Indian Sports News Network: Lytham St Annes: Anirban Lahiri will be counting on his meditation practice to lead him to a successful debut at The Open Championship which begins on Thursday.

The 25-year-old two-time Asian Tour winner is excited at the prospects of tackling the world’s oldest Major which is star-laden at Royal Lytham and St Annes but knows he must maintain an even keel to ensure a rewarding week.

“I’ll stick to my meditation and stay in the moment and not get carried away and focus on what I need to do. It’ll play a critical role. Times of great highs and low, the mind gets muddled and unclear. I have …

He’d prefer enlightenment to a medal, but when Japan’s horse-riding Buddhist monk Kenki Sato saddles up for London 2012, he’ll be representing one of the Olympics’ more unusual families.

Shaven-headed Sato, who starts each day with a morning prayer, is following his younger brother Eiken, who also trained as a priest and rode at the Beijing Games. His sister, Tae, 24, is a five-time national showjumping champion.

And his father, Shodo, who heads a 460-year-old temple and adjacent horse-riding club, was a member of Japan’s equestrian team before the 1980 Games in Moscow — only to have his Olympic dream dashed when Japan boycotted.

Kenki Sato is …

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Chris Cox, The Guardian: A celebrated lama’s new book [Running with the Mind of Meditation] recommends training the mind in conjunction with the body. But can sitting on a cushion before pounding the pavements really make you run further and faster?

Recently, I’ve been training for the Edinburgh half-marathon. But instead of seeking advice from the usual quarters, I’ve been taking tips from a Tibetan meditation master. In just a short time, following his advice has changed how I think about two things I’ve been doing for some years now: running and meditating. Rather than being separate activities, I’m starting to …

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Sara Beck, NYT: For Kelsea Bangora, New York’s 2011 yoga asana champion, the conversation usually goes like this:

“Yoga champion? How does that work?”

“Well, it’s like a dance performance, sort of, or a gymnastics routine, but not really.”

“So, can you touch your head with your feet?”

“Well, of course”

Typically, she does not demonstrate.

“I don’t want to show off,” she said. “I mean, my own students don’t even know I’m a champion.”

Others will be vying for that title when the United States Yoga Federation hosts the ninth New York Regional and National Yoga Asana Championship from Friday night through Sunday …

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Before facing and defeating Lyoto “The Dragon” Machida in the mixed martial arts Ultimate Fighting Championship on Saturday, UFC Light Heavyweight Champion Jon “Bones” Jones spent some time meditating at a scenic waterfall on the Ball’s Falls conservation area on the Niagara Peninsula.

“It was really beautiful but it was so cold out there I could only meditate for about maybe 15 minutes because I didn’t want to get sick,” Jones said Saturday night after defeating Machida.

“I got a good 12 minutes in but the job was done,” he added. “We felt really refreshed and our spirits were lifted on the ride back to the hotel. So mission complete.”

Both …

Students in professor Kent Menzel’s class watch a peregrine falcon soar at speeds of 180 mph.

These students aren’t bird-watchers – they’re cyclists in the winter term course Science of Cycling. Menzel had started class that day with a nature video to emphasize the falcon’s athleticism.

According to him, both cycling and flying demand natural form and technique. The Science of Cycling class consists of workouts and exercises that develop these skills.

DePauw racing team member and sophomore Aaron Fioritto said he’s learned “breathing, body control, relaxation, and recovery” from his mentor and professor. Students have also skipped in rhythm, worked on posture, and practiced fluid pedal strokes on the bike.

Menzel said he believes the course’s benefits also extend into other classrooms: “How …

Lim Teik Huat, The Star: Asian Tour legends, a history maker and rising stars from the region are poised to light up the Worldwide Holdings Selangor Masters.

Thailand’s Chapchai Nirat, who holds the world’s 72-hole scoring record, and compatriot Thaworn Wiratchant, an 11-time winner in Asia, will spearhead the elite field in the tournament at the Seri Selangor Golf Club from Aug 4-7.

The Thai duo will be joined in the RM1.2mil event by a pack of talented players, including youngsters Gaganjeet Bhullar and Anirban Lahiri of India, Singaporean Quincy Quek and Malaysia’s Akhmal Tarmizee.

Chapchai has been one of Asia’s most exciting players to emerge in recent years and he …

The siren song of the sea calls surfers away from school, jobs, family, and in Jaimal Yogis’s case, even a monastery. But for this surfer, bobbing on waves might be the best place to practice Zen.

If you’re wondering what in blue blazes has surfing got to do with Zen, don’t worry–Yogis clears it up in the book’s introduction. He cites a teaching in Shunryu Suzuki’s Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind as his “all-time favorite Zen-surfing quote:

…I like to think he [Suzuki] had surfers in mind when comparing thought waves to ocean waves. He said, ‘Even though waves arise, the essence of mind is pure… Waves are the practice of water. To speak of waves

…

Some years ago, two friends took me rock-climbing in Colorado. I’d only ever climbed with ropes once before, and that had been many years earlier, so really I was a complete beginner. And nervous.

I found myself suspended half-way up a cliff, in a state of anxiety, with my friends shouting encouragement from below. My breathing was tight, my heart was pounding, and my limbs felt weak and shaky, but I didn’t have time to think much about that. I was holding on to a narrow ledge that ran horizontally across the rock face — really it was more like a crease. The toes of my climbing shoes were precariously holding on to …

The bodhisattva moves through life elegantly, “in the zone” and in a state of playful “flow,” and he can do this because he has abandoned any clinging to the idea of self. “Let go of your sense of self; you have nothing to lose but your suffering,” Bodhipaksa tells us.

I think Chesterton was absolutely right when he said that the object of life is play. The best kind of life we can live, I believe, is one in which we love, laugh, and learn: one in which we can be serious without being down, and can laugh irreverently at life’s difficulties without being facetious or trivializing them.

One problem is that we …