Training Your Mind Like You Train Your Body Should Be the Norm for Skiers

This article originally appeared on Ski Mag

In pursuit of what she loves most--skiing--Sasha Dingle has known her fair share of pain and trauma.

She was 15, a highschool ski reacer, the first time she got a concussion and spinal injury. Around the same time, several skiers close to her died in skiing accidents.Still, her dream was to compete on the Freeride World Tour and she qualified in 2014. But two days before departing, Dingle went off a drop, landed on a tree, and broke her ribs. Her body seemed to be breaking down when she needed it most.

Yet Dingle isn't wired to give up. Rather than sink into despair, she sought a way to help reconcile the joy of skiing with pain. She threw herself into meditation practice and eventually became a certified medication guide.

"I was learning the lessons at 25 that most people don't have to learn until much later," recalls Dingle. "In Buddhism one learns that it is the nature of the body to get sick, age, and die. Athletes don't get to live in denial of that truth. Our bodies are subject to forces of gravity, injury, and illness."

In 2015, she founded the Mountain Mind Project in Jackson Hole, which provides mind fitness training through guided meditation, coaching, and retreats. The goal is to prime athletes for flow, provide meaningful opportunities to destress, or simply give them the spaciousness to make a sound decision.

To teach these skills, the Mountain Mind Project offers Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction--the intervention developed by secular mindfulness pioneer Jon Kabat-Zinn at UMass--as well as mPEAK, a program that was created as a collaboration between UC San Diego and the USA BMX Cycling team. Dingle also offers individual training and retreats and works with organizations to enhance mental health support.

Reflecting on her path now, Dingle sees the serendipity at work. "I never really intended to start Mountain Mind Project or be a meditation teacher," she says. "I think it was two parts heartbreak, two parts passion, and one part practicality."

The heartbreak was something she recognized as all too common in her community. Skiers who routinely perform at the edge of possibility sometimes go over it. As Heather Hansman pointed out in her book Powder Days, sensation-seeking is the most common trait among those drawn to the mountains. That can manifest as a predilection for danger when choosing a risky line or navigating stresses off the hill.

Yet being open about our mental health doesn’t always come easy in a community that prides itself upon nonchalance regarding physical challenges. There is an additive nature to the stress in a mountain athlete's life because experiencing emotional extremities only compounds the dissonance between the emotional peaks and valleys.

"We can’t compartmentalize stress and the load of injury, traumatic accidents, and the loss of friends and mentors in the mountains," Dingle says. "Not to mention, if you belong to a marginalized group, you carry an additional baseline stress load from racism, sexism, transphobia, etc. It piles up over a career and eventually shows itself in some interesting ways in the mind and body."

Pro skier and backcountry quide Lani Bruntz knows this firsthand.

"Many of us choose to engage with extreme environments as an escape of sorts," says Brutz, who is a client of the Mountain Mind Project. "Engaging with extreme environments commands my attention and seems to equally heighten and numb my senses in a way I don't find elsewhere."
Yet there is also a connection between a life driven by a pursuit that demands complete awareness at speed and a practice that primes one for full awareness at rest. As Dingle recognized this overlap, she saw a bridge to offering coping techniques that might help her peers.

"When you’re operating in these high valence emotional areas of life where there’s risk and high stakes you’re chasing flow, and flow uses up dopamine," Dingle says. "When we come back on a Monday after a big weekend there’s an equal and opposite dip. It’s something that you have to ride through."

Of course, as much as mindfulness can enrich a skier's life, it can sometimes take hitting rock bottom before someone is willing to try a different approach. "Pain is really motivating," says Dingle. "People are willing to engage with mindfulness when dealing with chronic health issues.In the life of an outdoor athlete, you're connected to the natural world, to yourself, and to others," she adds. "It's body based."

The same, she says, is true of a meditation retreat like the ones she offers. "If you are connected to your senses, you notice information about how the body is doing that can inform your training and emotional state."

To offer mindfulness strategies earlier as preventative medicine Dingle has leaned on language that speaks to improving athletic performance.

Bruntz found this true when dealing with her load of stress and injury. "The Mountain Mind Project has given me more tools to choose from in my toolbox to support my overall well-being," she says. "It helped give me a greater awareness of certain thoughts and behaviors, and strategies such as breathing techniques and meditations to interrupt ruminating thought patterns."

Dingle hopes that by making 'train your mind like you train your body' the norm, the Mountain Mind Project will help skiers to navigate our highs and lows with wisdom and acceptance. "It ensures that however many unknown moments we have left are spent fully alive."

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