birthday present - within 12 hours on either side of my birthday this week, we were presented with:

1. Fox TV's Channel 25 feature on Joy of Sox:
This video clip really captures what we hope to do with this movie! If only we could replicate their top notch production values...

2. A theme song composed by Red Sox Nation Vice-President Rob Crawford and writing buddy Dan Page. Here's an mp3 file of the song. Joy%20of%20Sox%20071309.mp3

Whaddaya think? Comments welcome!

Did the Spaceman save Big Papi's season? (6/27/09)

2009-07-20T13:25:00.002-04:00

My clinic's Integrative Medicine team participated in a recent Health Expo in Boston that featured lots of free massages and acupressures, as well as a chance to rub elbows with Bill "Spaceman" Lee, the Sox' Southpaw ace of the '70's. Among his many verbal gems and tidbits was his story about how David Ortiz's horrendous slump came to an end. I haven't seen it written up anywhere else, but it rang true for me.

Seems that Lee runs a bat making company in Northern Vermont that uses local labor and wood in an employee-owned coop format that turns out top quality bats. Good enough so that he's been supplying Ortiz for a while now. He'd been as puzzled as any of us by the slump that marked the start of this season for Big Papi, but he also noticed a problem in swing mechanics that he thought could be helped by making the bat handle a little thicker.

Without Papi's knowledge, Bill sent a shipment of altered bats with handles about 1/8" thicker than normal. Lo and behold, the day after said shipment arrived, Papi hit his first home run of the year. Since then, he's been back on his normal pace for power and average. But the Spaceman hasn't gotten any credit, to my knowledge. I was out of town for those few weeks when things turned around for Ortiz, so it's possible this story got some air time without me catching it.

Have any of you seen media coverage of this angle? Or will it be the unsolved mystery of the 2009 season? Let me know what you've heard. Thanks.

No trash talking allowed (6/20/09)

2009-07-20T13:06:00.005-04:00

Our British friend Paul was for years the football (soccer) coach at a local high school outside of Manchester (home of Manchester United, whose fans might be as rabid as our Sox fans). While chatting about sports on our recent visit, one of his comments in particular impressed me. He said his student footballers were universally discouraged by their coaches from taunting their opponents. They were told to respect their adversaries, whether they were winning or losing.

“Trash talking” (our term, not theirs), would lead to a warning from the refs the first time it happened, and a penalty kick the second time. He rued the fact that pro players didn’t live up to the same standards of protocol that were taught to the juniors, and he was seeing a steady increase in self-centered behavior by the mega-wealthy stars. Seems like they have the same sense of entitlement that our stars do here (see former Man U star Ronaldo, above), and their managers are also less likely to set limits after the owners have invested tens of millions of pounds in a new contract to steal them from rival teams. Sadly, those attitudes are starting to catch on among the juniors, who view the stars, rather than their coaches, as role models, largely due to the unrelenting media coverage that glorifies celebrity behavior. Thanks, Rupert Murdoch.

British twits (6/5/09-6/20/09)

2009-07-20T07:05:00.005-04:00

I really mean “Tweets from England” (ie, Twitter messages from England), but the pun was irresistable to this long-time John Cleese/Monty Python fan. Here’s what I would have sent out on my recent visit to England if I had actually been logged onto our JoS Twitter account. Some day – just not yet!

6/5: No Sox caps or banners anywhere, no mention of baseball on the telly, no Sox betting line available at Ladbrokes (the corner bookie). I don't even know if Ortiz has broken out of his slump yet. Being abroad puts things in perspective

6/5: The big sports stories here are surprisingly similar, just about soccer: mega-players getting 70 million pound contracts ($135 million for Ronaldo to enter A-Rod territory) and behavioral problems getting players kicked off the team (evicted rugger Symonds had alcohol problems, but otherwise his story sounds just like Manny's).

6/5: Had a nice chat with a 20-ish Muslim man who wants to stay in contact to learn more about Judaism (my semi-Biblical beard was the springboard, after I’d asked him for directions). I gave him my JoS card for the email address, and he remarked that his mother wouldn't approve of any forays into the "Joy of Sex". My dental hygienist made the same mistake.

6/6: Speaking with the coach of the Hereford Saracens junior rugby team, an avid sports fan all around - he had actually heard of the Boston Red Sox, but couldn't tell me one single point of information about them. It's very humbling to travel abroad!

6/7: Watching a cricket match on the hotel lobby TV, and finally understanding what they meant by terms like "bringing in a left arm slow bowler". He’s a guy who bowls 93 kph (kilometers per hour) vs. the pace bowler's 140 kph. We'd say the southpaw relief pitcher throws a lot of junk and tops out at 75 mph. Same diff.

6/7: The British cricket crowd cheered after a rival West Indies batsman finished his innings with 88 runs (including one 6 - ie, home run - that traveled 103 meters!). Good sportsmanship is the hallmark here, and I really appreciate it.

6/7: Whoever has the most money to spend can buy his team a championship. Real Madrid just poached Ronaldo from Manchester United, so one billionaire owner gets to gloat over his rival. Surprising to see these behaviors in a country and continent where the greater good so often outweighs the individual. Looks like capitalism has a pretty big foothold in the soccer world.

What's wrong with Big Papi? (5/21/09)

2009-05-22T17:36:00.003-04:00

As every member of Red Sox Nation knows, beloved slugger David Ortiz is mired in the longest slump of his career. Until last Wednesday night, he had gone almost 150 at bats without hitting a single home run. His blast that night was his first homer of the year, and triggered a huge round of cheers from the fan. That moment probably would have generated the highest RNG computer ratings at Fenway in a long time.

The question is, what’s wrong? There are several main theories being bounced around, and I’d like to present them here, and then see what you folks think. In no particular order, the possible explanations are:

1. Age – Ortiz is nearly 33, an age at which many other sluggers have seen their skills disappear, sometimes almost overnight (ie, Jim Rice). It’s possible that Ortiz is already in the twilight of his career, short and explosive though it was during his heyday from mid-’03 through mid-‘08.

2. Injuries – he missed a lot of last season with a wrist injury after being hit by a pitch, and when he returned to finish out the year, his power never came back to previous levels, though his batting average was still pretty decent. Maybe his resilience is gone, and his power will never return. If that’s true, he might recover to become a decent, but no longer feared, hitter.

3. The “S” word – other players have seen their performance dramatically deteriorate after the off season, often when mandatory testing for steroids begins. It’s hard to imagine, but it’s not impossible that Papi is in the same boat as Mark McGuire, Sammy Sosa and his ex-teammate Manny Ramirez. Difficult to contemplate, but it has to be included in what doctors call the differential diagnosis, the possible causes of his symptom of poor batting performance

4. Emotions – David is certainly in a funk these days. The former life of the party is now actually declining reporters’ requests for post-game interviews. Obviously some of that moodiness comes in response to his slump, but there have been hints that outside events might also be weighing on him. We’ve seen how family matters can weigh on players minds (and bodies) in recent years – Jason Varitek’s divorce and J.D.Drew’s son’s health problems come to mind – so maybe there’s something else going on that we don’t even know about. Whatever the sourcee, emotional distress can certainly ruin anyone’s hand/eye coordination.

5. Fan mojo – is it possible that the fans of RSN aren’t boosting him effectively anymore? If our cheers are coming from an attitude of desperation or pity, they won’t have the same coherence and impact as if they came from the state of excitement and enthusiasm. If we amp it up, will he respond?

6. Something else - What other factor(s) did I leave out? Let me know.

So those are the main possibilities that I’ve heard about. I tend to go with #4 (after all, I’m a psychiatrist), with a little bit of #5 thrown in (after all, fan mojo is the theme of this whole website). Apparently a quick visit from Ortiz’s father (ie, Papi’s papa) helped him the day before he hit his first home run. Dad advised David to “go out there and have fun”. They played with David’s son, and “it was loose at home”. Maybe that’s all it took, reconnecting with what he loves, at home and at the ballpark.

VOTE: So what do you think? Cast your vote (one vote per reader, please) in the comments section, give us your reasons why, and then suggest your solutions (if there are any). We’ll tally up the votes, hanging chads and all, and report back with the results.

The flickering aura of RSN (5/11/09)

2009-05-11T14:10:00.003-04:00

It’s not just the economy that’s tanking – Red Sox Nation (RSN) is taking a hit, too. The team continues to do well, playing solid ball and working out the kinks in this still-new season. However, several recent peripheral events have shaken up Red Sox Nation’s collective psyche, with unknown impact on our ability to generate distant mojo. Within a three day span last week, we learned of the death of a Sox icon, the steroid scandal of a former star, and the health crisis of a beloved announcer. Any one event alone would be sad, but the combo gives one pause. Here are some thoughts:

1. The illness of Jerry Remy – former Sox shortstop, long time TV announcer and current President of Red Sox Nation Jerry Remy stunned listeners last week with his announcement that he’s taking a leave of absence to recover from lung cancer treatments. Widely loved, and a ubiquitous media presence, the 56 year old “RemDawg’s” news triggered a flood of get well cards and good wishes. It was also a reminder of mortality - Remy’s, ours, and the Sox’s legacy’s.

2. The death of Dom DiMaggio – the 92 year-old centerfielder was a WWII-era teammate of Ted Williams and Johnny Pesky, one of “The Teammates” that David Halberstam wrote about. He is remembered for being a talented ballplayer and a humble human being, “a class act who brought out the best in his teammates’ (Kevin Cullen in today’s Globe). His death leaves Pesky as the last link to an earlier era when players willingly gave up several years of their career to serve in the Armed Forces, when steroid abuse hadn’t been invented, and when egos seemed to be smaller all around. The contrast with item #3 couldn’t be greater.

3. The suspension of Manny Ramirez – the severest steroid abuse penalty in Major League Baseball history was just dropped on our former outfielder, slugger Manny Ramirez. Given the positive urine tests, his initial claims of innocence will surely go the way of all the other superstar denials, and leave his reputation just as sullied. This was one incident that can’t be dismissed as “Manny being Manny”, just the naïve actions of a quirky hitting savant. He tested positive for a female hormone that is often used to get players’ natural steroid production back on track after finishing a cycle of injected steroid use (the same hormone, HCG, is actually the compound detected by home pregnancy kits).

So questions are now being asked about when he used steroids. Was it just during the last part of last year, when he posted outrageous slugging numbers after his trade to Los Angeles? Or was it during his time with the Sox, including our World Series years of 2004 and 2007? And if Manny used back then, was he alone? Even the unthinkable questions are now being asked – is David Ortiz’ current horrendous slump due to a lingering wrist injury, or did he stop his steroid use in the offseason, when drug testing and scrutiny got tighter? I for one believe it’s his wrist, but the Manny scandal certainly puts a little tarnish on the Red Sox aura.

The combination of these three stories is starting to drain the team’s mystique, the force that was such a key part of their appeal, and their success (if our movie’s concepts are to be believed). And if this steroid scandal develops any further to implicate past Sox teams, we may have to change the name of our movie to “The Joy of Juice” (“juice” is the players’ slang term for performance enhancing steroids)!

Head Coach of the Boston Buddhists (5/2/09)

2009-05-11T13:31:00.005-04:00

Boston was fortunate enough to host His Holiness the Dalai Lama for four days recently, the latest installment in a 10 year tradition that now includes an annual conference on Buddhism and the Science of Mind. This year’s events also included an outdoor public address at Gillette Stadium. I attended the latter event for two reasons – to see and hear the Dalai Lama, and to make some computer RNG recordings of the crowd. I thought that 20,000 people in a state of quiet heartfelt attention might cause some significant blips in the computer recordings.

To be honest, I planned poorly in several ways. For starters, I waited until two weeks before the event to order my tickets and by that time all the inexpensive stadium level seats had been sold. All that was left were the VIP and near-VIP seats at ground level. So I dug deep and paid $75 for tickets that would put me only 10 rows away from HHDL. In football lingo, these seats were not only “on the 20 yard line”, they were ”ON the 20 yard line”, right in front of his mid-field ceremonial speaking platform.

Also, I didn’t reckon with the high level of security at the event. Turns out that no electronic equipment larger than a camera was allowed inside the stadium, which meant that I couldn’t smuggle in my RNG laptop. I opted for the arrangement below, in my car in the parking lot (the PC is posed on the roof for this photo, but it was locked inside during the talk).

I turned on the program and headed back to the stadium, unsure whether the corwd’s vibes would spread an additional 100 yards out to the parking lot. As I walked back towards the entrance, I was struck by the clusters of Tibetan people in attendance, many in beautiful ceremonial clothing, and sitting in clusters for picnic lunches before the afternoon session. The depth of their devotion was obvious.

The talk was great, for he is a wonderful human being with a contagious laugh, speaking about such topics as the importance of a mother’s love for every human being, and the impact of compassion on our brain structure (he both teaches and learns at those conferences). He sought protection from the Spring sunshine by donning a New England Patriots cap; this photo of his image on the Jumbotron screen makes him look like just any other football coach, though his team – the Boston Buddhists – is in a league of their own.

I was struck by his answers to the written questions from the audience. He said that all humans deserve to be relieved of suffering, even the Chinese. What better way of illustrating the triviality of sports rivalries – we have trouble seeing the humanity of the Yankees, who are our opponents in a game, yet he can see the humanity of people who are actually committing murder and genocide.

I was sitting close enough to the dais that I was in the small group given pieces of paper to write questions. I asked about competitive sports and compassion – since we were in a stadium that often sees 55,000 people cheer when heads get knocked, I wondered how he viewed that huge expenditure of emotional energy. But apparently my intentionality mojo wasn’t in full force, as my question didn’t get asked. Still it was a great day. I’m waiting for the analysis of the RNG data – my guess is that the moments when he entered and left the stadium will show coherence peaks at least as high as “Sweet Caroline” created in Fenway last year!

How to maximize your fan energy

2009-04-24T06:57:00.001-04:00

Whether you’re at Fenway or rooting from home, your energy affects the game. Here are some specific techniques to help you get in the energetic groove, so that your invisible energies can make a difference:

Step away from your routine for a minute, to get focused. Fridays at 7pm is our chosen time slot just before the start of the regular Friday night game, to make it easy for fans to get into a regular rhythm.

Let go of other concerns for the moment, and focus on the Sox for just these 5 minutes. Whenever other thoughts surface (and they will!), just patiently bring your focus back to the task at hand.

Meditate, if you have prior experience. Take a few minutes to use your favorite approach to help your mind get more focused.

Breathe when you’re ready. Take one or two slow deep breaths as a way to release the past (literally and figuratively) and take in the present moment, because the present moment is your point of power.

Focus your attention on your energetic heart center, right in the middle of your sternum (not off to the left, where your physical heart lies). Imagine that the air is coming in and out of that point during your next few natural breaths.

Remember and recreate the feelings of appreciation and joy you have for the Red Sox in general, and your favorite player(s) in particular. Feel the feelings in your body, rather than just think about them in your head.

Imagine beaming this energy directly to the team and players, from your heart to theirs. And imagine or sense how their aura expands and shines when you make this energy connection.

No need to push them into specific actions (ie, a home run by Ortiz), just send the positive encouragement that your distant energy brings.

Just let it go after a minute or two (5 minutes is actually hard to sustain). Get back into watching and enjoying the game, and release your energy to work its magic.

A weekly test of Fan Power (3/21/09)

2009-03-21T11:04:00.002-04:00

Spring is officially here, Spring Training is almost over, and it’s time for us to start practicing what we’ve been preaching. Group intentionality isn’t just an esoteric topic for a documentary film, it can also be a key ingredient in the upcoming Red Sox season. We fans can harness this intangible factor to give our boys an extra boost, but only if we follow these two main guidelines:

Quality – We can send the most potent positive vibes possible to our team, by learning the “Joy” techniques of energy activation.

Quantity – We have to get as many members of Red Sox Nation on board as possible to participate in this group project. There’s strength in numbers, and your help matters.

Here’s the goal - We’re going to enlist thousands of Sox fans to do a weekly experiment in distant group support. We’ve chosen Friday nights at 7pm EDT as the time slot for a regular 5-minute group meditation, since that’s just before the 7:05pm start of their regular Friday night games. Everyone on our email list will be getting instructions on how to generate positive energies, and by going viral with our email list, we’ll generate a critical mass of supporters to help the Sox win.

Going viral is the first step. We’ve already got 1000 names on our mailing list, but 10,000 would be even better. So your job, dear reader, is to contact one or two of your closest Sox fan-friends, and send them to our website so they can sign on to our mailing list and learn how to join in the fun.

Be creative – Tell all your FaceBook friends, and ask them to spread the word. My Space, too. Twitter, YouTube, whatever. Mention this project on your own website, and tell your faith community (after all, intercessory prayer is pretty similar to what we’re doing here). You know who your die-hard friends are, so invite them on board now!

How to do it – The most important point we’ve learned is to be positive with your rooting. “Go Sox!” is actually more effective than “Yankees suck!”. Let your feelings come from the heart, and let yourself get into that sense of enjoyment and eager anticipation. Future blog posts will provide more details, like how to overcome doubts and worries, how to focus in on your favorite players, and other related tips to improve your energetic impact. But for starters, these are the key points.

Is it working? We’ll keep track of the Friday night games during the season, especially the first innings. Wouldn’t it be cool if the Sox developed the habit of outscoring their opponents in the first innings, jumping out to an early lead they never relinquish? And we’d be the only ones who knew why!

So let us know what you think. Send us your creative tips for growing this project, and we’ll keep you up to date with new information on distant intentionality and how to use it in your daily life – to benefit the Sox, and to benefit you.

One degree of separation (3/14/09)

2009-03-16T09:50:00.012-04:00

Dubbing Matt Damon into our teaser last month reminded me of the many near-misses that we’ve experienced, times when we’ve come within one or two degrees of separation from signing on some very heavy hitters. Here’s our list. It’ll be followed by a very sobering conclusion:

- Matt Damon – I’ve spoken with his High School history teacher, and got his PA’s email address from his Mom(!), but we still haven’t gotten him to sign on the dotted line (or even to reply to an email).

- David Ortiz – the son of my work colleague is the BMW dealer whose exclusive client is Big Papi, but he (understandably) didn’t want to bring this outside stuff into their relationship.

- John Henry – the cousin of the wife of a scientist interviewee winters with the Sox owner in West Palm Beach, but for some reason JH never followed up with a call to us.

- Stephen King - I sat next to Stephen King's doctor at a book signing (no one in my line, 20 in his), and he agreed to contact Mr. King about being interviewed for our film. I thought he'd put a nice supernatural spin on things, but no dice.

- Larry Lucchino – I did bump into the Sox co-owner at Spring Training in ’07 and we had a nice chat. He helped make some arrangements for us, but he hasn’t answered any recent emails.

- Manny Ramirez – our producer has worked with the sportscaster for the local Spanish network, a guy who interviewed Manny all the time. But by the time the possibility of an interview with us got around to being discussed, Manny had become a Dodger.

- Mariel Hemingway – she’s very into holistic projects, and a physician friend of hers met me at a conference and said he’d pass on the project info to her. She’s not a Sox fan, but a Hollywood connection couldn’t hurt.

- Theo Epstein – his Mom runs a local boutique where the wife of a colleague shops all the time, and… (this one shows how desperate I am!).

Bottom line – if it happens, it happens. But listing these near-misses helped me realize that it’s time to look into Plan B for fundraising – using the strength and breadth of Red Sox Nation to drive our finances, rather than hoping to find one or two wealthy sugar daddies to bring home the bacon.

So we’ve devised a new strategy that will implement a grass-roots approach that puts into action the very principles of manifestation that our project is researching. I’m still working out the kinks, but the next blog post will show how we can harness the intentionality power of our readership to benefit the Sox during the upcoming baseball season, while at the same time solving our fundraising challenges as well. Stay tuned!

The teaser (2/23/09)

2009-03-16T09:02:00.001-04:00

My son David and I had fun last month putting together a very rough mock-up of the first segment of our film. The 16 minute sampler is called a “teaser” for obvious reasons, and it was exciting to do, because it helped me get a real sense of how the film’s story might actually come together in a fun and informative way. We took some liberties in editing, using some unlicensed clips from MLB and pretending that we’d been able to sign up our dream narrator, local Sox fan Matt Damon. We used a photo of Matt in a Sox cap along with a voice-over by David to capture the mood (sort of), but because Matt hasn’t signed on to anything, we obviously can’t distribute this sampler. Still, it helped us to envision more clearly what we really want, and to feel the enthusiasm that a clear vision creates. And those are very important steps in the manifestation process.

Mid-winter musings

2009-02-23T09:33:00.009-05:00

I’m too sun-deprived to come up with the usual long, coherent (they usually are, aren’t they?) blogpost essay, so here are some random musings along the trail. Hopefully, this’ll help clear my brain for the Spring Training stories that are starting to arrive from Florida.

1. Gabe updates: in case you missed the last newsletter, our boy Gabe Kapler made Major League Baseball’s Play of the Year for 2008, according to a poll of MLB.com’s readers. Go to this link at MLB.com (This Year in Baseball, 2008), and click "Play":
Unfortunately for us, he was signed by the Devil Rays in the off-season, so when he returns to Fenway, it’ll be as an opponent. That means there’s a chance he’ll make another catch like his award-winner at Fenway, maybe to rob David Ortiz of a home-run. Ironically, the Rays are our Opening Day opponents, but Gabe was too booked that weekend to stop by for any Joy of Sox fundraiser we might whip up in his honor.

2. The Super Bowl – yes, there are other sports besides baseball. This year’s football finale was intriguing for several reasons. One, our Patriots didn’t make the playoffs, despite a better regular season record than one of the finalists (but that’s another story), so it was noticeably harder to care about the game. That put at least this one local viewer into a different frame of mind, hoping for a well-played game without caring who actually won. And in fact it was a very exciting game, with a rousing final quarter that ranked with the best of ‘em. The underdogs almost pulled it out at the last second, and I found that you don’t have to be a partisan to appreciate excellence in sports.

Oddly enough, that’s one of the key points in “Joy” – emotions like appreciation and joy and enthusiasm are most contagious to the players, and are more helpful (in a distant intentionality sense) than anger at the opponent. So for fans to have the most impact, they shouldn’t be attached to any particular outcome. This is a Buddhist approach to cheering, and I’m not sure many Sox fans are up for such a high-minded approach to cheering. But at least that one time it was fun!

3. The science of Joy - It was gratifying to receive my copy of the Winter 2009 issue of the scientific journal called Subtle Energy and Energy Medicine, because it included the write-up of our lab demo done with the HeartMath Institute last Spring. That test showed that emotions can be spread by invisible forces, with heartfelt appreciation being the most powerful emotion. See the May 2008 blog entry for a summary about the HeartMath system, or click on the small lab photo on the homepage for a link.

A write-up of the other science fair project – random number generators at the ballpark – is still being shopped around to find its proper home in the scientific literature. I’ll let you know when it gets the “thumbs up”.

4. Spring is here - we may still have 6 inches of snow outside, but the sap has started to flow in our maple tree, so the light at the end of the tunnel is now visible!

Manifesting Gabe Kapler (written 11/23/08)

2008-11-23T20:30:00.006-05:00

In some ways, former Sox outfielder Gabe Kapler has been the patron saint of JoS. He was the first Sox player we ever had contact with, starting way back in 2006 during a long spell on the disabled list with an Achilles heel injury. The Boston Globe did a feature article on him that highlighted his independent mindset and insightful approach to sports and life. It caught my eye, and made me wonder if he’d be interested in our concepts. So we tracked him down (some people actually read their fanmail!) and started a very enjoyable online, and ultimately in person, connection.

He has supported us by helping us get passes to Spring Training, by letting us interview him at length in his hometown of Tarzana, and by lending his visibility to the project. So, along with the rest of Red Sox Nation, we’ve shared his career ups and downs, from the high point of being on the field when the Sox won it all in 2004, to the low point of leaving the Sox after the 2004 season to play in Japan, to spending the 2007 season as the manager for the Sox’ minor league affiliate in South Carolina, to returning to the big leagues last year as a backup outfielder for the Milwaukee Brewers.

But something interesting is cooking now. The Sox have recently traded away Coco Crisp, their 4th outfielder, leaving a hole in their roster for someone who could be a dependable backup if/when one of the regulars is hurt. What better choice that fan favorite Gabe? The offseason months of November and December are when deals are made behind the scenes, and so I jokingly emailed Gabe about a possible return to Fenway.

His reply? “Manifest it!” In the spirit of our JoS belief in the power of intention, he was asking us to help bring it about. And not surprisingly, he’s also OK with this next crazy idea – harnessing the force of our entire readership to generate some positive energy around the potential for his return to Boston. So here’s the idea – each reader who wants to see Gabe back in town can use our principles to magnetize that possibility.

Here are the key steps:
1. Start by connecting with positive emotions like fun, appreciation and joy (duh!). Use your own memories of times when you felt these feelings, and then take a few deep breaths to help you feel them coming alive inside your body, as warm fuzzies, tingles, or whatever.
2. Staying in that positive state, vividly imagine future scenarios with Gabe as a Red Sox, and let these images become as real as possible.
3. If/when you notice doubts and worries creeping in, acknowledge them and then put them aside as you consciously refocus on your preferred outcome.
4. After a minute or two (that’s all it takes), simply step back from your imagery and let the Universe take it from there. But please help the Universe by making this effort go viral - email a link to one and all.

How can we tell if this works? Just keep your eye on the sports section of the Boston Globe!

Weird science updates (written 11/7/08)

2008-11-23T20:15:00.005-05:00

Here are three brief updates on the science behind The Joy of Sox:

#1 – We’ve done two weird science experiments so far, and recently I’ve been writing them up for a scientific audience. The blog entries for 12/15/07 and 4/08 have brief summaries of the Fenway Park experiment with the random number generator (RNG) in my laptop, and the HeartMath Institute study of contagious group energies, respectively.

Unfortunately, the Red Sox study (the one where my ratings of emotionally key game events were matched to the computer’s measurements of crowd non-randomness) did not meet with favor from the editors of the Explore: A Journal of Healing and Consciousness. They rightly pointed out that my data was uncontrolled, and subject to probable bias because I subjectively decided which game events were important based on my own indefinable standards, in order to see whether they corresponded with peaks in the computer’s output. The editors suggested that I conduct a repeat study in which many evaluators were assessing game events for their emotional significance. Their averaged ratings would even out biases from any one individual rater (like me!). It’s a good refinement to my protocol, but the editors didn’t suggest how I should go about setting things up with the Sox and Fenway!

I had better luck with the second paper, which described the HeartMath test. That was the one where I was a guinea pig and found that my heart rhythm shifted when I was surrounded by a group of meditators focusing on feelings of appeciation and joy (of Sox). Translated into medicalese, that became “The influence of group heart rhythm on target subject physiology: case report of a laboratory demonstration”. The Journal of Subtle Energy and Energy Medicine has tentatively accepted the paper, subject to revisions that make it clear that we don’t really understand how these interactive effects come about, whether it’s by magnetic fields or whatever. I’ll set up a link from this website to the article when it finally comes out, probably in early 2009.

#2 – Scrolling down a few posts to September 8, 2008, you’ll see an unusual photo of a computer next to a harp. That shot was taken at the Boston Conservatory, where we were trying to measure RNG fluctuations in the presence of beautiful music. The results are in, and, to be honest, it’s hard to tell what they mean.
As you can see from this graph, there was one big blip that occurred right in the middle of the half hour performance (from 11:30 am to 12 noon). The timeline is very coarse, with data points averaged over four minute intervals, so it’s hard to pin down exactly what was happening at any given moment, but we did detect a deflection every bit as large as the one at Fenway when the crowd did the Wave – so something was going on during the harp show! Harpist Sarajane Williams will be describing these results in her upcoming documentary film called “The Healing Harp” (details at www.harptherapy.com).

#3 – In the post written on 9/19/08, I forgot to mention that the group of health care providers who heard my slide show about JoS also joined in a brief group energy cheer for the Sox after the lecture. That happened at 9:30 pm on the evening of a playoff game, and so it was easy to check and see what impact our group energy had on the game. There were about 20 of us in the circle, in a Boston office near North Station (the game was at Fenway, only about 3 miles away). We weren’t watching or listening to the game, but I later found out that we started our meditation just when relief pitcher Mike Timlin entered the game and began warming up. For 6 minutes, he was able to hold them at bay, but at 9:36 pm the floodgates opened, and Tampa Bay rallied to beat the Sox. So either our mojo was only good enough to help for 6 minutes, or we had no real impact.

Nothing conclusive one way or the other, but it’d be fun to do a larger and more organized sort of group energy circle for the Sox next year. I’m sure there are already plenty of informal Sox prayer circles scattered across Red Sox Nation, but this one could utilize all the properties of intentionality and manifestation that we’ve been learning about. A similar Internet-based test has been going on for a while, though not focused on sporting events. Check out www.TheIntentionExperiment.com for details.

The end of the 2008 season (10/30/08)

2008-11-02T19:34:00.002-05:00

The 2008 baseball season is over. The Sox were eliminated by the young upstarts from Tampa Bay, who then lost the World Series to the Philadelphia Phillies. Honest Sox fans will admit that we went about as far as we could this year with such a battered lineup, but our failure to repeat as Series champions raises a challening question for Joy of Sox readers. Have Boston’s sports fans finally lost their mojo? Is our amazing recent run of championships finally coming to an end? Remember, it wasn’t just the Sox in ’04 and’07; we also had the basketball Celtics in ‘08, the football Patriots in ’01, ’04 and ’05 (as well as two Super Bowl losses), and final round near misses by the soccer Revolution in ’07 and ‘08). Most cities are lucky to get one or two major championship teams in a decade – we’ve had 7 in 7 years.

If I’m at all typical of Boston fandom, then we’re all finally ready to take a break from this nonstop state of being on the brink of yet another crucial series. Fans can get burned out, just like players. I for one confess that I still haven’t fully come to terms the Patriot’s Super Bowl upset in February or digested the Celtics’ win in March. My wife says that I eat my meals too quickly, but I definitely like to savor my championships. It sounds like time for the Sox to regroup as a team, and for Red Sox Nation, in fact all of New England’s sports fans, to regroup energetically around the principles of Joy of Sox.

Consider this: it’s only October, but already three star Patriots are out for the season with injuries (the leading running back, the defensive team captain, and the star quarterback), the eading scorer of the Rev is out with a concussion, and the Sox season ground to a halt with injury concerns about Ortiz’ wrist, Lowell’s hip and Beckett’s shoulder. The players all seem to be getting ground down, and maybe it’s because we fans are no longer providing them with enough of an energy cushion to bounce back from all their hard knocks.

Maybe the Patriots are showing a new model for how to win titles. With their system, it’s not the individual players who count, but the schemes and the play calling and the coaching. The players start to resemble interchangeable parts - if injured 2007 MVP Tom Brady can be replaced by a backup QB who hadn’t started a game since High School, and have the team still be 5-2, then maybe Coach Belichik’s alternative model can also work. He’s emphasized players who subordinate their ego to the team, and who aren’t “characters” that attract media attention.

They’re each a little harder for the fans to love (apart from the 3 or 4 stars), and so they may have found a way to replace fan energy by being so mechanically efficient. Not that they’re robots, but the Pats players each fit a mold more than the Sox of ’04 did. And that might be the model of the future.

JoS goes public 9/19/08

2008-09-23T10:06:00.001-04:00

Last night was my first opportunity to talk at any length about JoS with people who aren’t directly involved with the project. It was a coming out event of sorts, and it was a blast. For the last year or so, I’ve been participating in a brainstorming group of clinicians from the Boston area, called the Collaborative Medicine Working Group. They’re holistically oriented and are finding ways to bring integrative medicine into the mainstream. Each session has an educational component, and yesterday was my turn to present.

The first clue that things would go well came during the preparation phase at home, as I tried to squeeze some of our JoS material into the PowerPoint format. I really enjoyed the process of finding the right visual image to convey the science points, and ended up with a pretty lively 30’ slide show. Much to my delight, the crowd of 20 or so clinicians at the meeting also loved it. Many were already solid Sox fans, but all were attuned to the invisible energies that our film focuses on and that their therapies are based on. They laughed at the right spots, made great suggestions, and asked questions that I had never thought of (after all, that’s one of the reasons for making presentations).

One nurse was struck by the notion of conditioned spaces, where elevated thoughts and emotions trigger enhanced physical responses. She remarked that she works in the opposite kind of place, an Intensive Care Unit, where the atmosphere is truly deadening and fear-laden (a “de-conditioned space”?). We talked of ways to clear her workspace of emotional negativity, and she came away with some practical suggestions about how to do just this (no, not by having the doctors and patients do “The Wave”!). A couple of good connections emerged – with a therapist who’d given massages to Sox wives at the Pan Mass Challenge, another who once led Manny in a private yoga session (it was the morning of the day he went ballistic against the Yankees in the 2003 ALCS and attacked the pitcher! Apparently the yoga released some latent anger that was locked in his sore hamstrings.), and another whose longtime favorite Fenway moment is singing “Sweet Caroline” (she was pleased that the RNG’s validated her experience).

And that was the main theme, how nice it was to have sophisticated equipment validating inner experiences that we’ve all had. How spirit and science can be reunited, and how JoS can function as a Trojan Horse to spread these ideas into the mainstream. I even got four invites to give a similar talk at other medical settings. More proof that we’re on to something!