#182. On Thoughts, Truth, and the Claret Jug

 "He was in such a good mood, and that's important because when he's happy, he's unconscious.  When he gets serious, he starts thinking.  All we really just tried to do was to get him to not think all week, and he managed it really really well."
--Bob Rotella on Darren Clarke's run for the Open Championship's Claret Jug

Those pesky thoughts.  Most of the world thinks we're just stuck with our thoughts.  Nothing to be done.  They're who we are. Sports psychologists like Bob Rotella dig deeper, though.  They tend to go at thoughts in one of two ways: either they want you to think positive thoughts (including images and emotions) or they want you not to think at all.  It's hard to argue with Rotella if Darren Clarke really was so happy he wasn't thinking at Royal St. George's this past week.  I know Clarke made me happy just by continually flashing his infectious grin. Check out the photos in this video.  He was even smiling during his swing!



My favorite spiritual teachers take a different tack on thoughts, though.  They're not much hyped on positive thoughts (better than negative ones but still stuck in the dualistic world of positive-negative, good-bad, etc.) and they're not too keen on directly trying to squelch thoughts. What we resist persists and all that. The consensus among mystics seems to be that we don't really have control over thoughts dropping by, but we do get to choose whether we attach to them or not.  Thoughts come, thoughts go.  If we don't identify with them, they don't really matter.

The Enlightened crowd has another suggestion for dealing with thoughts: Just don't believe them. Adyashanti says that if you want to awaken, "Be silent and don't believe your thoughts and don't believe your thoughts."  Hmmmm. 

Byron Katie has a program she calls "The Work" to help you give up believing your thoughts.  Take a stressful thought (e.g., I'm a lousy putter.) and apply these four questions and a turn-around to the thought.  By the time you finish, you'll be totally confused how about what kind of a putter you are, and the thought will likely have lost its hold on you.  Here are the questions:
     "1. Is it true?
      2. Do you absolutely know it's true?
      3. How do you react, what happens, when you believe that thought?
      4. Who would you be without the thought?"

Then once you've subjected the thought to the four questions, Katie says you should "turn around the concept you are questioning, and be sure to find at least three genuine, specific examples of each turnaround."  For example, the obvious turnaround to "I'm a lousy putter" would be "I'm not a lousy putter." Then you'd find three examples of not being a lousy putter.  The idea is not to reject the thought but to shake its veracity at the roots and make you aware of how the thought affects you.

I don't know any golf performance gurus who focus on getting folks to disbelieve their thoughts, but I figure it's worth a try.  Of course, this flies in the face of all the power-of-positive-thinking and affirmation gurus, but not because positive thinking can't have an effect on golf (or anything else). It can; it just doesn't necessarily help you get any closer to Truth with a capital T.  At least according to folks like Katie, Adyashanti, and Eckhart Tolle.

It seems silly to spend all this time working on our golf games just to get better at golf.  We might as well kill two birds with one ball and pursue Truth as well. Unless, of course, you're chasing the Claret Jug.  Then you might want to take the fame and fortune and work on Truth later . . . once the hangover subsides.  Hey, Clarke's another Ulsterman. Comes with the territory. 

Then again, if all we want is to be better golfers, maybe we should just move to Northern Ireland.

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#181. Beaches, Black Bass, and the Buddha

Holden Beach photo by Diesel2004

The Hospice House miraculously released my brother after 25 days because he finally quit thowing up. He was the only patient I saw who left with a pulse.

Since he's feeling better for the time being, last Friday seemed a good time for an impromptu trip to Holden Beach, NC, where I stayed with the Mulhern clan, great friends from my Davidson College years. Luxury and laziness claimed the beach days.  The most strenuous activity was a deep-sea fishing trip on Sunday where we caught a couple of sharks, a few lizardfish, and a gazillion black bass too little to keep.  Maybe seven were big enough for dinner.

Didn't manage to get any golf in, though, so it's back to the practice range.  I'm housesitting for some friends in DeLand, FL, for two weeks, so I've been combing the golf course directory Golfnow.com, looking for cheap greens fees in the area.  Now if I can only coax my friend Rusty out on a course with me . . . .

Putting continues to give me fits, despite my new Dave Stockton set-up.  I had 37 putts in a round at Winter Pines last week, which is down from 40 the last time I played but still way too many.  Fortunately, now that I'm on the Stockton program, I don't care whether the putts go in or not, so it's all good. 

Not really. 

The best I can do at the moment is pretend that I don't care if the putt goes in or not.  Even pretending is a step in the right direction, I think, but I'm not yet a fully detached Buddha putter, and I'm not yet back in the zone of the Magic Triangle, which I still imaginatively draw as soon as I've set-up in Stockton fashion.  Back  to the practice green . . . .

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#180. Feherty, the Wise Fool

If you watched any of the Golf Channel's US Open coverage this year, you couldn't miss the promos for Feherty, the new show that debuted the night after the Open's final round.  I've had a mild crush on David Feherty for a while, so I had to check out the Irish-born commentator's latest project.



For sure, Feherty's no mystical golf figure. He is, however, a clown: he skips the garish makeup but sometimes sports the funny hair and clothes, and he's a physical comedy wiz.  He's also wicked smart and, well, deep . . . despite all the jokes about "testicle cams" and burping ("When the flaming hot Cheadles enter the earth's atmosphere, yodeling will be involved").   After watching three episodes, I can categorically say that Feherty is . . . ummmm, unlike any show I've ever seen.

Each half-hour episode (and the hour-long premier) features crazy Feherty vignettes as well as interviews with one particular celebrity: so far, respectively Lee Trevino, Don Cheadle, and Tom Watson.

Don Cheadle?

Incongruity is Feherty's hallmark. Nothing quite makes sense in Feherty's world, but somehow, the nonsense comes together to equal more than the sum of its parts.

For example, in the Don Cheadle episode, we get to see Cheadle--a 10 handicap and Academy Award nominee--take some swings on a golf course and answer questions about acting, but we also get to see him in skits where he poses as a judge for a stand-up comic job for which Feherty auditions (with purposefully terrible jokes).  And we get to see Feherty go on a goofball man-on-the-streets interview series based on some mythical confusion between Cheadles and Cheetos.  We also get to hear Feherty tell a story (and storytelling is his true forte) about the late Payne Stewart sneaking a groundhog into Feherty's hotel room. It's insanity, really.

But the kicker is that in every show, in the midst of all this lunacy, Feherty plugs into what I call the "Fourth Dimension of Clowning."  Here's the theory: if you get an audience laughing enough at ridiculous humor, the laughter breaks down their defenses and provides a perfect space into which you can drop a bit of wisdom.  The wisdom then connects on a deeper level because it's unexpected and a bunch of undefended space has been cleared by the laughter.

In Feherty's case, his sophomoric inanity lulls the audience into a relaxed availability without expectation of anything deeper, more heartfelt.  And that's when Feherty pops the trap door from under his audience by throwing out something profound that resonates at a more powerful level.  In the Cheadle episode, it's the aching, bittersweet love for daughters who will eventually leave home.  In the Trevino episode, it's Feherty describing the turning point in his battle with booze.  In the Watson episode, it's the two of them discussing their deep friendship and mutual struggles with alcohol. 

Each of these vulnerable, poignant moments comes after you've watched much and varied silliness.  Somehow the silliness preps you and enriches these moments.  Such is the modus operandi of the wise fool Feherty.

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#179. Let's Go to the Movies!

Photo by Jerese

The trend these days seems to be turning golf books into movies.  The film adaptation of Michael Murphy's novel Golf in the Kingdom will make its world premier on July 29 in New York City.  Seven Days in Utopia, based on David L. Cook's novel Golf's Sacred Journey: Seven Days at the Links of Utopia, opens September 2. Even John Richardson's Dream On: The Challenge to Break Par in a Year is supposed to be turned into a film later this year.

Golf movies are nothing new, of course, but what I especially like about Golf in the Kingdom (as a novel and presumably as a movie too) is that it involves a mystical mentor (in this case, Shivas Irons) and a golfer who isn't a pro.  I love Steven Pressfield's The Legend of Bagger Vance as a novel (and I like the movie pretty well too) but it, along with Golf's Sacred Journey and Kjell Enhager's Quantum Golf : The Path to Golf Mastery, all involve mystical gurus and students with perfect swings who are head cases.  Sure, we can learn plenty from the masters in each of these books, but most of us have a long way to go on the physical and mental/spiritual aspects of the game.  That's why it's comforting to see guys like Michael Murphy and John Richardson working on both parts of their games: Murphy in the fictional world of Scotland with the mythical Shivas Irons, and Richardson in the real world of Northern Ireland with a live teaching pro plus a host of books and videos by mental/spiritual golf teachers as well as golf pros who focus on technique. (Richardson is a man after my own heart.)

This brings me back to my recurring beef: why aren't there more golf pros out there who focus on swing AND spirit?  Obviously the PGA is no help here.  PGA pros don't focus on the mental side of the game when they qualify as teaching pros.  The PGA concentrates its mission on technique.  A friend of mine in the industry speculates that this mechanical focus isn't just the PGA's fault, though.  He claims that most of their teaching professionals wished at one time (or still wish) to be successful tour players and didn't make the cut, not because they didn't have great mechanics, but because they had head problems that they didn't address at the time and don't want to confront now.  In other words, they're repressed.

I don't know if that's right or not, but I do know that the PGA pros aren't very friendly to performance coaches who want to teach swing at their golf clubs.  It's a turf issue. The industry is set up to keep swing coaches and spirit coaches as far apart as possible, even though we all need good mechanics and a good mental/spiritual set-up every time we swing a club. Of course, given a choice between swing coaches and spirit coaches, I'd pick a Bagger Vance or Shivas Irons every time.  Those guys know about both.  Unfortunately, they only exist on the page or the big screen. Sigh.

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#178. Dave Stockton on Putting and Pressure

"When you're getting ready to putt,  you don't want to try to make it.  You wanna just roll the ball.  I mean, as soon as you try anything in life, try not to 3-putt--try to do something in golf especially--it's not gonna work. . . . If you don't care if it goes in, that's the chance you'll usually make it every time."
--Dave Stockton, winner of the 1970 and 1976 PGA Championship

Rory McIlroy started working on his putting with Dave Stockton between this year's Masters and U.S. Open.  Recently Dave Stockton's Putting Instruction, an iPhone app, jumped from $.99 to $3.99.  Supply and demand, eh?  I bit. First, though, I listened to Stockton's Youtube video below and was taken in by his Yoda-like advice about not trying.  Stockton takes it a step farther than Yoda, though, by suggesting that you totally detach from the result.  In other words, you'll putt better if you don't care whether you make the putt or not. I suspect there's a connection here between control and caring/trying/efforting your way through the putt vs. surrendering once you've completed Stockton's set-up (including no practice strokes, which could also be connected to control).

Interestingly, this detachment seems the opposite of Jack Nicklaus' advice to Rory before the U.S. Open: “He said he always put a lot of pressure on himself,” McIlroy said. “He expected himself to play well. He expected himself to be up there all the time. And he said to me, ‘I expect you to do the same thing.’”

I cringed when I heard Nicklaus' advice, but I sunk into Stockton's like a jacuzzi on a cold night.  Rory seemed to thrive on both.  It's tricky: expectations, effort (what Stockton calls trying), and pressure.  Stockton himself has expectations about putting: "I expect it to go in, but I'm not going to extend and try to make the ball go in the hole. If you try to make any shot in golf, let alone a putt, and you try extra hard cause it means something, it's not gonna work."  He expects it to go in, but he doesn't put any pressure on himself, and he isn't going to get attached to the result.

So, is the Stockton advice (including more technical suggestions in the app videos) helping my putting?  So far, so good . . . on the practice green. I'm definitely more confident and sinking more putts.  I'll let you know how it translates to the course this weekend.

Some people thrive on the kind of self-induced pressure Nicklaus is talking about, but I bet a lot more of us would benefit from Stockton's advice to ease off and care less, surrender more. McIlroy's a freak of nature.  He can do it all.

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#177. True Surrender

Photo by DAVID2_03

Once you start into this idea of control vs. surrender, things get murky.  Surrender to what, for instance?  I used to surrender to the Evil Caddie, to my anger on the golf course.  Obviously, that's not a surrender worth pursuing.

I've been wondering if maybe control is a normal stage on the way to true surrender.  (I'm calling the kind of surrender I'm looking for--surrender to the universe, to consciousness, to the Force, to the unity beneath the surface of separation, to God, etc.--"true surrender" for the time being.)  I'm not discounting the possibility of leapfrogging control and going right to surrender though grace or intent, but it seems that a lot of us have a need to control our minds before we're capable of true surrender.

My friend Stick says that if I'm thinking about control vs. surrender, then I'm not really surrendering, and surely he's right.  If I'm thinking about anything very hard, I'm not surrendering.  I wonder if I would write this blog if I truly surrendered?

Every day I'm watching my brother struggle with this battle between control and surrender at the Hospice House.  He's been here 20 days, a long time by Hospice House standards, and he's still intent on controlling things within his grasp.  At this point, that includes, for example, instructing doctors and nurses about what drugs he wants to take--more Atavin, no more steroids. Usually Hospice House patients control only their morphine pumps.  He also gets to control what he puts in his mouth--a bite or two of pizza, a donut, a Funyun, a candy bar.  But he's lost control of whether or not the bites go down or stay down.  He's chasing a new vomiting world record . . . it's hard to let go of the foods you love most. He can still control (up to a point) what people do for him--nurses, family, friends--what they bring him, what they do to help him plan his funeral or the dispersion of his things.

Life has taken a lot of things out of his control, though, forcing his surrender.  He said to me the other day, "I can't believe this room is it. This is all there'll be." It's not that he doesn't know he's going to die.  He does, at least most of the time.  But surrender just hasn't been part of his vocabulary.  People praise him for not going gentle into that good night.  He's a fighter, a survivor.  But he will lose the fight; he will not survive.  This is true for us all.

My brother is moving toward surrender, not because it's his goal, not because he he has much experience with it, but because surrender is sucking him into its magnetic field.  Our culture teaches us precious little about surrender. Sure, it forces our surrender to, say, education.  We learn to sit quietly in our seats and regurgitate material, but that's just surrender to authority, only marginally different from surrendering to the Evil Caddie--one external, one internal, but neither true.  Our culture doesn't value true surrender, but life does.

I wonder, though, if we don't have to control first in order to confront the limitations of that control before we become good candidates for surrender, on the golf course or in life.

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#176. What demons?

Photo by kiteboymm

I don't know what part was control and what part was surrender, but it sure was a joy to watch Rory McIlroy romp at the U.S. Open this weekend.  What a great kid!  I loved what Jack Nicklaus said about him: "He's humble when he needs to be humble, and he's confident when he needs to be confident."  Golf or no golf, we could all wish for that balance.

From the BBC, check out this interview with Rory when he was nine years old.

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#175. Go, Rory, Go!

By Jar105_2009

Oh, man, I can't wait to see how Rory McIlroy plays in the third and fourth rounds of the U.S. Open.  The PGA elite must be clinking highball glasses over the first and second round scores with McIlroy at 11 under, 6 strokes ahead of Y.E. Yang.  McIlroy's run at his first Major championship this weekend may be just what golf needs to derail its Tiger obsession. I sure would love to see Rory exorcise the demons from his Masters' debacle and win at Bethesda.  In any case, it'll be a privilege to get to watch how he handles the pressure.
 _______________________________

I've been thinking more and more about this idea of controlling the mind vs. surrendering on the golf course.  Most sports psychologists focus on controlling the mind and emotions in order to control the body, and I think that can be extraordinarily helpful to someone's golf game, at least up to a point.  My primary motivation, though, has been to work on my spiritual life.  Golf is just a vehicle for that, and I've long assumed that any growth in my spiritual life will translate into more fun and better performance on the golf course.  At some point, though, control becomes antithetical to spiritual growth.  Surrender becomes much more important. The Northern California spiritual teacher Adyashanti puts it this way: "We've been taught that to come to that natural state of consciousness, we must learn to control or discipline ourselves. And what I'm saying in some sense is just the opposite.  We come to the natural state by letting go of control, letting go of effort, and resting, resting from control, resting from effort in a state of vividness."

Adyashanti here is talking about "true meditation," but he would agree that all of life can be a "true meditation," so why not practice on the golf course?  I've been mulling over exercises that are more about surrender than control. The Magic Triangle, for instance, seems to be mostly about surrender.  When it works, something else is controlling the speed and direction of the putt.  The only part that has to do with control is focusing on the target and imaginatively drawing the lines.  Printer Bowler says that there's even a shortcut to that that works for him: "Instead of visualizing the whole triangle (after you’ve practiced that way for awhile), try just shooting a beam at the target and lighting it up."  Either technique is a way of focusing then releasing, controlling just a bit, then surrendering totally.  And it's clear that it only works with total surrender.

The truth is, my putting lately has been lousy.  I had three 3-putts on my 40 back-nine last week and three 3-putts on my 42 front-nine on Thursday. Something has shifted and fear is interfering with the Magic Triangle.  I haven't quite been able to let go of each putt because on some level, I'm scared I'm going to flub it.  It's not the Evil Caddie, ragging on me about my putting.  It's deeper and more subtle than that, not quite a thought but a tiny wave of fear that short-circuits the magic of the triangle.

I'm culturally conditioned to move toward control when I'm afraid.  What I want is to rewire myself so that a ripple of fear reminds me to let go instead of contract.  On a muscular level, if we pay attention, most of us can feel our bodies contract when any fear or tension is present.  Right now, I have to recognize the fear/contraction, then manually relax though breathing or other tricks that help but don't completely work.  In any case, this seems like a lot of control.  I hope that one day,  when a ripple of fear moves through, it will automatically trigger surrender to the fear, awareness of it till moves on its own. Then the Magic Triangle will have a clear frequency.

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#174. Back on the Golf Course: Losing Control

Legends Golf Course

The one-year deadline for this project has come and gone, and I just don't feel done.  I'm adding on the summer months due to time on the DL and too darn many people dying in the last year.  Plus I have a sweet deal at Legends Golf Course in Clermont where for $199 I can play as much golf (with cart) as I want after 4 pm for no additional fees until October.  The Twilight Pass also gives me 2-for-1 range balls.  If you don't mind the heat, Florida summer golf is awfully cheap.

I took a hiatus from the game to get a little more grounded, but I've been back on the course regularly for the last week and a half, playing or practicing.  Golf can be a good respite from the vigil at the Hospice House for my brother.

For much of the last year, I've worked hard at controlling my mind on the golf course: banishing the Evil Caddie and learning to relax with the help of hypnosis, meditation, and breathing.  Largely it's worked.  I control my mind reasonably well, infinitely better than I did last June.  I got a great compliment from my friend Scott recently: "You have a calming effect on me when we play golf.  When I play with others, I too often get much too competitive and I push myself to play beyond what I am capable of."  Nice to hear.  I don't think any of my golf buddies before the Hole-In-Oneness project would've said or thought that, so I'm happy that controlling the mind has led to a much more relaxed state.  I even shot an 89 last week, breaking 90 for the first time and shooting a 40 on the back nine, so my scoring also seems to be slowly improving.

Here's the rub, though: I don't think true spiritual development is about control.  I think it's about surrender.  So part of my focus this summer is the transition from controlling my mind and body to surrendering my mind and body.  See, I've long had this feeling that Awareness/Consciousness/God/the Universe--whatever your preference--WANTS to play golf. Why? I have no idea. But I think It needs body/mind donors to make it happen. It needs surrender. I am reminded of the verse by the 14th century Persian poet Hafiz:

     "I am a hole in a flute
     that the Christ’s breath moves through–
     listen to the music."

It wants to play through . . . any of us who will surrender.

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#173. Heavy Gravity

By vitoco1072

Sorry for the blogging silence. Heavy gravity has taken charge.  Since my last entry, my brother is now in Hospice care, Seve Ballesteros has succumbed to brain cancer at 54, and an ex-beau of mine has died unexpectedly at 61. Whole blog entries aren't currently bubbling forth, and my golf game lags. Until writing and golf return--soon, I hope--I pass on to you . . . "The Matador":

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