Author Archives: Ben Lanin

By meeting change, ever inevitable, from within consciousness, you can provide direction. This person in the future whom you wish to be: it is you, expanded. This is your goal. But remember: life happens in the present. This expanded, future you: that person would feel more open, more in flow, yes? Now ask: In what ways? How and where would it be different? Where would the openness be? Where is there tightness or constriction in your energy that is keeping you from being that person? Find it in your body. Now, in that place of constriction: begin to open.

In a sense, a goal invokes movement toward becoming someone in the future who is different (at least a little different) from the person you are right now. But this is no excuse to start *living* in the future. The future is the ultimate *out there,* never more than a dream. Really, there is only ever a present, constantly unfolding.

(Know this: whatever happens, you will be a different person in the future. Change is the only constant. But you can choose to meet that change consciously. Or not.)

I think maybe our goals shouldn’t exist *out there.* Our goals should be *in here.* I think maybe we should express our goals like this: “My goal is to be a person who hits his drives 210 yards and straight.” Now the goal stops being an object, something we wish to possess. Now the goal is inside us. Stated this way, the goal becomes synonymous with us. It becomes our co-subject.

By making the goal something we wish to be, we open ourselves up to the change necessary to bring that goal about.

It occurred to me over the weekend that perhaps we’re doing this whole goal-setting thing wrong. Generally we state our goals like this: *My goal is to achieve x.*

For example: “My goal is to hit my drives 210 yards and straight.”

Why might this be a problem? When we speak this way, the goal becomes an object, some shiny thing that exists *out there.* It’s just a thing we hope to obtain. We might as well be saying, “My goal is to have a Ferrari.”

If the body doesn’t know “not,” then what happens when we say a sentence like, “I’m not a good golfer?” Does the body hear, “I’m a good golfer?”

It does not. When we say that the body doesn’t know not, we are saying that an affirmative statement is met as concretely real in the body, whereas not is an abstraction, which takes it out of the realm of the body and into the realm of the mind.

We cannot make energy flow by using the mind. Energy flows by moving to center, by connecting to the open, flowing breath, and allowing the breath to draw energy into and through us. We cannot think our way to flow.

However, we can definitely think our way out of it. When we say a sentence like “I’m not a good golfer,” we’re using the power of the mind to clamp down on flow. The essential guiding hypothesis of TTW is that athletic ability (any ability, really) depends on an open, unfettered flow of energy. Any blockage in that flow will inevitably limit one’s abilities.

Thus, no matter what our skill at the sport, saying, “I’m not a good golfer” becomes true to some extent just by saying it.

Don’t take my word for it. Try it for yourself. Center. Establish an open, flowing breath until you can feel the energy flowing. Now, pick something that you are working at meeting your potential in. It can be anything, just as long as it’s something you care about. Now, say to yourself, “I’m not a good _______.” What did you notice about the breath? What did you notice about the energy in the body? Did you find that the breath didn’t flow as cleanly (if at all), and the energy in the body closed up or fell away?

For now, try to start being aware of times you use language to limit your flow. Awareness is the first step to changing that pattern.

It was a year ago this week that Jerry and I published our first pieces for TTW and began the project in earnest.

Earlier today, we were at the chipping green practicing our chips and pitches, and I was reflecting on just how far we’ve come.

We still mis-hit shots sometimes. Not every one even stays on the green. But the grouping of our shots, as it emerges, is unmistakable: our shots group around the flag.

It didn’t used to be that way.

My goal when I came back to practicing golf after all these years was to break 100 within five years. I’d never even come close to breaking 100, but five years still seemed realistic if I was willing to work hard.

Jerry thinks I will succeed in that goal before the snow flies this year. I’m not convinced yet. But I have witnessed our short games progress radically in just a year of regular (but hardly daily) practice. This first year, we’ve put the bulk of our practice in on the chipping green. For the second year, we’ll put the bulk of our practice in on the driving range. If our long games improve as much next year as our short games did this year, I will certainly break 100 before this time next year. Jerry will be breaking 90 regularly.

In the pieces I’ve published so far this week, I’ve been writing about language and the ways in which we use it to help or hinder our attempts to change. Today I am reflecting on how far we’ve come, and I have to wonder: just how much magic did we set free in our lives when we set out on this project with the idea that, “Yeah, we can do that?”

One day I was hanging out with a friend of mine, and I was trying to convince her that she should learn to ski or snowboard, and she was having none of it. Now, she may have many million reasons for not wanting to learn, but what she said to me that day was, “I’m a total klutz. I’ll just hurt myself.”

But I think back to another time we were hanging out, and something in our conversation inspired her to move into the yoga pose Natarajasana, or Dancer’s Pose. It’s a pose that requires substantial flexibility and balance, and she did it effortlessly, without thinking or becoming self-conscious at all. It was quite beautiful.

We are so quick to argue for our limitations.

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.

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.