Tennis as Meditation

A hidden gift of sport: How competition cultivates mindfulness

By Peter Carlisle

Nearly fifty years ago, Timothy Gallwey’s Inner Game of Tennis popularized the idea that quieting the mind is key to peak performance. With tennis as his framework, he argued that to enter “the zone,” players must move beyond the self-interference of internal chatter, doubts, and distractions that undermine performance. Every experienced tennis player knows the truth of that insight: steady the mind and you play well, let external thoughts intrude and your game unravels.

For this reason, to progress in the sport, players must develop strokes and strategies while also learning to master their attention. Those who cannot do both eventually stop advancing in the sport. Whether deliberately developed through routines, breathing, and mantras, or simply acquired over time, players cannot compete at a high level unless they’ve cultivated a discipline of mindfulness under pressure.

Mindfulness matters in every sport, but in tennis it is indispensable.

Growing up, I played numerous competitive sports through high school. In college, I played tennis. After college I played whatever sports were convenient and accessible to me, such as basketball. But as the pressures of work and life increased, I found myself drawn back to tennis. In difficult times—whether personal or professional—the court felt like a refuge. Playing steadied me, cleared my mind, and provided a reliable sense of calm.

At the time, I credited this calming effect to familiarity with the game and the physical relief that comes with any workout. More recently, I’ve come to see it differently: tennis itself is uniquely therapeutic—meditative—in a way that sets it apart from other sports.

These days I tend to divide my time between tennis and squash: tennis in warm weather, and squash through the winter. Unless I’m traveling, I play most days of the week. Both are competitive one-on-one racquet sports, and comparable in terms of average heart rate and physical demands. For years I assumed their benefits were roughly the same. But this spring, as I transitioned from squash to tennis more gradually than usual, I noticed an important distinction.

During squash, outside thoughts such as plans, worries, and other distractions crept into my head more frequently. In tennis, by contrast, they seemed to fall away almost automatically. After either workout, I felt more at ease, but after tennis, peace of mind lingered longer. The more I paid attention to this difference, the more obvious it became.

The key difference, I believe, lies in pace. Squash is played at a faster speed, leaving less time for the mind to interfere. Play is more reactive. Strategy may be considered before a game or between points, but in the midst of play, there is little room for reflection.

Tennis unfolds differently. It’s still fast paced and reactive, but points develop at a pace that gives you time to consider your shot, anticipate your opponent’s reply, and even run through some hypothetical outcomes of possible decisions. That’s the trap: the more space the mind is given, the more apt it is to fill it with noise.

That noise undermines performance. Your ego whispers doubts, your mind chases consequences, your thoughts splinter focus. And because this interference is so destructive, no one advances in tennis without learning how to quiet the mind. It’s not optional. It is essential.

Squash also cultivates composure, but because points accelerate into reaction more quickly, mindfulness is not demanded in the same way. Tennis, more than most sports, cultivates mindfulness out of pure necessity. When your mind is engaged, your body tightens, and you simply can’t hit the ball effectively.

Squash, in this sense, offers a kind of reprieve from self-consciousness. The speed of the rallies forces the mind out of the way, leaving little room for thought to intrude. Tennis is different. Because the points unfold more deliberately, the player has just enough time for the ego to whisper doubts, for the mind to project outcomes, for distraction to creep in. And so tennis demands something squash does not: the ability to deliberately still the mind. In squash, the reprieve comes as a byproduct of speed; in tennis, it must be conjured through discipline.

This realization has led me to think differently about tennis as a form of meditative practice. In Buddhism, it is said that the spiritual life demands focused attention on the way things are. Tennis requires the same. Each rally is an exercise in focused attention: the ball here, the opponent there, the present point demanding thoughtless presence. When the mind drifts into self-talk or distraction, the rally is lost. The discipline is not to suppress thought by force but to learn, through repetition, how to disarm it and return to the present moment again and again.

In this sense, the tennis court becomes a kind of spiritual training ground. Just as meditation cultivates awareness, so too does the game, through movement rather than stillness. And the transformation carries beyond the court. Meeting pressure with calm, letting go of ego-driven chatter, and becoming one with the task before you are disciplines that shape not only performance but also life.

Many mindfulness practices aim to free us from habitual ways of perceiving the world. We learn to step outside ordinary patterns of thought. Tennis can be such a practice. The noise of life recedes when competition demands full attention, and what remains is a quiet awareness of the present moment, of the simple act of hitting a ball, of responding with clarity to what comes.

That clarity does not end when the match ends. It lingers, sometimes for hours, as a deep calm and steadiness. And over time, it changes how we meet pressures off the court as well. We’re less quick to react, more able to stay grounded, more aware of the chatter of our own minds.

In this way, tennis is more than exercise or competition. It is a contemplative practice, a form of moving meditation that teaches us, again and again, to return to the present and to be free, if only briefly, from ourselves.