Author: Benjamin

Jerry and I played our first round two weeks ago. As I described in my piece from that day, I tried to prepare myself mentally and emotionally for the experience, in order to assure that I would have fun. Did it work?

It did not. I did not have fun.

Now, I did have a good time spending a few hours with my friend Jerry. I also enjoyed my time at the golf course itself, a nine-hole course not far from where I live that nonetheless feels like it’s 50 miles out into the country. The place had a great energy. I’ll certainly go back.

But I did not enjoy the actual playing of the game. In my piece on mental preparation, I wrote that what I was looking for was that at least some of my shots look like actual golf shots, which to me means proper shot trajectories with something like the distance I believe I should be able to expect, given my size. I wrote that I expected that I’d hit a few that met those criteria, and many others that would not. It never occurred to me I’d literally fail to hit a single shot with the power I should easily be able to muster, and how much that would matter to me.

Please keep in mind that I’m not comparing myself to some impossible ideal, like how far the pros hit, and then excoriating myself for falling short. I watch high school kids two-thirds my size easily out-hit me. This power should be well within my reach.

How deeply that lack of power troubled me has forced me to acknowledge that unlocking my power is the single most important thing for me with respect to my improvement as a golfer. As shot after shot after shot fell short of where I think I should easily be able to reach, be it a nine-iron that didn’t even travel 100 yards or a five-wood that barely went 150, I got more and more and more frustrated. A shot going off line was just something I noted and then let go of. But as the round went on, the lack of distance made me want to take my clubs and smash them, one after another, into the trunks of the majestic cottonwoods that grow along the creek that runs through the middle of the course.

Okay, fine, well, besides that: How did it go? What else can I report?

Well, as Jerry pointed out in his pieces about the experience, we both struggled mightily with our short games. During our practice sessions, we usually hit our chips and pitches somewhere between “pretty good” and “lights out,” but during the round, we both failed to execute almost every chip we tried to hit. Why the disconnect? Well, it was interesting to note that both of us were clearly tight. We both found a pretty dramatic difference between practicing and playing. Bringing what we’ve accomplished on the practice green to an actual round turned out to be more difficult than simply showing up. We discovered that learning to navigate the space of playing will be a process all its own.

A positive: except for a meltdown on the ninth, I left every single green with two putts or fewer. That felt pretty good. A couple of times, I even drained nice mid-range putts. It’s worth pointing out that we basically haven’t practiced putting at all since we started this process. Though practicing putting is in many ways the most efficient use of time with respect to improving your score–turning just a few three-putts per round into two-putts isn’t very hard to accomplish–we have felt to this point that our development has best been served by building our short games as our foundation, and then moving out to the range. (Did that approach work? Consider this: Jerry said he now feels comfortable grabbing any club from his bag. That’s a huge improvement.)

Were there any other upsides? Jerry already spoke positively of the pleasure of the experience, but I’d like to turn the focus for a moment to his results. He played just over bogey golf for the round, and that includes two holes out of the first three where unlucky bounces put him up against tree trunks with no choice but to punch the ball a few yards out. He’s already within shouting distance of the sub-90 round he’s looking for. And as for me, if we leave out that meltdown on nine, I was averaging out to double-bogey golf. I have been talking about the goal of breaking 100, but it’s worth remembering that a useful intermediate goal is to simply shoot lower than a double-bogey-per-hole 108. I’ve never once done that well. That intermediate goal is clearly within my reach.

I’m going to wait until next week to dive deeply into my experiences with the round Jerry and I played last Friday. Today, leading in to that conversation, I want to follow up on the issue I raised two weeks ago, that the sports we choose to engage in are not neutral to how we perceive our growth as athletes and people.

In my piece from two weeks ago, I offered parallel hypothetical situations in tennis and golf–a sequence of eleven shots, five of them excellent and six of them poor–and noted how the outcomes could be completely different. You could win your service game in tennis with that sequence. On a par five in golf, that sequence nets you a sextuple bogey. It’s fair to say the rules of one of the games is relatively forgiving and the other completely the opposite.

And let’s face it: you’d be very likely to come out of those respective sequences with very different feelings about what just occurred.

It’s worth asking: how differently should you feel?

I wish the answer were cut-and-dried. My first inclination was to say, No, it shouldn’t feel different, but as I delve deeply into it, the question seems more complicated. For the purposes of our project, the question hinges on another question, not obviously related: what do we mean by improvement?

Consider: I currently am practicing my golf swing and tennis serves quite a lot, and I noticed that I had a very different relationship to how I performed in the two different arenas. When practicing my tennis serve, I’m pleased when a serve goes in. I allow the misses to fall by the wayside. Sometimes, depending on my goals (when I’m practicing for power, say), I even welcome them. In golf, on the other hand, I noticed that I wasn’t judging myself by my successes, I was judging myself by my failures.

Now, from the perspective of scoring golf, that kind of makes sense. If I’m playing a round, each of those “bad” shots counts toward my score. If my goal is to get “better” at golf from a scoring perspective, then it makes sense to focus on consistency of shots and on working to improve my worst shots.

But that’s a pretty narrow view of improvement, and it fails to take into account that practice doesn’t really work that way. “Failure” is how we learn. What did I do that produced the result I didn’t want? What did I do that produced the result I did? Can I repeat it? We get better by learning from “failure.” That’s the way practice works.

By judging myself on my bad shots rather than my good ones, all too often I was failing to notice the very real improvement at the top end of my ability. I could hit one really good drive and six weak ones and all I’d be thinking was, “That’s six holes I’d be starting from the rough.” But that thinking is a problem. Instead, I should be noticing about the good one that I couldn’t hit one that good until recently. My scoring in a round might be improving only a very little, but I’m improving. The practice is bearing fruit. So I need to be conscious that I’m not letting the structure of the game keep me from noticing just how effective the work really is.

Indeed, if I look at my game as a whole, what do I see? Well, my worst shots are as bad as they ever were, but they occur far less frequently. My medium-quality shots are much improved–they’re underpowered but they go straight, which almost never used to happen. And my best shots are hugely improved. They’re rare, but every once in a while I hit a shot and say, Yes. That is what I am capable of.

What’s interesting is that, notwithstanding everything I just said, and despite the mental and emotional preparation, described in last week’s piece, that I did ahead of our round on Friday, I did not have fun playing Friday’s round. Somewhat to my surprise, I learned that there are still other issues I need to address before I have fun playing golf.

For at least a month now, Jerry has been insisting that it’s time for us to play a round of golf. We’ve only played once, at a nine-hole par-three course last summer, which served as the establishing-a-baseline experience for this whole project. I recall playing that round surprisingly well, despite not having played a round for many years. I started something like par-par and finished with a par, too. I hit some reasonably good shots. Since then, we’ve pretty much taken my swing apart, working to groove a new, smoother, more powerful swing, a process that’s nowhere near complete.

Nevertheless, Jerry’s right: it’s time. And today’s the day.

I have to admit I feel quite a bit of trepidation. My new swing is nowhere near grooved yet. I expect that I’ll hit a handful of pretty good shots, but also a bunch that go every direction but where I’m aiming. From the perspective of the actual (scoring) rules of golf, I’m likely to play pretty poorly indeed, and it’s going to take some real focus on my part to not begin to question the conclusion that I’ve been sharing with you recently, that I really have improved greatly since that initial experimental round a year ago.

I wrote last week about how golf’s scoring makes it especially unforgiving to the learning player, and so I want to plan a strategy ahead of time for making the experience as positive and fun as possible, while not diverging too far from the guiding idea of this project, which is to use energetic awareness to improve our golf games. By that I mean that I can’t completely disregard the rules of the game and still speak to what we’re trying to achieve here. I mean, I could definitely count only every other stroke if I wanted, and then tell people how I heroically and unexpectedly finished under par. (Hooray for me!) I could refuse to ever play a ball from a bunker or deep rough. I could pick up every ball that’s behind a tree or in front of water. What’s stopping me? Nothing, of course. And if that’s more fun for me, well, I could just go ahead and do it. But I shouldn’t properly call that “golf.”

On the other hand, what’s the value in using the rules of the game as a way to punish and undermine myself, to leave me demoralized and doubting?

So I’m making a plan, because I don’t want to waste energy on disappointment–I’m interested in setting myself up for success. Because I haven’t played since we started working on this project in earnest, I intend to go in with the attitude that I’m basically a beginner, that I haven’t done this before, that every shot is new to me. Furthermore, I want playing to support my goal of improvement as much as practice does, so I want trying to figure out how to get as much useful experience out of the round as possible. With that in mind, I intend to do the following: I’m going to play by the rules, counting every shot. At the same time, I’m going to keep a second score, in which I essentially play a scramble with myself. Whenever time allows, I will take another shot when a shot goes awry, and sometimes even when it doesn’t. Basically, I’ll practice as many shots on the course as possible. I’ll take my actual ball as my score, but will use that second score–we’ll call it the “potential” score–as a guidepost to help keep me optimistic about where I’m ultimately headed.

What I’m most concerned with is seeing within me the ability to hit something of a reasonable shot from each actual lie, even if it takes me three or four shots do so. Recall that when we started this project, my goal was built around having fun, and for me in the context of a round of golf, fun is less dependent on my score than feeling that I have the potential to actually play golf. I don’t want to feel like the stupid game is something eternally beyond my reach.

So why keep score at all? Several people, including at least one friend who’s a much better golfer than me, have recommended not doing so. “It’s a lot more fun that way,” they’ve said. (I’m sure we’ve all seen the quote, usually attributed to Mark Twain, that golf is “a good walk spoiled.”) They have a point, but for our purposes, a score offers a numeric way to gauge how we’ve done, and an objective path to measuring our improvement.

I feel good about this plan. By preparing myself mentally ahead of the experience, I’m making it much more likely that I’ll walk off the course exclaiming, “That was fun!” It’s hard to hope for anything more than that.

If the real goal of the practices we’ve been describing is to improve not just our golf (or tennis or whatever) games but our lives–if the goal is to make ourselves better people–we need to be aware of the way the games themselves can foist upon us certain narratives about ourselves and our capabilities, and that these narratives can help or hinder our growth.

Consider the following scenarios:

Imagine you are playing a tennis match. It’s your serve. You start the game with a powerful ace: 15-love. Next, you produce an egregious double-fault–your first serve is so long your opponent has to duck to get out of the way, and your second serve bounces on your own side of the net: 15-all. Now you blast another ace: 30-15. And then another double-fault, a carbon-copy of the first: 30-all. You hit your next serve so powerfully you can see it red-shift as it travels away from you. Ace: 40-30. Your next first serve improbably bounces off the top of the frame, goes straight up, and hits you on the top of the head. Even more improbably, your second serve does the same thing. Another double-fault. Now serving at deuce, you put so much spin on the ball that it visibly distorts as it spins away from your frustrated opponent. Another ace: ad-in. Finally, you send an untouchable serve down the T for a final ace, leaving your opponent in tears and giving you the game.

During this game, you struck the ball eleven times. Five of those shots were excellent, six were very poor, but because of the structure of the sport and its scoring, you won the game. Those bad shots can disappear into the ether. They no longer matter at all.

Now imagine that you’re playing golf. You’re on a 500-yard par five. Your drive is lovely, straight down the middle of the fairway, about 230 yards. With 270 yards left to the hole, you grab your trusty fairway hybrid, but you top the ball so badly that it skitters about fifteen yards down the fairway before stopping. 255 yards left to the hole. You swing your hybrid again, this time hitting it well. The ball travels about 180 yards into the middle of the fairway, leaving you with 75 yards to the hole. You grab your pitching wedge, take what feels like a careful swing, but hit it so fat the divot travels further than the ball. Your next swing produces the same result. On your third attempt, you finally hit the ball well, putting it within fifteen feet of the pin. On your putt, some strange magic befalls you, and you mishit your putt so badly that the ball whistles past the hole and keeps going, all the way across and then off the green and into the deep rough. Your first chip shot sails over the green, landing in the rough on the other side. Your next one travels about six inches, embedding so deeply into the rough that it seems almost impossible that you’ll get it out. But you make a lovely chip, relative to the lie, and leave yourself a twelve-foot putt, which you mercifully make for a sextuple-bogey eleven.

On this hole, you struck the ball eleven times. Five of those shots were good, sometimes very good, and six were poor. Here, there’s no escaping your errant shots. Each and every shot counts toward your final score. You’re stuck with the indignity of a sextuple bogey.

Notice how different the emotional tenors of these two situations are apt to be. In each instance, you hit five good and six bad shots. On the tennis court, you might walk away from that service game feeling pretty good about yourself. Maybe you’re breathing a sigh of relief and calling yourself lucky. Either way, you won the game, and are one step closer to winning the match. On the golf course, you’re likely to be feeling pretty bad. Sextuple bogey. Your playing partners don’t even want to make eye contact after a hole like that.

Again, despite exactly the same ratio of success to failure, you’re likely to be engaging in two very different narratives about your ability, maybe even about yourself as a person. One of those narratives is likely to help you stay in flow. The other is likely to drive you out of flow. Our goal is personal growth. So how do we deal with this kind of thing?

As we bring centered practice to the sports we choose to play, the ultimate goal isn’t actually improvement. Improvement is just a side effect. What we’re really seeking are the deeper things that emerge as we make this consistent effort to begin to meet our true potential. For those of us old or wise enough to have released whatever dreams we might ever have indulged of going pro, putting our utmost into being a really good golfer or tennis player has little value for its own sake. Winning an amateur tennis or golf tournament might be nice, but if the value of the effort comes only in meeting the goal, what happens should you not succeed? What happens when your skills decline? Can the point truly be only winning?

We say no, and our answer to that question is at the heart of why we’re doing this. We’re not interested in seeing our golf games improve only because we want to play better golf. Competition and play are wonderful, but only part of the point. What we’re really talking about is striving to use the practice to become better people. That’s why so much of our focus is on energy and feeling rather than technique. Being able to hit a 220-yard drive straight down the center of the fairway has utility in exactly one place. A feeling awareness of the body, concentration, centering–these are things you can use everywhere. These things make your life better.

Over the past several weeks, I’ve argued in some depth that the only really effective path forward in learning sports is in learning to feel, that feeling is something of a missing link in instruction and learning.

A few weeks ago, I was playing around swinging a club in the backyard. I was thinking, if what I’m saying about feeling is accurate, we’re only going to get anywhere with the golf swing if we learn to feel the position of the club in the hands, feel the plane of the swing, and feel the contact between the clubhead and the ball. As I was playing with the club, it occurred to me that it’s very hard to feel the striking face of the club, that I didn’t really feel its connection to my hands. In what might have been a moment of insight, I tried to find the point on the shaft where the club balanced, that is, the club’s center of gravity. I was surprised to discover that the center of gravity isn’t somewhere in the clubhead, nor at the point where the shaft joins the head (which would have been my guess), nor even particularly close to the clubhead. On this particular club (an eight-iron), it was a good six inches or so up the shaft of the club. Wouldn’t it be easier to swing a club properly, I thought, if the part of the club that naturally should be our focus–the head–was where the club’s center of mass, and hence its feel, was?

After a little research, the reason clubs are engineered this way made a bit more sense. Because of the physics of leverage, the closer to the hands that the club’s center of gravity is, the easier it will be to accelerate the club, which will make for a faster clubhead speed, which leads to longer shots.

So it makes sense, but I nevertheless remain convinced that less experienced golfers like myself are naturally going to put our focus on the clubhead–it’s what hits the ball, after all–and we’re likely to imagine we feel the weight of the clubhead where it actually is in space, but that’s not where we feel the club’s weight. We feel the center of gravity. What we think we feel isn’t what we feel, which is going to lead to a certain kinesthetic confusion,

After a bit of practice, I found I could feel the center of mass swinging from my hands, which had to be an improvement. This led to an idea: I found the point of balance along the shaft of each of my clubs and wrapped a bit of electrical tape at that point. (The longer the club, the further up the shaft the center of gravity is.) That way I’d have a visual cue for the club’s center of gravity whenever I picked up a given club.

As I’ve practiced with it since, I’ve found that this visual cue has helped me feel the swing of the club much more accurately. It’s led to an increased smoothness. Throughout my swing, I have the sensation of the club’s weight at the club’s actual center of gravity. I rely on my eyes to guide the clubface back to the ball (as most of us should), but because the club’s weight pulls from a spot several inches up the shaft, the clubhead kind of floats in space.

I recommend finding the balance point of your clubs as well. A visual indicator at the center of gravity will help you connect with the feel of the club. Working on learning to truly feel the club as you practice your swing can lead only to positive results.

Earlier this week I was chatting with Terry, the woman who gets such a kick out of seeing me practice in the park. She asked how my writing connects with what she’s seen me practicing, and I gave her my standard answer, that we’re writing about energy flow in the body and how it contributes to learning sports and athletics. This was my standard on-the-chairlift answer all winter long when someone asked about my writing, but it always felt vague and kinda lame, and even all these months later, I’d never figured out a way to say it better. But then just after Terry and I finished our conversation and she rode away on her bicycle, I finally thought of a better description: we’re seeking to revolutionize the way sports and athletics are taught and learned.

Perhaps I needed to see the results of this first not-quite-year of experimenting and practice before I was comfortable making so bold a claim. As I see my golf short game get more imaginative, consistent, and with a deeper repertoire of shots; as I see more and more of my full swings fly straight and long; as my tennis serves more and more frequently pock off the strings with easy power, I’m seeing, in areas in which I stagnated for, literally, decades, consistent and often substantial improvement.

The energy techniques that Jerry teaches work. They work better than anything else I’ve ever tried. Do I dare claim they’re the missing piece in sports instruction? It makes me nervous to make such a statement, but…well:

• Over all those summers of tennis lessons as a kid, no one ever adequately explained to me that the power of the shot isn’t in the arm, it’s in the legs and core, and certainly no one ever got me to feel that truth.

• The golf lessons I took as a kid left me with a hideous push-slice and no power.

• I took years of yoga classes with many different teachers, including a couple of famous teachers whose names you’d recognize from the magazines, but for all the talk of “connecting to the breath,” no one ever explained that the free flow of the breath determined the depth of the pose. I figured it out by myself after applying centering to the yogic breath one summer morning. Without exaggeration, centering taught me more about properly finding the pose than any teacher I ever practiced with. From that perspective, it wouldn’t be entirely untrue to say that Jerry is the best yoga teacher I’ve ever had, and he doesn’t even do yoga.

That Jerry and I have both seen such improvement working together to teach ourselves, with neither of us having any deeper familiarity with “proper” golf technique than the mediocre lessons we’ve taken in the past and the occasional bit we’ve read in a book or online, leads pretty inexorably to the conclusion that most instruction is poor.

It’s not fully the instructors’ fault. Few people have the personality and constitution to look at the conventionally held wisdom and say, “Wait. This doesn’t actually seem to be working.” That conclusion makes most people feel desperately out on a limb. If people think to wonder just why it is that more students don’t see better results, the answer given back all too frequently is one of the most pernicious, disheartening and false answers one could imagine: that the students in question just lack talent.

It appears that something separates the top, top performers from the rest of us. Maybe no amount of the best instruction and concentrated, dedicated practice would have ever made me into a Tiger Woods or a Roger Federer. And that’s fine. But I know now that my level of accomplishment never even came close to the limits of my potential, and in my observed experience this is true for almost everyone. The rare kid who really thrives in the current system is declared talented and moved into the sports track; the rest are shunted to the wayside. Consider this: several times this winter, I’d have a student explain to me that she isn’t athletic, that she is actually a klutz–and then, by connecting the centered breath to what she was trying to do, turn out to be the student who picked up skiing more quickly than anyone else in the class. Where did this story about herself come from? It was taught to her. But it isn’t true and almost certainly never was.

This is why we make such a big deal about centering and the feeling of flow that it engenders: because once you learn to feel flow in the body, you can follow that feeling to the truth of any athletic pursuit. Most of our limitations are untrue stories we carry with us. Centering begins to move us beyond those stories. Which isn’t to say that it’s a simple process. Letting go of stories we’ve carried with us for much or most of our lives can threaten our sense of identity. But after two years on this path, I feel confident in saying that we’re better served letting go of our limitations than we are staying constricted, no matter how comfortable we’ve become there.

Jerry and I started this project with the hypothesis that by using the energy techniques he’s developed over the past twenty years, we could work together to radically improve our golf games. I’ve spent the past three weeks writing about the possible value of outside instruction, but what I haven’t done is really measure our success in terms of that initial hypothesis. Once I began to use that yardstick, the question about the need for instruction got much more clear.

We’ve been working on this project for less than a year, and the improvements we’re already seeing strongly suggest that our hypothesis was accurate. We’ve both improved markedly. Our short games are far stronger than they were. Jerry has seen improvement throughout his bag on full swings, and while the long irons are still proving to be a challenge to hit consistently, the distance he gets from his hybrids, coupled with how well he hits his 7-iron, 9-iron and wedges, should already be enough to get him close to his initial goal, which was breaking 90 regularly. I’m still working on the more basic goals of hitting my shots straight and with some power, but things are clearly getting better. Over the past couple of weeks, on a couple of occasions I have hit my driver straight to about 180 yards. That may not seem like much, but I literally cannot remember the last time I hit a truly straight drive. Sometimes I even hit a hook now, and though that’s “bad,” it shows very clearly that my swing is changing. I used to push-slice horribly almost one-hundred percent of the time. And about a week ago, I went to the range and hit a three-quarter 7-iron about 110 yards. Again, that may not sound especially impressive, but until recently I’ve been unable to hit an iron longer than a nine at all.

My initial goal when we began the project was to break 100, and I gave myself five years to get there. Based on what I’m seeing, I think there’s a good chance I’ll manage my goal before the end of 2016.

So back to the question that has occupied me for the past few weeks: what defines good instruction? A good measure would be the student’s consistent improvement, don’t you think? Based on that metric, the instruction Jerry and I are currently receiving is quite good indeed.

I had an interesting conversation about a month ago. A woman from my neighborhood was watching me practice my golf swing in the park, and she struck up a conversation. She introduced herself and told me a bit about herself and her family and their relationship to golf: her husband had played professionally and now ran a local golf course; both of her daughters had played at the collegiate level; one of them was now a teaching pro at another local course; she herself had been a pretty good golfer at one point. She asked about my practice, and I told her what I was doing. She clearly enjoyed hearing about it. And she replied, quite casually, “It’s a tough sport to figure out on your own.”

I have been thinking about that comment for a few weeks now. I think it’s really interesting. It seems pretty obvious on the face of it, but the more I examine it, the more I see.

First of all, as I try to improve my game, I’m not trying to figure it out on my own–I have Jerry and all his knowledge of centering and kinesiology to help me. I have my own eyes. I have all the video I could ever want of the best players in the world. And I have my own practice of centering and the body-focus it engenders to teach me the “rightness” or “truth” of my swing.

Furthermore, right now I’m actually operating in a pretty specific problem space: I am trying to unlock my power. A powerful shot arises from a swing that flows from core. That’s the only way it can work. So the answer will be found in feeling my way to unrestricted movement in the core. Which is to say that right now I know what I need to be practicing.

And finally, as I’ve been practicing, I’ve discovered a very important piece that most outside instructors just aren’t equipped to deal with: a major block to flow doesn’t manifest in sport alone. The way I restrict my power is not limited to just my golf swing. The problem runs far, far deeper than that. Somewhere, a long time ago, I learned that letting my power flow in my life didn’t feel safe, and so I put the brakes on. And it’s affected me in all aspects of my life ever since. This is a sensitive space.

There will come times in this process when I won’t know what I don’t know, and the technical knowledge of an expert will serve me well. But there are also times, as now, when I know both what to practice and the energetic repercussions of that practice. I’m not stuck or confused. I’m not saying that no one out there is equipped to help me, but when things are flowing on their own, why risk muddying the waters?

Last week I finished my piece about the value of coaching by asking if Jerry and I could speed up our learning process in golf with some good outside instruction. In answer, I asserted that the definition of “good instruction” is that it helps you learn more quickly. But from that perspective, what makes instruction “good?”

Before I go any further, let me share an observation that’s driven our approach to this endeavor that will strike many people as startling or even simply wrong: the golf swing isn’t actually all that difficult. The ball is sitting on the ground, not moving. We have a club in our hands. The problem we’re trying to solve is, how do we move the body so as to generate a fast-moving clubhead that’s traveling straight along the aim-line at impact, with a clubface that’s square to the direction of travel? It’s really not that complicated. A modest knowledge of kinesiology and physics should get us, more or less, to the right answer. Furthermore, we have dozens of fantastic instructors teaching by example on TV every week, which makes learning even simpler: other people have already figured this out! We only need to emulate them.

Another observation: I had a fair amount of instruction in golf when I was a kid, and yet I was terrible golfer. So why is it that I’ve made more progress in the last year of practicing with Jerry than I did in years of instruction as a kid? Is it simply that I’m older and better at figuring things out?

No, it’s not. There have been periods in my adult life in which I practiced golf. I just never got anywhere.

The difference between then and now is that Jerry taught me about centering. Centering, and the attention to the body that it brings, is what was missing all along.

By combining centering, knowledge of kinesiology and energy flow in the body, good observation of top performers in the field, and a practice of feeling the body accurately, we’ve made great strides in less than a year (as Jerry pointed out on Tuesday). If the measure of good instruction is that you learn quickly, well, how much better do we need our instruction to be?