"When the 12 Thai boys who’ve been trapped in a cave and are being
rescued one by one were first discovered by British divers a week ago, they
were reportedly meditating.
“Look at how calm they were sitting there waiting. No one was crying or
anything. It was astonishing,” the mother of one of the boys told the AP,
referring to a widely shared video of the moment the boys were found.
Turns out that their coach, Ekapol Chanthawong, who led them on a hike
into the cave when it flooded on June 23, trained in meditation as a
Buddhist monk for a decade before becoming a soccer coach. According to
multiple news sources, he taught the boys, ages 11 to 16, to meditate in the
cave to keep them calm and preserve their energy through their two-week
ordeal.
“He could meditate up to an hour,” Ekapol’s aunt, Tham Chanthawong, told
the AP. “It has definitely helped him and probably helps the boys to stay
calm.”
Eight out of the 12 boys had been rescued as of Monday, while four more
and Ekapol remained stuck inside. Rescuers said they were refilling their
oxygen tanks and would be going back in to retrieve the final five on
Tuesday.
Ekapol, 25, went to live in a monastery at age 12 after he was orphaned.
According the Straits Times, he trained to be a monk for 10 years at a
monastery in Mae Sai, Thailand, but left to care for a sick grandmother. He
then was hired to be the assistant coach of the team, known as the Wild
Boars.
Coach Ake, as he is known, still maintains close contacts at the monastery.
The abbot there told the Wall Street Journal he’s “a responsible young man
who meditates regularly.”
That meditation would be a useful practice in an extremely stressful
situation like being trapped in a cave is really no surprise. Buddhist
meditation has been around for 2,600 years, since the Buddha began
teaching it as tool for achieving clarity and peace of mind, and ultimately,
liberation from suffering.
Recently, scientific researchers have shown in clinical settings that
mindfulness meditation (a specific meditation practice and one that’s taught
in Thai Buddhism and elsewhere around the world) can reduce anxiety and
depression, as well as pain.
Though there are few randomized control trials on meditation and mental
health, a 2014 meta analysis by Johns Hopkins researchers for the Agency
for Healthcare Research and Quality found that meditation, and in particular
mindfulness, can have a role in treating depression, anxiety, and pain in
adults — as much as medications but with no side effects. Meditation can
also, to a lesser degree, reduce the toll of psychological distress, the review
found. The research on kids is still fairly preliminary, though more and more
schools are implementing mindfulness meditation programs.
As Brother Phap Dung, a senior disciple of the Zen Buddhist master and
author Thich Nhat Hanh, told me in a 2016 interview: In meditation, “you’re
cultivating [peace, kindness, clarity] so you can offer it to others. When you
sit with someone who’s calm, you can become calm. If you sit with someone
who’s agitated and hateful, you can become agitated and hateful.”
In a cartoon that’s been circulating in Thailand, an artist shows Ekapol with a
lap full of tiny boars, peacefully meditating."
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