| The purpose of this research was to explore five female adolescent equestrian athletes' experiences using mindfulness practices in competition. This dissertation study utilized narrative data collection and analysis. The equestrian athletes in this study all have a mindfulness practice that they employ to address stress and maintain focus when navigating complicated courses of obstacles. Equestrians experience pivotal moments regularly but rarely take the time to investigate the particulars of the event. Additionally, athletes prepare incessantly in order to achieve desired results, often omitting the required mental training. Stress and undesired results can cause reduced ability to perform and athletes can spend years in a slump. In this study, elite-level junior equestriennes were interviewed about their lives as competitive horsewomen in the hunter, jumper, and equitation fields as well as about their particular experiences utilizing a mindfulness practice in competition. Narrative analysis was used to explore the experiences described by the athletes. The transcribed narratives were analyzed according to the methodology presented by Lieblich, Tuval-Mashiach, and Zilber (1998) and Riessman (1993), which distills general themes from the interview data and restructures the material in the form of a cohesive narrative similar to the intent of narrative therapy (White & Epston, 1990). By focusing on the girls' narratives about their mindfulness practices in training and competition, individual and collective themes emerged to illustrate the layers of their experiences. The data were reviewed in terms of typology and progression as well from the psychological perspectives of developmental psychology, theories of sport psychology, and mindfulness-based psychotherapy with the intention of unraveling new approaches to supporting adolescent athletes both in and out of sport. The narratives were combined to create a composite cohesive narrative, which disclosed the common themes of "breath, relationship, mind, focus and moment" as essential to each of the participants' experiences of using mindfulness in competition. Additionally, the composite narrative disclosed that the equestrienne-horse relationship is essential for successful use of mindfulness in show jumping. These findings may reveal phenomena that could help our understanding of the multiple layers of peak performance. |
