Tennis Meditations

In Tennis Meditations, award-winning author and expert tennis player Carl Frankel takes you deep inside the sport with 99 brief and entertaining explorations of on-court challenges and opportunities. Each short essay focuses on a single tennis-related activity or process, provides Frankel’s unique and thought-provoking take on it, and ends with a question or series of questions that invite the reader to ponder their current strengths and weaknesses and explore they might get better.

Taken as a whole, the meditations provide a multitude of luminous insights into the game and the pursuit of excellence both on and off the court.Beautifully-written, witty, entertaining and provocative, Tennis Meditations is a book you can read in one sitting from beginning to end, or alternatively, you can keep it at your bedside or in your tennis bag and dive into at random as you might with a book like the I Ching.

In spirit, Tennis Meditations is the sequel to Frankel’s 2022 book Tennis as a Wisdom Practice: A Story About the Quest for Mastery, which recounted Frankel’s quest for a top-10 national ranking in his age group. Tennis as a Wisdom Practice has been favorably compared to books in the tennis and sports canon like Gallwey’s The Inner Game of Tennis, Burwash’s Tennis for Life, and Herrigel’s Zen in the Art of Archery. Tennis Meditations will make you think, it will make you laugh, and it will help you get better at tennis.

In his groundbreaking The Inner Game of Tennnis, Timothy Gallwey discovered a whole new facet to the game — its mental, spiritual and psychological aspects. In Tennis Meditations, Frankel goes spelunking deep down that mine-shaft and emerges with golden nugget after nugget. Meditation titles like “A Secular Martial Art,” “The Altered States of Tennis,” and “Tennis as Improv (Trusting the Silence”) tell the story. As one reader told Frankel: “I keep your meditations on one night table and the Bhagavad Gita on the other. I read them every night and it’s like they’re talking to each other.”-“Frankel’s insights into the inner workings of tennis and the life lessons they provide are thought-provoking and inspiring. Highly recommended for lovers of tennis and of life!” (Kevin W. McCarthy, Founder SeniorTennisTIPS.com, former USPTA Tennis Professional)

-“Invites you gently and with humor to explore yourself and your best path to mastery. Superbly written, accessible, and entertaining, Tennis Meditations is a pure delight.” (Mitch Ditkoff, author, Storytelling for the Revolution)

-“A beautiful invitation for you to see your game with greater awareness and to find solutions to play better and have more fun on the court. From timing and technique, to emotions and flow, Frankel offers a fresh look at everything you ever thought you knew about tennis, in brilliant and simple ways, and captures the subtle thread linking mind, body and spirit.” (Dr. Damien Lafont, tennis and mental training coach, physicist)

If you’re looking to grow as a player and a person, Tennis Meditations is the book for you.