Category: Uncategorized

There’s a videogame I play which I call Game, and one of the features and challenges of Game is that, though you can save your progress between sessions, you cannot save your progress during a session–that is, when you make a mistake and die, you have to start over all the way at the beginning.

Earlier today I allowed myself to start up a saved session and play about five minutes of Game and during that time I made a very, very stupid mistake and died, and just like that ten-and-a-half hours of gameplay disappeared and, once again, I’m back to the start.

One of the things I like about Game is that because the stakes are simultaneously so high (die and start over) and so low (it’s still just a video game), it provides a surprisingly good platform for learning about yourself and discovering opportunities for growth.

So today, after I died, I wanted to make sure that I would learn something from the stupid, stupid thing I’d done, and so I started articulating to myself what I’d like that to be. “I will not continually make the same stupid mistakes,” was one thing I said to myself. That’d be a good thing to learn, right?

And it was then that I realized that I had something salient to share here. An important teaching of Jerry’s is, “The body doesn’t know ‘not.'” He means that the body deals only in concrete realities, whereas the negation of something is an abstraction. Thus, if I want to effect a change in my life–if I want my recreation to be an opportunity for learning and growth, if I want it to help teach me something about living a better life–then I have to find a way to articulate what I want to learn as a positive and concrete affirmation.

Here you might expect me to share exactly how I’ve come to articulate the change I wish to see after today’s events, but I haven’t gotten to that point yet. So instead of rushing into an answer, I am for now keeping myself open to the question: How best do I make this experience into a gift?

Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve written about my experience with our first round of golf, saying that it wasn’t fun, and that it won’t be fun until I can unlock the power of my swing.

Now, first of all, I want to say that there is value in knowing yourself. If a certain something isn’t going to be satisfying, it isn’t going to be satisfying, and you do whatever you need to do to deal with that. If playing rounds at my current level of ability isn’t fun, I can certainly wait until I get better at hitting the ball.

But I have been thinking a lot about the experience, and I think I’ve been operating under a problematic misapprehension, and it’s not something I want to continue.

The problem wasn’t the situation. Being able to reliably drive the ball 200 yards–or 225, or 250–isn’t going to fix anything. My dissatisfaction wasn’t inherent in the experience. My dissatisfaction was, essentially, a choice.

If I really want to, I can hold on to the idea that golf is going to be fun when X, Y or Z finally happens. I can hold on to the idea that in this journey there’s a destination. But there is no destination. There’s only ever the present moment, constantly unfolding. Everything else is memories and dreams. So I can keep waiting for some magical future where everything is perfect, or else I can meet the present moment as it unfolds around me. And will I always enjoy the process? That doesn’t seem to match my experience. Sometimes things feel good and sometimes they do not, but feelings pass just like all other things pass in the everchanging present. I can fight with What Is in the present moment, measuring it up against a dream, or I can attend deeply to it. I can choose to be here, or not.

I choose to be here.

Last week as we finished our first lesson, I gave some practice recommendations for the week to come. The homework consisted of centering 50 times per day and either swinging or hitting golf balls for 10 minutes a day. When I give assignments like these, I always ask for more repetitions than I expect the clients to do. I know that there is a certain amount of practice necessary to promote change and by asking for more than that, I can build a cushion into the system to insure future success for the clients.

We started the second lesson by discussing how the homework went in the time between lessons. The answer was about what I expected. One of the clients practiced her centering 10-15 times per day and hit balls 4-5 times during the week. The other centered intermittently and practiced hitting once. She was apologetic for the lack of compliance and offered several reasons for not practicing.

Before I continue, let me say that this process is always about the client. It doesn’t matter if I’m in the gym or on the golf course, I never take my clients success or failures personally. My job is to bear witness to the process, while offering suggestions and guidance based on my 25 years of experience. I know this process is difficult and takes great courage to pursue.

At this point, I’m sure some of you are thinking, “Hey wait a minute, this was just a golf lesson. What’s so courageous about taking a golf lesson?”

As Ben and I have written about many times, our true goal is to find achievement through consciousness.

The centering and breathing practices that we promote in the TTW principles actually open the participants to a deeper level of awareness and help to build a greater sense of consciousness. As we practice our centering and breathing we begin to release stored energy and emotions that have created blockages within our neural networks. When this happens, things can get pretty interesting.

Ben wrote about this in his piece last Friday. How preparing to play brought up lots of feelings, images and emotions of playing golf with his father as a young man. This flood of emotion can be hard to handle. So when I ask my clients to do some kind of homework between lessons, the work is designed to begin the process of building awareness. Sometimes, that can be too much. I understand.

So we take a moment, find center and breathe.

In last week’s piece, I wrote about how the recent round Jerry and I played wasn’t fun for me. So does that mean that I’m done? I quit? I don’t have what it takes to play golf to just simply have a good time, and so I’m going to let it go?

Of course not. Because now the interesting work can really begin. In acknowledging the aspect of the game that matters most to me–namely, unlocking the power of my swing–I know where to put the heart of my practice. This focus may not make an immediate positive difference in terms of score (indeed, if my accuracy declines during the initial part of the process, I could well end up with higher scores), but I know my satisfaction will markedly increase.

However, it wasn’t merely my dissatisfaction with the length of my shots that kept the round from being fun for me. Other things came up both before and during the round that told me a lot about myself and my relationship to the sport.

First of all, I was careless with my time leading up to the round, trying to get too many things done that morning, which put me in a state of frustration before I ever even left the house. When I get into time-stress, my energy tends to blow up, and it takes a long time to settle down again, during which time it affects my ability to be present and enjoy what’s going on around me. Allowing that to happen right before the round certainly had negative repercussions on my enjoyment of the round.

But if I’m being honest, long before that happened, I was already primed for a perilous emotional state.

Jerry and I have spoken multiple times in these pieces about how the process of living a more centered life will get energy flowing through places where you’ve previously shut down. We start to feel places we’ve numbed.

Well, that morning before the round, I found myself in the midst of some of the feelings I used to have about playing golf back when I’d last played regularly, when I was a kid in middle school. They weren’t simple feelings. The feelings related to my frustration with the game, to memories of my displeasure at awakening so early to play (my dad always wanted to be on the course as close to sunrise as possible, and there is no great joy being awakened at 5:30 in the morning when you’re twelve or thirteen years old–thankfully Jerry and I met at a far more sensible time, but those feelings nevertheless arose), and feeling related to my dad himself.

My dad had about as literal a love-hate relationship with golf as it’s possible to have. He went religiously, week after week, but he struggled and struggled with the sport. His explosive temper and the endless frustration golf caused him made for kind of a bad combination. And of course I had my own relationship to his anger, as well as my own propensity toward anger, and a conscious desire to not want to emulate his volatility. Golf had all of these associations for me when I was a kid, and on that Friday morning before I went to play, I watched them all arise again in my body.

So what do you do about that kind of thing? Because I am neither interested in playing out my father’s pathologies around the game, nor am I interested in reliving feelings that have lingered in my body since my boyhood.

Well, interested or not, there is no easy path through it. Things arise. And when they do, we generally have two choices: we can try to deny the feelings are there, either by trying to ignore them or tamp them down; or we can acknowledge the feelings and then center and breathe through them. Through that process, fresh energy will flow through the stuck places, and the stagnant energy will start to release.

(Now, whether or not dealing with these feelings when they arise during a round is productive is a different matter. It may not be appropriate to close your eyes and center deeply and breathe for a while until the feelings dissipate when you’re in the middle of a round and the people behind you wish you’d just go ahead and hit your next goddamn shot already.)

This may not be immediately obvious, but it’s a good thing when feelings like these arise. As Jerry and I have said several times in these writings, our main goal with this project is not to improve our golf games, but to improve ourselves as people. We seek to improve our lives. In acknowledging these feelings, I have an amazing opportunity to grow. The process won’t be easy or comfortable. Changing challenging feelings never is. Even writing about it is challenging. Still, I recognize how significant the long-term benefits are going to be, and so I welcome the process of change.

Last week, I gave my first official lesson on the TTW principles at the driving range. (Ben was still in New York watching the early rounds of the U.S. Open, so I was on my own.)

The clients were a couple of friends, both women in their mid-to-late 50’s who had quit golfing a couple of years ago because “the game quit being fun.” They couldn’t play well enough to be comfortable and lessons didn’t help. They approached me last week after going to the driving range and having an awful time. Apparently, the layoff did nothing to help their swings – neither of them could hit the ball at all and simply swinging the club “felt bad.”

One of them has been a client of mine for the last couple of years and understands centering in the context of the gym, while the other was completely new to the idea of centering and conscious movement.

As we started, I asked each about their long-term goals, as well as what they hoped to accomplish today. The long-term goals were to have more fun playing, while connecting to themselves, the course, and the game. The short-term goal was to be able to swing without feeling discomfort or pain.

As with everything that I do, I started by teaching them to center and find an open flowing breath. Even though one of the ladies had been a client for a couple years, the idea of centering in this environment was new and helped her expand her concept of centering.

From there, we worked from centered stance, to centered grip, into a centered swing, and even covered a centered pre-shot ritual. Essentially, we worked on most of the things Ben and I have been exploring and writing about for the last 18 months.

By the end of the lesson, both were hitting the ball better, and with more confidence. Most importantly, they were smiling. My client raved about her ability to turn her shoulders and use her core in order to create pain-free swings. When I asked her friend how she was doing, she smiled and replied with, “I cannot believe how good I feel!” With that I gave them some homework and ended the lesson.

Over the last year I have watched many people receive lessons. The response ranged from blatant frustration to grimly focused determination to get better. Until today, I have never seen a lesson end with smiles and a declaration like the one I heard today.

Two women who had all but given up on playing golf, due to the frustration of one-size-fits-all instruction and less-than-fun playing experiences, found hope and inspiration that they once again could enjoy a game they both love. I would call that a complete and totally successful debut for the program that Ben and I have created.

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.

Last week I reported the results of my first round since starting this experiment. After reflecting on the results, I thought I would share some observations.

First, I feel that we should have been playing actual golf the entire time. Practice is one thing, but as Ben pointed out, playing has a different energy and feel to it. Without playing it’s hard to understand how effective the practice truly was. For example, when practicing Ben and I have become very efficient with chipping onto the green from 50+ feet. When playing, we were both hesitant and left chip after chip short. I know that all the practice will eventually show up within the game, but that lack of confidence was a direct result of not playing.

Ball striking and clubs selection: When hitting practice balls on the range, the distance of each shot and the action of the ball is very different from playing with real balls on the course. When playing last week, several times I used the wrong club for a particular shot. These shots resulted in either being short of the green or hitting into obstacles. As the round went on I became less and less confident with my choices. This showed up time and again as I would hit a second shot with the right club and would hit a much better shot. Again, I feel this will auto correct with playing more frequently, but could have been prepared for much more efficiently.

Putting: I was efficient with my putter. Not amazing, but better than average. My lag putts were very good, but I did have 3 putts either lip out or stop one roll short of going in. We haven’t practiced putting anywhere near the amount we have chipping and I thought it showed for me. Moving forward, I plan to do more chipping drills where I finish the shot with my putter in order to simulate playing more effectively. On a side note, Ben nailed several long putts and except for the last hole putted much better than I did. He usually wins our putting competitions, but I plan on getting extra practice while he’s away this week to close that gap.

Overall, as I stated before, I feel that we have been highly successful. I think moving forward we can be more efficient with our practice and create effect strategies to improve on our weaknesses as they show themselves while playing.

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.

Friday, Ben and I actually made it to Haystack for our first round of golf since starting this project.

If you haven’t played there, Haystack is a duffer’s dream. No tee times, very laid back, with a pretty funky (in a good way) vibe. If you’re in a hurry, or get frustrated with slow players in front of you, haystack is NOT for you. But if you want to play a casual round, try some second or even third shots, Haystack can be a fun afternoon. It’s a par-32 nine-hole course that is deceptively hard. What makes it hard is the unpredictable course conditions.

I was pretty excited to play and arrived early. So I walked around and hit some balls to get warm. Ben showed up right on time, we hit a second bucket of balls and queued up to begin play (that’s right, just wait your turn and go when ready.)

I’ll spare you the shot-by-shot details and summarize my day. I shot a 43. Yep, 11 over par. I had 4 balls find trees: 2 that were caused by course conditions, 1 that I hit offline, and the other I simply hit it too far by choosing the wrong club. I had 3 putts that lipped out requiring tap-ins to finish the hole. Twice I had chips that should have rolled right up onto the green, but the course was wet and soggy and ate the balls’ momentum requiring another shot. A great example of these soggy conditions was on the 7th hole, a par three with an elevated tee hitting over a large pond. I hit a beautiful tee shot that landed firmly onto the green and sank. That’s right, no bounce or roll, it just stuck there about 25 feet from the pin. But that’s golf, right? You play the course in the condition that you find it.

To summarize my day, I had a blast. I really didn’t realize how much I missed actually playing a round of golf (it had been two years). I could have played better and next time I will! I was pleasantly surprised by my confidence hitting any club, up to and including my driver. As I begin to know how far certain clubs will go, I should have an easier time with club selection.

The thing that shocked me the most was the lack of confidence both Ben and I had when chipping. We have spent the majority of our practice time on finding balance within the swing while chipping. We approach the practice green with confidence and a sense of capability that neither of us had before starting this project. On the course, both of us were hesitant and underperforming. I assume that it’s simply the nerves associated with actually playing and that it will improve as we continue to play. I hope to play once or twice more before my next scheduled post, so I should know lots more by then.

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.