Author Archives: Ben Lanin

In thanksgiving:

I am grateful for the work I’ve gotten to do with Jerry. I am grateful at how transformative I’ve found our work together to be. I am grateful that I can look at my life before and after and see how much better things are now. I am grateful that my exploration of the TTW principles takes me outside to play. I am grateful for soccer and golf and tennis and mountain biking. I am grateful for skiing and snowboarding. I am grateful to be in a place with great weather and great natural beauty so that I want to be outside every day. I am grateful for having a teacher as adept as Jerry, someone who is inclined to experiment, to play–this is how TTW came to be, this is why it has worked. I am grateful to the clients we have worked with so far. I am grateful for the clients yet to come.

I am grateful that our idea worked, and I am grateful to have learned that change is more complicated than I thought. There is no magic switch here. Our patterns do not just go away. I am grateful to have seen that truth so clearly through this year of exploration. And I am grateful, deeply grateful, that change is possible.

Change is always possible.

Jerry’s piece this week took me by surprise. We both took the election really hard, but Jerry is usually so grounded that I expected his shock would wear off over the weekend, and he’d return to something like normalcy. So I was certainly surprised by the continued note of despondency in his piece.

As the days go on, however, I’m becoming more and more aware that there is not and will not be a return to normalcy, not as we knew it, on this side of this election. The political divisions between red and blue have been getting sharper for years, but this election was so divisive, and the sense of recrimination, disgust and betrayal so deep, that our society seems to have split asunder.

We have been talking here about how the purpose of TTW is not primarily to make ourselves or our clients into better athletes. That’s just a side effect. Rather, we’re engaging in concrete, embodied practices with the goal of becoming better people.

So now the universe has seen fit to give us a new playing field–one with the highest of stakes–to really test the TTW principles. What does “better people” mean in a divided nation? What does “better people” mean in a country in which the legitimacy of our governmental system is breaking to pieces before our eyes?

If TTW is more than just talk–and it is–then here is where the rubber hits the road. It may look like we’re trying to be better golfers, or tennis players, or whatever. But by practicing being in the present moment, not fleeing from what is, we become more skillful at living in this challenging world.

While I’m not a Tiger Woods-level athlete (to say the least), I had a substantial history with weight-training when I first started working with Jerry. I started lifting weights as a freshman in college, got certified as a personal trainer in my early 20s, and have included weight-training as part of my exercise routine throughout my adult life. I had my first session with Jerry at the age of 40, so at that point I had been involved in weight-training for literally more than half my life.

In our first session, we started with centering and the breath, and then Jerry explained to me the problems with the athletic model of training. We went out to the weight room, and Jerry instructed me on how to lift with a focus on breath and feeling. The intensity of the workout was less than I was used to–no more sets to failure–but Jerry explained that I’d be able to work out more frequently, because the lower intensity meant I didn’t need a day off for recovery.

Jerry sent me off with the instruction to practice, and so I did. I worked out nearly every day. I was not suffering from physical injury when Jerry and I started, but the relationship between myself and my body was definitely askew. To my fascination, it wasn’t long at all before that started to change.

Last week I was watching Andy Murray play Jo-Wilfred Tsonga, and during the match Murray reverted to his tendency to angrily mutter in the direction of his player box when things weren’t going his way. I realized that I see that same sort of behavior all the time in the sports I practice and play. In fact, it happens so often that I don’t even think twice about it. Someone muttering angrily to himself after mishitting a shot on the practice tee? Totally normal.

After a bit of reflection, I noticed that what I don’t see is people talking animatedly with themselves when things go right. Indeed, when I took a moment to imagine someone doing so, the image I saw in my mind’s eye was of the kind of person at whom we either stare or else consciously look away.

How strange, I thought. We take it as normal when someone watches a good shot and then moves on to the next one but scolds himself when he hits a bad shot; but the opposite–letting the bad ones go but offering himself out-loud congratulations when things go right–seems weird, even a bit crazy.

From an energy perspective, by engaging in these behaviors, aren’t we leaving ourselves little room for growth? We shrug off the positives, giving ourselves no space to be delighted and thus rejecting the energetic expansion on offer, while meeting negative experiences either by constricting our flow around them or by expending extra energy in self-recrimination. Notice how insidious this is. As non-flow gets more and more ingrained, change becomes gets harder and harder.

This week I have been exploring a new approach: letting the negative things pass with as little extra energy as possible (like a cloud passes in front of the sun) while trying to open my energy, as in gratitude, when I experience the positive ones. I’m finding this surprisingly difficult. But with growth as the goal, surely this is the better approach.

And you may find yourself living in a shotgun shack.
And you may find yourself in another part of the world.
And you may find yourself behind the wheel of a large automobile.
And you may find yourself in a beautiful house
With a beautiful wife
And you may ask yourself
Well
How did I get here?
–Talking Heads, “Once in a Lifetime”

In his piece on Tuesday, Jerry brought our work here full circle, returning to the topic of how we would work with Tiger Woods. Jerry acknowledged that Tiger has forgotten more about how to play golf than we will ever know, but said that this doesn’t matter. We’d start with Tiger the same way we start with everybody: with centering and the breath.

While working with top athletes is a dream we hope to see come true, the main constituency we expect to work with is non-famous people like ourselves who seek to maximize their potential. We’ve assumed that because our methods bring deep feeling to the body and, with that, a concomitant feeling of vulnerability, certain groups of people won’t be amenable to this work.

But in the past couple of weeks I have watched with something like wonder as I’ve had conversation after conversation with members of exactly the group that we’ve considered least likely to be our audience, which you might find kind of funny when I tell you who they are. (Sometimes we fail to see what’s right in front of our faces.)

These conversations have been with men, my age or a bit younger, who find themselves in situations not unlike where I found myself a couple of years ago. They seem to be looking around and saying something like this to themselves:

“I thought I was living skillfully. I thought I would be more at this point in my life. But when I look at my life, I see a lack of purpose, a lack of solidity. I lack the fullness of my own integrity, and I don’t know how to make it better.”

As the song says: “How did I get here?”

Once these conversations started to happen, I realized that of course there are men just like me out there who could, as I did, use a little help. And of course I am being called to help them. The universe tends to send us exactly what we need in order to learn and grow.

What they’re experiencing: I have been there. Hell, I am still there. I do not live in the fullness of my own integrity, and I suffer in that lack. But I am trying, goddammit. Though I may have miles to go on this journey toward solidity of self, I also know just how far I’ve come since I started this process. And what was the first step in beginning the process of change? It’s exactly what Jerry said on Tuesday: it started with centering and the breath.

We began with the practice of centering (a practice accessible to all) and hypothesized that we could apply it in the service of meeting our highest potential.

We spent a year testing our hypothesis, and ultimately we deemed the experiment a success: through the application of centering, we discovered some of the blocks to our potential, and, through centering, we began to move beyond those blocks.

We make no claim that we’ve arrived at any destination, for there is no destination. The practice continues, and will continue, always.

But we believe now that with consciousness, we can achieve up to the very limits of our potential. With consciousness, all blocks to achievement can be overcome.

This is not theory. This is not an intellectual exercise. We are living this practice, and it is in harvesting the fruits of our practice that we dare make such bold assertions.

It is our observation that many people are stuck, embedded in patterns that no longer serve them. We’ve been stuck in such patterns ourselves, but through our practice, we have seen our patterns change.

Through our practice, we have seen our lives change for the better, and it is in service to that change that we are called to teach.

In his piece on Tuesday, Jerry boldly declared our experiment a success. We’re ready to teach, he said.

I wouldn’t have made that declaration without him doing so. I might have gotten hung up on that my golf game is still very much a work in progress. How far have we come? Very far. How far do we still have to go? Well, any concept of a final destination is unskillful thinking, but even if we limit ourselves to our initial goals (Jerry breaking 90 regularly, me breaking 100), I suspect I still have a way to go.

So are we ready to teach?

Absolutely we are. But let’s be very specific in exactly *what* we’re here to teach. We’re both practicing golf avidly, but we’re not doing it just or even primarily to learn golf. If that’s your main goal, you are probably better served by finding someone who teaches more traditionally than we do–we can model centering, we can model our own practice, but neither of us can model a completed swing. By some measures, I’m no more than a highly devoted advanced beginner. Jerry would probably call himself an intermediate-level golfer.

But if your goal is an exploration of yourself, a willingness to confront your deep tendencies that get in the way of you meeting your highest potential–in *all* walks of life–then we’re exactly the people you want to work with. I am unequivocally a better golfer and tennis player than before I started practicing with these principles. But far more important is how deeply I have come to understand barriers and blocks that I (and others!) put in my way from a very young age. More important still is that I am starting to release those blocks, and that release is making me a better person. I am living a better life. Yes, my golf game and tennis game have improved, but that pales in comparison to how much my life has improved.

I have spoken many times recently about my desire to unlock the power of my golf swing. The skills I have cultivated through my centering practice, especially the ability to feel more accurately and acutely what’s going on in my body, have allowed me to notice that, when I work on power, I clench the muscles in my jaw when I swing: I don the stony mask of grim determination.

Do I even need to say that there can be no benefit to this expression of tension? Whenever I experience a moment’s breakthrough in one of the sports I practice, it’s always accompanied by a feeling of effortlessness. In skiing and mountain biking, I experience it as near-weightlessness, as though flying. In soccer or tennis, I’ll accomplish something at or beyond the limits of my ability with an ease that makes success seem pre-ordained. In golf, I feel freedom of flow, with no blockage and no tightness.

In our lesson last week, I witnessed a lot of struggle from my students. One wore the mask of grim determination. The other offered a slight scowl or slump of the shoulders with every ball she hit. They both so wanted to hit the ball better. I tried to convince them that we’re on the right track, that what we’re doing together is working.

But in my own practice, I still find myself wearing that stony mask. It seems I don’t fully trust that I myself am on the right track, that what I’m doing is working.

I know I don’t want to go through life wearing that grim mask. But it is not enough to say, “I don’t want to hit with grim determination.” After all, as we’ve said, the body doesn’t know not. So how do I remove the mask?

I began to ask myself, “Can I hit the ball joyfully?” I began practicing some 30ish-yard pitches, and I set that as my goal: I wanted to discover what hitting the ball joyfully would feel like.

Would I claim to have completely figured it out? No. Sometimes my hitting was fun. Sometimes I got frustrated.

But I did notice this:

It was a beautiful day in late September, sunny and warm, and I was in a giant green-grass park, the entire thing essentially a playing field. I was holding an oddly-shaped stick, and I was using it to try to hit little white balls up in the air in smooth and lovely arcs toward a distant flagstick. In the grand scheme of things, that’s kind of a silly thing to do, don’t you think? But I found pleasure in the motion of swinging that stick, and delight in the ping that sounded when the stick’s striking face contacted the ball just so, and beauty in the balls’ smooth arcs.

Framed like this, do you wonder, as I do, why we struggle so?

I worry sometimes that I’m deluding myself about how well the techniques that Jerry and I have developed are working. Maybe it’s just that I so want to see success that I do.

Except: No. It’s not that.

On Thursday, I was practicing hitting pitch shots from 30ish yards away, and I watched the balls group around the pin. A year ago they didn’t do that. I unequivocally have a better short game now than I did a year ago. The practice is paying off.

On Saturday, I was playing tennis, and I paid the most objective attention I could to the quality of my serving, and undeniably, I serve with more power, accuracy, consistency and confidence than I did a year ago. The practice is paying off.

It hit me that the truly challenging question isn’t, “What if it’s all just confirmation bias?” It’s far more challenging to consider this: What if the work we’re doing is capable of unlocking our abilities to the very limits of our potential? What if this all really, truly works? What if, by continuing to attend to what’s going on in our bodies and what’s going on with our energy, coupled with regular practice, the end result is that we see improvement to levels we’ve barely dared imagine?

What happens if we discover that our limitations have been largely self-imposed? Then what do we do?

Yesterday evening I went to play soccer. I have not been having much fun with my soccer this season. I don’t know why, I just haven’t. I’ve felt no drive off the field and pissed off on it. My play has been tight, angry, with no risk-taking and no flow. It’s like I put my game inside a big rock and from that rock I carved a mask of grim determination and I have been wearing it, grey and hard, over my face.

I’m getting tired of not enjoying the things I do for fun.

So before I left the house, I declared, “Today in my game I will cultivate joy.” I asked myself, “What is my favorite thing to do on the soccer field, something of which I have full control?” I answered that I love beating someone for pace. So I set this goal: that at least twice in the match, once in each half, I would try to dribble by a defender. I didn’t have to beat him, I just had to try.

I gave myself permission to just go for it, and go for it I did. A couple of times in each half I found the ball at my feet and saw space around the defender and I revved myself through the gears and pushed the ball toward that space, and I found a freedom that I hadn’t seen in my game in I don’t know how long, and I smiled and I laughed and I smiled.

For those of us fortunate enough to have put aside *making money* as a reason we play the games we play, what keeps us playing? Only one answer makes sense: we go out to these parks and play these silly games because doing so makes our lives more full, more joyful, *better.* Let us begin, then, to find the parameters within our control that enable us to shatter these grim masks and reveal us underneath, smiling.