How Colin Wilson transformed his life - and career - through meditation

Colin Wilson is like the vast majority of hockey players in that he takes a nap before every game he plays. Unlike most hockey players, before and after every nap Wilson puts a metallic headband around his head, with an external wire connected to an app called Muse on his smartphone.

To the manufactured sounds of rain falling in a forest, or incoming tide on a beach, or wind swishing over sands of a desert, Wilson focuses in on his breathing for a form of meditation called Vipassana. Translated from the Pali language, Vipassana means “to see things as they really are.”

As Wilson relaxes to his inhalations and exhalations, it is his goal that the headband will record his brain waves as being in the Alpha phase – one of five brain wave phases and the one most commonly associated with relaxed, mindful meditation. Most of the time, Wilson will sit silent in a classic yoga position, legs crossed, shoulders back. Occasionally, he will slowly chant a mantra on the exhale.

It is something the 29-year-old Avalanche forward started doing early last year, and he credits it for bettering not only his life, but his hockey career.

“I just started looking for other ways to recover, other ways to calm myself down. Playing 82 games throughout the year is akin to really heightening your nervous system, so any way I can get a break and just come to a different understanding, it helps,” Wilson told BSN Denver.

If his brain waves didn’t quite achieve Alpha status before Game 5 of the Avs’ first-round series in Calgary, Wilson certainly achieved it on the ice with his play. He scored two huge goals in the Avs’ 5-1, series-clinching victory. It continued what has generally been a strong, bounce-back season for the 10-year veteran and, in the last year of his contract, certainly given Avalanche management something to meditate over whether he’ll get another offer or not.

Whether he’d get another contract offer or not – that’s something Wilson admits he would have seriously stressed about earlier in his career. Since discovering the methods of Vipassana, Wilson’s mind stays more in the present, as they are. Sure, he’d like another nice contract and he thinks about it, but worrying about such things isn’t going to do any good, he’s come to realize.

“I’m at the point now where I’ve played 10 seasons and this whole season I’ve just been like, ‘I want to enjoy it as much as I can,'” Wilson said. “That’s probably allowed me to take a little pressure off myself and let me just play my game.’

Vipassana isn’t the only form of meditation Wilson practices. Once or twice a week, for 90 minutes at a time, he lays on the top of heated salt water, entombed in a sensory deprivation flotation tank. Think of yourself floating in a coffin, to the sounds of dreamy ambient music, and you get an idea of what it’s like in a flotation tank.

“They’re great,” Wilson says. “And you get such a good sleep after them.”

Wilson has started to influence a few of his teammates too. Tyson Barrie so far is the only one to wear the headband and practice Vipassana on the Muse app, but “a few other guys” have tried the flotation tanks, Wilson said.

“It’s not all about just being calm,” he said. “Some of it, you have the calming effects, but at the same time it’s kind of staying in your center while you are nervous or while you are anxious before a game. It’s understanding and seeing it a little bit differently.”

Wilson prefers to keep his mantra private. Suffice to say, it’s probably not “Staaan-ley Cup”, but if it were, Wilson doesn’t mind looking that far ahead. That’s a team goal, and it’s OK to think about the future, too, even if you meditate.

The Avs are still longshots to win a Cup this year, but that’s OK, Wilson says. He’s been on an eighth-seeded team that made it to the Stanley Cup Finals before, with Nashville in 2016-17.

“This team reminds me a lot of the team in Nashville that went to the Finals. We were the last seed in and we knew how good we were, but we took quite a few games off during the year, but managed to get in,” Wilson said. “We had that 8-0-2 stretch where we were battling every day and I think it brought the group together. Now, we have a lot of belief in our team, at the right time.”

“If you want to conquer the anxiety of life, live in the moment, live in the breath,” – Amit Ray.