Month: September 2016

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.