Category: Uncategorized (So Far)

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?

400,000 is a guess for how many words I’ve drafted since I started the Free Refills Project in earnest. I’m proud of that. The stacks of printed-out pages serve as tangible evidence that I’ve been showing up and showing up and showing up.

I’ve run into an unexpected downside. Having written that much volume on such a panoply of topics, I can no longer remember if I actually wrote on an idea, or simply told myself I should write on it. At the start of the project, I wasn’t very deliberate about where I saved my files, so sometimes a keyword search doesn’t easily find the answer. My print-outs contain mysteries.

As problems go, I far prefer this to my previous problem: “I haven’t written seriously in a year-and-a-half. Do I still get to call myself a writer?”

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.

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.

Happy Autumnal Equinox! Free Refills Season 7 starts today.

I’m making a bit of a change to the flavor of the rules for this season. Switching gears too frequently between drafting and revising can get a little draining. I’d like to shift toward an approach in which I can take a more expansive view of my drafting, allowing movement towards longer-form writing. So I’m making a small change in how I measure my drafting quota. Instead of needing to complete 5,000 words per week, my quota will now be cumulative: I’ll need to complete 5,000 words by the first week, 10,000 by the second, and so on. This means I can get ahead, but I can’t fall behind. If during some week I get way ahead on my quota, good for me. Then I can choose to focus on other aspects of writing for a while, or I can push and get further ahead.

In 2017, I’ll extend that approach to the whole year. There are 50 writing weeks during the year (I’ll continue taking the two weeks around the winter solstice as a period of rest), so that means 250,000 words total during the year. (250,000 is such a lovely round number, don’t you think?) Again, I can get ahead, but I can’t fall behind.

Why am I not allowed to get behind and catch up? Here’s why: I still have anxiety dreams in which I’m in school, and it’s the night before the final paper is due, some big 30-page paper demanding a great deal of research, and not only have I not started writing, I haven’t even opened the books that I need to read to begin the writing. I have no desire to experience something like that in real life. I won’t be waking up some morning in November of 2017 realizing that I’ve got 200,000 words to write between then and the end of the year. No thank you.

For Season 7, my publishing schedule will stay the same.

A couple of times in the iterations of these guiding rules, I’ve talked about doing under-the-hood work on Free Refills in order to bring the site more in line with my long-term vision of what I’m trying to accomplish here. This has proved quite challenging. My vision has been like a grand thing seen at a great distance: I know it’s there, and I know it has substantial size and shape, but I can barely make it out through the haze. Sadly, this means that I’ve done nothing beneath the hood at all. (Way to follow my own rules, eh?)

Well, over the past couple of months, the haze has cleared out substantially. I still don’t know exactly what this thing is supposed to look like, but it’s getting clearer. I can at least begin to do some of that work. Anyway, it’s too important to put it off anymore, notwithstanding any lack of clarity–I’ve got to find the clarity through the work itself. I’ve stated this as a rule several times during the life of Free Refills and haven’t done anything about it, but it’s time for that to change. I don’t want to make myself a liar another time.

Once again: Happy Autumnal Equinox! Enjoy the change of seasons, and start thinking SNOW.

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 our conversation about setting down things that are heavy, I asked Jerry about my writing, because these days sometimes my writing, particularly my rule about daily publishing, feels like a burden. He said, “You’re a teacher now. Do whatever you need to do to support your teaching.”

I am a teacher? Present tense?

Jerry said, “You’ve taught me (and others) writing. You’ve taught skiing. You’re teaching centering. And you’re called to teach. You’re a teacher.”

Okay, then. I’m a teacher.