Joe Namath once described the feeling that would at times come over him when he was playing football. He said it was as if the game was being played through him. He could spontaneously move in the right direction and throw to the right spot. Everything would just unfold without any effort, nothing ever going wrong. It was his game, he owed it.
I have heard the same description from musicians. They say that once they start grooving, the music comes through them. This is also the way a song gets written or a poet finds the rigth words. They all would agree that it is something that occurs through them, not to them and never with any effort involved. This is creativity. It is boundless once we learn to tap into it or perhaps it is better said when we get out of the way so that it may tap into us.
The experience of hitting a golf ball without a path of effort would certainly fall into these descriptions of creativity. Though the shot itself may last in its flight, or roll for only seconds, there is a feeling that strikes us to the soul. It has the effect of a stone thrown into the water -- the ripples go on for quite some time. A bad shot has the same rippling effect on us. Our bodies are a mere vessel to store these memories. A few very powerful questions to ask yourself -- what do you do with your memories? And are you an object referral golfer?
To get a better sense of this, there is a story I once heard and I'd like to share. It was about a man that had two things in his life that meant everything to him. They were his son and a pony -- his fortune, if you will. One day the pony left, it was nowhere to be found. The man was devastated. Several days later the pony returned and he had the most incredible white stallion with him. The man was in ecstasy. A few days passed and the man's son was riding on the new white stallion and he fell off. He had broken his leg. The man was deeply saddened by this turn of events. The next day his countryman came by to the town he lived, there was a war that broke out and they came to take all the young men with them to the front lines. All except for the man's son, because he had a broken leg. This made the man happy.
This story exemplifies an object-referral state of being, always at the whim of what is going to happen next. Does this in any way describe the way you feel when you play golf?
The opposite of this is self-referral. I don't have a good story for self referral, but a can tell you that when you are the self-referral golfer you will experience the game playing through you. You don't play from memories because what is in front of you hasn't happened yet and what is in the past really has no bearing on your future unless you let it.
To be a self-referral player is to lose attachment to the outcome of the events and when they happen, lose the need to judge yourself for whatever happens, good or bad. Don't be excepting of yourself. That, in its own way, is a judgment. Just be the watcher. It would be like planting a seed in the dirt. Give it the water and the sunshine and it will turn into a plant, but you can't pull on its leaves to make it grow faster. You just trust that the universe will take care of the details. Same with your golf game. Once you get there you will see how much fun you have by letting it all just be.
For more information, visit 7mythsofgolf.com.
Billy Bondaruk was recently recoginzed as one of the top 9 instructors in Northern California.
