Mind Training for Modern American Warriors
September 23rd, 2009Via: Time:
Not long ago at Fort Bragg, N.C., the country’s largest military base, seven soldiers sat in a semi-circle, lights dimmed, eyes closed, two fingertips lightly pressed beneath their belly buttons to activate their “core.” Electronic music thumped as the soldiers tried to silence their thoughts, the key to Warrior Mind Training, a form of meditation slowly making inroads on military bases across the country. “This is mental push-ups,” Sarah Ernst told the weekly class she leads for soldiers at Fort Bragg. “There’s a certain burn. It’s a workout.”
Think military and you think macho, not meditation, but that’s about to change now that the Army intends to train its 1.1 million soldiers in the art of mental toughness. The Defense Department hopes that giving soldiers tools to fend off mental stress will toughen its troops at war and at home. It’s the first time mental combat is being mandated on a large scale, but a few thousand soldiers who have participated in a voluntary program called Warrior Mind Training have already gotten a taste of how strengthening the mind is way different — dare we say harder? — than pounding out the push-ups.
Warrior Mind Training is the brainchild of Ernst and two friends, who were teaching meditation and mind-training in California. In 2005, a Marine attended a class in San Diego and suggested expanding onto military bases. Ernst and her colleagues researched the military mindset, consulting with veterans who had practiced meditation on the battlefield and back home. She also delved into the science behind mind training to analyze how meditation tactics could help treat — and maybe even help prevent — post-traumatic stress disorder.
Rooted in the ancient Samurai code of self-discipline, Warrior Mind Training draws on the image of the mythic Japanese fighter, an elite swordsman who honed his battle skills along with his mental precision. The premise? Razor-sharp attention plus razor-sharp marksmanship equals fearsome warrior.
The Samurai image was selected after careful deliberation; it was certifiably anti-sissy. “We took a long time to decide how we were going to package this,” says Ernst, who moved to North Carolina in 2006 and teaches classes at Fort Bragg as well as Camp Lejeune, a Marine base near the coast. “There are a lot of ways you could describe the benefits of doing mind training and meditation. Maybe from a civilian approach we would emphasize cultivating happiness or peace. But that’s not generally what a young soldier is interested in. They want to become the best warrior they can be.”
The benefits of Warrior Mind Training, students have told instructors, are impressive: better aim on the shooting range, higher test scores, enhanced ability to handle combat stress and slip back into life at home. No comprehensive studies have been done, though a poll of 25 participants showed 70% said they felt better able to handle stressful situations and 65% had improved self-control.
The results were intriguing enough that Warrior Mind Training has been selected to participate in a University of Pittsburgh study on sleep disruption and fatigue in service members that will kick off early next year.
For now, success is measured anecdotally.
On patrol in Iraq two years ago, John Way would notice his mind straying. “Maybe I should be watching some guy over there and instead I’m thinking, ‘I’m hungry. Where’s my next Twinkie?'”
With privacy at a premium, he’d often retreat to a Port-A-Potty to practice the focusing skills he’d learned from Ernst at Fort Bragg. “To have a way to shut all this off is invaluable,” says Way.
Warriors for the ‘New Age’. Anyone read “The Men Who Stare at Goats”?
now this is really interesting… i’m frankly surprised they actually (and finally?) took on the challenge of the questioning of the the incredibly limited small box that the standard and traditional american military mindset as offered really is.
carried through thoroughly and fully, such a mental regimen may lead to countering much of the programming and westernization of thought military culture tends to inculcate in it’s ranks. certainly i hope it enlarges their vision enough to see the bigger pictures more freshly, clearly. this report may focus on the immediate benefits but i believe there’s larger benefits down the road.
PR fun for “The Men Who Stare at Goats”?
Ignore the torture side and focus on the good, smart troops.
Sorta takes “Persistence in Combat” to a whole new level.
GoogleSearch has about 58,000 “hits” for that phrase.
Re: PeterofLoneTree‘s interesting link:
upon seeing this line in the article,
“We’re working on something that takes away pain without interfering with cognitive faculties,” said Franz Hefti, an executive at Rinat, a spinoff of biotech giant Genentech.
Sounds innocuous enough. It all does. But.
-I googled up darpa augcog…
‘Persistence In Combat’ indeed. Persistence In Piracy as well…
For me, ‘Mind Training for Modern American Warriors’ is not far from ‘Mind Training for Modern Americans’… Here we are training soldiers to accommodate bad practices, policies, and goals and mitigate PTSD et al by short-circuiting or bypassing natural conscientious impulses and reactions -by virtually fanaticizing them with such psychic hardening. Moreover, this embeds the military culture deeper yet into the national psyche in the deepest, most personally intimate fashion yet. Samuraization. Nothing could sublimate the framing of the correctness of American piracy more…
It’s an assault on cognitive liberty in a direct way, and as such is an indirect assault on liberty in general. Not to mention reason and conscience.
The PTSD they wish to attend to in this indirect way would be far more simply dealt with by application of decency at all levels, from goals to policies to practices to values. American piracy, domination, and imperialism must end. dammit. We have an entire history of it to counter though!
We also have another, better, history of liberty -yet to be realized fully. The race is on to do so before we completely kill Earth.
Earth has much to tell us -as ever -but those in power fight it. There is something intrinsically unnatural and sick about power. Psychopathic in nature, the emotions of conscience are absent -or neutralized…
Robert D. Hare of http://hare.org can say much on that.
On cognitive liberty, I leave this url:
http://www.cognitiveliberty.org/