Speaker 1: Hello.
Speaker 2: I'm Josh Crockett from Oregon City, Oregon, and I play
at Stone Creek Golf Course.
Speaker 1: Welcome to Golf Smarter. Hi.
Speaker 2: This is Bob Lawiki from Westernville, Ohio, and I play
at Darby Creek Golf Course. This is Golf Smarter number
one thousand and twenty seven.
Speaker 1: The essential difference between a mindful state of mind and
a chaotic state of mind is called meta awareness. Meta
awareness would be imagine that your normal consciousness is the
flashlight beam. Imagine there's a smaller flashlight bolted to the
big flashlight, and the purpose of the beam of light
coming from the small flashlight is to always focus on
where the big flashlight beam of light is focusing. So
you always know where am I paying attention right now
in this moment, And if it turns out you're paying
attentions in a bad place, a place that could trigger
a yet for example, or a flinch or just a
poorly time release. If you recognize my mind goes to
a place that then triggers a breakdown in the mind body,
or just a bad swing is a result when my
mind wanders off, knowing that that mind wandering off is
the main cause or even the only cause of a
bad swing can be of great help because now you
have the opportunity to learn from your mistakes.
Speaker 2: Rules of the road to understanding how consciousness works in
creating a better mental game.
Speaker 1: With Jim Waldron. This is Golf Smarter, sharing stories, tips
and insights from great golf minds to help you lower
your score and raise your golf IQ. Here's your host,
Fred Green.
Speaker 2: Welcome back to the Golf Smarter podcast.
Speaker 1: Jim, thanks man, really appreciate being here for my one
million appearance.
Speaker 2: That's always the beginning of these episodes, like figuring out
how many times Jim Waldron has been. It's probably in
the thirty something range. I think we discussed the last time.
Speaker 1: Somebody's going to remember.
Speaker 2: That's the number of the tounds familiar to me. Yeah,
it's interesting. We didn't do thirty six holes. But you know,
but but since the beginning of our podcast time, you've
become quite prolific, and you've done more than thirty seven
podcast episodes with a lot of people, haven't you.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I'm getting invited pretty much. I get at least
about one invitation a week the last year, from some
really interesting ones, including kind of what we're going to
talk about today. There's a whole other sub genre in
the podcast world that you may not be familiar with,
but has to do with people who are interested in
the nature of human consciousness. So there's a consciousness community
on the Internet.
Speaker 2: And then there's golf consciousness community.
Speaker 1: No, there's not really a golf conscious there's more what
you've been doing. There's a golf mental game community. But
what I wanted to talk about this is kind of
this is kind of a main thing that I've been
interested in, not just as a golf coach for the
last forty years I've been doing it, but even since
I was a very young child, I was always fascinated
by the nature of consciousness, and I want to go
in I think that would be a good topic today
because I think the big critique I have of traditional
mental game instruction in sports psychologies particular even just general
you know, Western psychotherapy, is it's too much based on
what I call Shuldhism, which is the story we tell
ourselves to get ourselves sort of what to get our
mind wrapped around, you know, the nature of improved psychological performance.
But the big missing link historically has been lack of
actual pragmatic execution. Yeah. Do that makes sense? Yeah? Yeah?
And you know the word should have could it right? Yeah? Yeah.
I mean everybody kind of knows. If anybody who's been
a golf mental game podcast junkie like you and me,
we're all kind of saying the same thing. You know.
The experts are pretty much in agreement on the major
points about what the ideal psychological state is. Right. The
question is how do you go from a very anxious, nervous,
stressed out, neurotic psychological state to a calm, emotionally stable,
confident state of mind. And that's the part where I
think traditional approaches are sorely lacking because they don't understand
that the essential nature of consciousness and good for us,
there is a body of knowledge that's been around for
twenty five hundred years, which is the Buddhist tradition. The
Buddhists were the original, were the world's original psychotherapists, and
it's the entire Buddhist tradition when it comes to trying
to understand or explain the nature of the human mind,
is based on empirical observation. It's not based on theory,
meaning Buddhist monks spend sixteen hours a day in the
meditative state of mind, and when they're dreaming, a lot
of them practice something in the West is called lucid dreaming.
They're meditating when they're dreaming. So these are people who
spend the bulk of their day observing how the mind works. Right,
So we can learn a lot from that tradition, especially
the mindfulness aspect of it.
Speaker 2: You know, I'm distracted in the sense that you know,
the Buddhist monks don't play golf. That it's easier, I
have found for me. And this has been a tough
year for me for golf because I've not played as
much as I like to play, because we've just been
busy with family and travel and blah blah blah. And
so I have found for me that when things aren't
going well on the golf course. But let's put it
this way, when things are going well on the golf course,
it's very easy to get into a positive, flowing state.
But when you know, as the round progresses and you
have an issue that becomes reoccurring, whether it be missing
three foot putts multiple times, whether it be chunking off
around the fringes of the green, which is my issue.
Speaker 1: And I work on it.
Speaker 2: I work on it, and I work on it, and
I feel really good and confident and positive, and I
go to the golf course and I hit it eight inches.
I mean it's like I just chunk behind it. So
when that happens multiple times, it's very difficult to calm
yourself down, to get into a like, oh, just like,
look at the trees, appreciate where you are, feel grateful,
just breathe, I mean, all those things I do.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah, In fact, it actually makes it worse because
now you have a set of behaviors you're supposed to
be expressing right, and you're utterly failing to do all
that sports psychology recommended stuff. So that makes you feel
even worse. Yes, that's the essential dilemma from a Buddhists
point of view. To keep it real simple, a there's
a type of suffering that human beings experience, which is
sometimes called in the Buddhist tradition secondary suffering or reactive suffering,
which basically means when life presents a problem to you
in the external world, how do you react to that
external world situation can create unnecessary suffering sow is, there's
sort of required or necessary suffering because of the nature
of human existence, right that we don't get our way
all the time, and we don't we don't have one
hundred percent freedom, and we don't have you know, we're
not God's We have limitations that the physical world presents
to us. But then there's how we react to that
type of suffering. The original suffering become turns into reactive suffering,
and then that begs a question, well, is there anything
you can do to lower that reactive suffering? And the
answer is absolutely, from a Buddhist point of view, absolutely
yes there is, which but it means you have to
do the work. You have to do some type of
psychological hygiene practice the way you do physical hygiene terms
of working out or dental hygiene, brushing your teeth. I
believe everybody should be doing at least one form of
daily mindfulness practice just to maintain basic psychological health. Yeah,
pretty important.
Speaker 2: I would think that reactive suffering is just a euphemism
for golf. Yeah, what are you gonna do today? Hey babe,
I'll be back in a couple hours. I'm gonna go
do reactive suffering.
Speaker 1: Yeah, what tells that a lot of money to do it.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and you choose to do this, yes, yes, as
often as I possibly can.
Speaker 1: So I've developed a system that's kind of a step
by step series of principles about the nature of consciousness.
And when people understand that and start to do the work,
that's when I start to see a pretty rapid and
big increase in their psychological performance, whether it's on or
off the golf course. Yeah. And the first one is
the first step, or the first stage, is to understand
the nature of normal consciousness, meaning normal consciousness would be
someone who's never done any type of mindfulness practice, right.
And there's various aspects of normal consciousness, but I'm just
going to go over a couple of the really big ones.
One is random chaos. In Buddhism, that's called monkey mind,
meaning your mind is constantly churning. It doesn't like to
be at rest, it doesn't like to be stable. It
always wants to be moving at pretty high rates of
speak thoughts, entering, leaving judgments, conclusions. There's this constant churning mass.
It's sometimes described as a in Buddhist philosophy, right, like
a like a like a class three rapid river with
different abjects floating in the surface, and you're in the
river and you don't know how to swim. This is
the basic depiction of sort of you know, baseline human suffering,
and you're trying to keep your head above water, and
what do you do to to not drown in the
in the river of suffering and mental chaos? Right, And
so the idea is, uh, there's a way to basically
find a way to basically keep your head above water
so you don't drown, and then eventually learn how to
swim a little bit and then eventually swim over to
the bank of the river, climb climb up on the
bank and sit and watch the river go by. That's
that would be more of a more of an advanced
state of mindfulness practice. You got to start somewhere, and
so that that type of practice in the Buddhist tradition
is called samata or translating from power or censort to English,
that means concentration or narrow focus. Yeah. Okay, So if
you think of if you think of awareness or consciousness,
which is often described not just Buddhist tradition, but most
major religions and systems of psychotherapy will will describe consciousness
as a beam of light. Yeah. And the beam of
light has three sizes or modes, which are a search
light super wide, yeah, and then a medium wide, and
then very narrow. So narrow would be like a like
a quarter inch diameter laser beam. Think of it like
that versus the big mind that super wide would be
like a search light. And so what you're doing in
early stages and mindfulness practices, you switch on narrow mode
by focusing intensely on just one small thing, which we
call the focal point. And there could be any number
of things and golf, it could be the target picture,
for example, or it could be the feeling of grip pressure. Yeah.
In sittying meditation, it's usually feeling your belly move in
and out with your breath. Yeah. The exercise I start
all my students with is a real simple one called
candle flame concentration. So you when you're not stressed and
when you're not tired, you sit in a dimly lit room.
You light a candle, put it on your coffee table,
sit on the couch or the chair, set your phone
alarm for two minutes, and the goal is to simply
pay attention to the flickering candle. Flame without having any
internal psychological reaction to it, and without your mind wandering
off going somewhere else, which you know sounds easy fread,
but it's really really difficult.
Speaker 2: God, God, it would be painful for me.
Speaker 1: Yeah, because again, the essential nature of the monkey mind
is it doesn't like to stay on one thing. It
likes to flip back and forth from one one focus
of attention to another.
Speaker 2: I am very familiar with monkey mind. I live it,
and I'm very familiar with the term because it's very
hard for me to stay focused on anyone, especially you know,
in a short period of time, an intense period of time.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Another aspect of it is when you start to meditate,
not only do you realize you actually have a much
Everybody experiences this, It's universal. Everybody who meditates for the
first week of doing it properly, by the end of
the week they're like stunned at how out of control
their mind is. So I call that your mind has
a mind of its own. It doesn't want to stay focused. Right.
But there's another aspect of normal human consciousness, which is
that we have way less free will or choice than
we think we do. In other words, again, there's an
involunte even though we call it conscious mind, because what
we're talking about is amenable, it's accessible to consciousness, right,
So you can be aware of your thought patterns, for example.
But the fact that you can be aware of what's
going on in your conscious mind sort of mental space,
doesn't mean that you have a high degree of control
over it so very much. So we're human beings. Are
not too dissimilar to the famous Pavlovs dogs experiment where
the dogs were trained, through what's called operate conditioning, to
salivate when they hear a bell ring. Have we heard
of that? So there was real reactive creatures. We're not
primarily rational creatures, which is the big mistake of the
European Enlightenment philosophers who thought we were primarily rational. We're
primarily emotional creatures, and we're primarily storytelling or myth creating creatures.
We're not primarily logical, irrational creatures. So that's the second
thing you realize when you do early stages of mindfulness
practice that you're kind of like the dog. When the
bell rings, you react. So when you triple bogie your
first hole and around the golf and you got about
a one or two minute walk to the next tee.
That's your opportunity to start to start salivating, so to speak,
because you just messed up the first hole, right, So
now you start going to the reactive suffering where you
beat yourself up. You have this intense conversation with yourself
while you're walking to the second tee, right, and that
all that does is make the likelihood of your second
of your key shot on the second hole being as
bad as the first hole that you messed up. Right.
Speaker 2: Yeah, Well, for me, it's like when I when I
have that triple bogie on the front where you watching
me play yesterday, It's like, Okay, that's out of my system.
Speaker 1: Now let's move on. Well, that's the right way to
frame it, correct, That's that's how a Buddhist monkly frame it.
But most people don't do that. They go into what
we call the ego drama and they feed it.
Speaker 2: Right, it's like, oh, this is gonna be a really
long day.
Speaker 1: Oh my god, I can't believe you know.
Speaker 2: It's like they think that that's going to dictate the
rest of the round.
Speaker 1: You could burn you the next five hole. Nobody knows
what's going to happen. Everything. The nature of physical reality,
in fact, it's called the fourth dimension is time. We
live in a three dimensional universe spatially, and then time
is the fourth and the essential nature of time is
this moment has never happened before, it will never happen
in the future. The present moment is completely unique and
at the level of human psychology, the past has no
influence over your ability to perform this shot.
Speaker 2: Well, yeah, I was telling somebody that this week I
was playing and he hit a ball left and he goes,
I do that every time on this whole I'm like,
oh boy, do we have to talk like it has
nothing to do with this shot? Your history has nothing
to do with your next shot.
Speaker 1: Yeah, we call that the myth of psychological momentum. The
physical momentum is real the level of the body, clearly,
the past influence is the present. Be injured yourself, like
I always use. Tony Finow a few years ago to Augusta,
he sprained his ankle in the Wednesday Part three contests.
Somehow he was still able to play and he actually
made the cut, but obviously he didn't play as well
as he could have. So past loses the body, but
it doesn't influence the mind ironically, Fred, unless you believe
it does due to the power of what we call
in psychotherapy the as if principle, or the power of belief.
So if you believe the past has some external, actual,
objective force that's affecting you your ability to perform mentally now,
then ironically it becomes a self fulfilling prophecy. Yeah, but
objectively it doesn't have an influence at all. And yeah,
so those first two steps to read. By the way,
did you know that close to ninety five percent of
people who learn at least classical beginner level Buddhist meditation
quit by the end of thirty days. They don't stay
with it. It has a worse track record than weight
loss programs.
Speaker 2: Wow, from what meditation does.
Speaker 1: Yeah, most people will not get to most average people
will not even make it to thirty days. But the
problem is you don't get the benefit. Generally speaking, you
get almost no benefit until you reach the thirty day mark.
Speaker 2: Well then then doesn't that make sense and why people
believe it's like working for me?
Speaker 1: Yeah? Well no, only that. Again, it's painful to realize
I'm more like a dog reacting to a bell that
tinkling more reactive than I thought I was. I have
less free will, less personal autonomy than I used to think,
and my mind is like, it's like, you know, it's
like the monkey mind thing. I got this out of
control mind. And so it's painful to have those two
insights about the nature of normal consciousness. But it's also
a mistake, obviously in my view, to quit. I think
if you could stick it out and get through the
beginning of the second month, particularly if you're doing sitting meditation,
which is designed to be insanely boring on purpose, if
you can get over that first thirty days, that's when
the magic starts to happen. You get the benefits. Yeah,
and again the main benefit is you start to create
much more mental clarity and much more emotional stability, so
less negativity, less negative emotions, more positive emotions, less stress.
You become less reactive to stressful situations, and you become
much better at the ability to focus your attention. And
that's when the goods things start to happen. In terms
of golf performance.
Speaker 2: Well, and I see that personally. I consider golf and
my swimming, which is my exercise besides walking. Golf courses
is a moving, moving, meditation.
Speaker 1: M yeah, that's right, me too, That's what I do.
Speaker 2: And yeah, and to me, that's the preference I can.
I can move and focus and do that versus just
sitting and staring at a candle right.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, Well candle flame is actually easier than sitting
because the reason why the candle flame is easier for
people is because it's always it's it never flickers the
same way. There's a newness, there's a novelty to the
movement of the candle flame, right yeah, yeah, meditation, And
once you start to focus the sensations coming from your
belly as it moves in and out with your breath,
after you kind of lock in on it, maybe five
or six seconds later, you suddenly realize, well, this is
the same sensation pretty much every time. It's not fundamentally different,
and your mind goes, this is insanely boring. I'm going
to go I'm going to leave my belly and go
up into my head space where the thoughts stream is
and entertain myself by thinking about something pleasant that happened
yesterday or that might happen a week from now. And
the problem with that is then you then you start daydreaming,
you get lost in the thoughsterream, You get lost in
your thoughts, and now you're doing the opposite of what
you should be doing when you're meditating, right, You're you're
feeding the thoughtstream. You're feeding the monkey might when you
do that. So the whole point of it is to
get out of your head, get out of your headspace,
and into your physical body by focusing on the sensations
coming from your body when you're inhaling and exhaling. Right,
But how to learning how to accept boredom and overcoming it,
seeing boredom as it interesting challenge that should be overcome
and not run away from. You know, this constant need
to entertain ourselves is in itself a form of neurosis. Right,
There's never been a more entertainment entertainment industrial complex society
than modern America in the twenty first century. We've we've
got it. We've got a movie theater in our back pocket,
your phone. We can constantly, we can constantly distract ourselves
using the internet, right, yeah, Yeah.
Speaker 2: And And the other thing that I find absolutely fascinating,
since we're very good at bouncing all over the place
on these conversations, the thing that I find really fascinating
is that because of that library movie theater in your
back pocket. Younger generation, I've noticed people I interact with
don't value the elder's experience and wisdom that we've gathered
over decades of life. Yeah, because they're like, well, I
don't need to ask you. I'll just ask Google, or
I'll go on Chad GPT and have a conversation and
get all the wisdom of the world ever recorded in
my answer.
Speaker 1: I won't.
Speaker 2: I don't need your your thoughts anymore.
Speaker 1: Yeah, No, that's a bit. It's a problem socially, it's
a big cultural and social problem. I think we're going
to start to see I think it's already starting to happen.
We're starting to see a little bit of a movement
away from the more toxic aspects of the Internet. Yeah.
I think it's going to keep growing with with AI
coming on strong. But we're gonna see more and more
of a reaction to I hope, maybe not full on
ludite like I've been most you know, but maybe semi ludite.
We'll see, we'll see how it goes.
Speaker 2: Okay, Jim, you allow me always to get to tracted
in topics, which kind of shows you how good I
meditation stuff. So I can't even keep a conversation going
without changing the topic more than once.
Speaker 1: I'm sorry, but we need to make this relate.
Speaker 2: To golfers who are frustrated and struggling.
Speaker 1: Yeah, which is golfers. Yeah, no doubt, yeah and yeah.
So my point of all this is that there's in
a really baseline simple way, when I work with a
new student on some of this mental game and mindful
of stuff, it comes down to do they understand the
difference between the internal world versus the external world? So
this is called I've came up with this theory forty
years ago I called the two worlds theory, which is that, again,
a big part of Buddhism is that we coexist, not
literally simultaneously, but pretty much potentially simultaneously. We live in
two different worlds at the same time. There's the physical
world that science studies, also known as the external world
or also known as reality. Right. Your body is part
of that world, although most people don't think of their
body as part of it. It is that your body
exists in the physical world. Right. Then you have a
private psychological space, sometimes referred to in philosophy as subjective
world or internal world, right, And one of the principles
of the two world theory is that there's a massive
wall of separation between those two worlds. They're literally like
oil and water. They do not mix in reality. Now
there's a subjective belief that they kind of intermingle, but
that's because people who have that belief just aren't paying
attention because they don't meditate. Right. But when you start
to meditate, you realize I can't be in my internal,
private psychological headspace and paying attention to the external world
which flutes my body at the same time. I can
only be one of those two worlds in terms of
my flashlight being, so to speak. Again, if you think
of consciousness as a beam of light coming from a flashlight,
the flashlight beam is either pointed externally on the physical world,
including your body at the level of kinesthetic or feel awareness,
or it's inward and you're paying attention, you're paying to
your private subjective psychological space. Another principle of this, which
is really a big one from the Buddhist perspective is
this might be the biggest one, I think in the
history of Buddhists thought what Buddhism, what the the experience
of Buddhist monks who spend a lot of time what's
studying their mind is is that when you're in your
psychological headspace, paying attentions to thoughts, memories, hopes, fears, fantasies
of the future, forming beliefs, conclusions, mental pictures, all of
that stuff fundamentally that state that psychologie logical stake. Functionally,
this is equivalent to dreaming at night, meaning there's a
made up aspect to it. It's kind of like we
don't need to put a headset on, like the oculus
set set that Microsoft has to go into a digital
simulation world. We have a biological capability to create a
digital so to speak, simulation world, and it's the private
psychological space we're talking about. We already have that. But
from a psychological suffering standpoint, one of the primary reasons
why we suffer psychologically, the secondary, the reactive suffering, is
we take everything that takes place in our private psychological space,
we give it as much credibility as we do the
physical world, and in most people today, they give it
more credibility than the physical world, which is stunning when
you think about it because again, everything that takes place
in that private psychological space has an aspect of what
is called symbolic consciousness. If you think of do you
know anything about art history? Have you ever studied any
art history? No? Okay, So there was a movement in
the early twentieth century. There was a Dadaist movement and
a Surrealist movement in art, and like the famous Salvator Dahali,
you know, the Spanish painter, it looked like dreamscapes. Right.
So the purpose of sort of the social purpose, the
underlying meaning to both the dataists and the surrealistic movement
in art history was to help people wake up, to
differentiate the clear distinction between a symbol compared to the
reality that the symbol points to. And when you're in
symbolic consciousness, there's a conflation between the symbol and the reality.
So you know the old phrase, this was a big
slogan back in the sixties, the map is not the territory. Yeah,
a map is a map. A map is not the
same thing as the actual physical landscape that the map represents,
right right, And a word is not the same thing
as the object in the physical universe. So if I
say the word flower, right, And after I say the
word in my private headspace, I then go into internal
visual mode and I picture a flower. So the word
flower is not the same thing as an actual flower,
and a visual image of a flower in my head
space is not the same thing as an actual flower.
There's there's a fundamental difference between the word flower or
picturing flower and an actual flower. Right. So, anytime you're
talking to yourself, if you're doing what's called verbal thinking,
where you hear your own voice in your head using language,
or anytime you're picturing something in your mind's eye visually functionally,
that's the same thing that happens when you're asleep at night,
when you're dreaming, you're engaging in symbolic consciousness. And in
both cases, when you're dreaming until you finally wake up
and go, oh, I must be having a nightmare, and
then you wake up. But until the moment you sort
of realize I must be dreaming, people don't think of
it as a dream. They think of it as being real,
right when you're in normal dreaming, right and in normal consciousness.
People take everything that takes place in their private psychological
space way too seriously, way too credibly. So Therefore, if
an average person suddenly had a series of very negative
thoughts come into consciousness, like disturbing, highly negative thoughts, they
will react to those thoughts as if the situation the
thoughts are depicting was actually happening right now, when in
the point of fact, they might have happened twenty years ago,
but you'll experience it as being almost as real as
the original of that twenty years ago. But if a
Buddhist monk had a thought of something that happened twenty
years enter his mind, he would think, oh, that's interesting,
I wonder why I'm thinking about that, and then he
would let it go. He wouldn't have any emotional or
psychological reaction to that shain of thought. Zero. Yeah, So
that's kind of where we're going, where we should be going.
I think as metal game coach is more about get
down to the nitty gritty the application, less about the ideal,
more about how do I actually do something pragmatic to
get to the ideal state? Right right?
Speaker 2: I mean, you know, the whole point here, and the
theme of your conversation is understanding how consciousness works to
improve the golf mental game.
Speaker 1: So how do we.
Speaker 2: Reel it back in to our golf game.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah, Well again, it comes down to when you
start to start, when you get your sort of foothold
through some type of daily meditation practice. There's many different
forms of meditation, but as long as you're doing something daily,
you'll start to notice what's called detachment or non attachment
and Buddhist philosophy, which means in the past, when a
negative thought chain would enter your head or a negative
emotion would enter your body, you would start reacting to
it like, oh, I don't like this feeling. I wish
I wasn't feeling scared now on the first ted because
people are watching me, right. But when you meditate on
a regular basis, you may notice those feelings of nervousness
or performance anxiety. But because there's less attachment to the
negative thoughts and the negative emotion, the emotion of fear,
Because you're less absorbed into the negativity, there's a sense
of what is called psychological space between the negative thought
or the negative emotion and your sense of personal identity.
Once you have that sense of space, the intensity level
of the negative thoughts and the negative emotion goes way
down to a more manageable level. Jim, you lost me.
I'm sorry. I don't know where you're going.
Speaker 2: And I and I'm struggling to figure out how to
make this relevant to what I'm struggling with when I'm
playing golf.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I got you. Well, Because again, this is something
you have to experience because otherwise it's just more symbols
that are going in people's ears. Okay, yeah, yeah, okay.
It has to be a lived experience. So when you meditate, right.
Speaker 2: So you're so you're advocating medicaid, medication, meditation and medication maybe,
but you're advocating.
Speaker 1: Meditation. Just take the drugs, need to mas. There we go,
Let's get back to the sixties.
Speaker 2: We had it right the first time.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, it so lives experience. So what I can
just tell you what I can talk about my personal experience,
but I can also many thousands of people I've taught
how to meditate over the last four years. This is
a known thing in the meditation sort of the mindfulness
community that after about a month of doing some form
of daily mindfulness practice, everybody reports this. This is a
universal experience. I feel less wrapped up in my neurosis.
I feel less captured by You know, when people have
a really neurotic mindset, they often describe it as I'm
walking down the street and it's a beautiful sunny day
and next thing I know, a dark cloud passes over,
and the next thing I know, I'm inside a tornado
and there's powerful winds sucking me up into the sky.
With someone's having a very powerful negative psychological experience, both
mentally and emotionally. That's people often describe it as like
being stuck inside a tornado, where the fear, the stress,
the anxiety, the depression, the anger, and all the mental
chaos that surrounds it is so overwhelming that you feel
that you're it's like consuming you, that you're inside of it. Right,
But when you meditate, it's like the tornadoes a mile
away and you're here safe on the side of the road,
and you're noticing the dark clouds and the tornado, but
it's so far away you don't feel threatened by it
because you're not actually threatened by it. That's what happens.
That's called detachment or non attachment.
Speaker 2: Okay, I'm assuming you meditate regularly.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, I've been doing it since I was ten
years old. I'm seventy four and now I've been doing
it for sixty four years. Daily different daily, Yeah, yeah,
not just daily. I do it all the time. For it. Yeah,
I'll just tell you a story about it. But here's
my question.
Speaker 2: And you're gonna plow, You're gonna floor on this one.
Speaker 1: Okay.
Speaker 2: So you're talking about how come all these you're talking about,
how meditation can really help you get through all these
challenging elements of your life and carry you through it.
How come you're you do the exact thing you're saying
not to do whenever you get near your computer.
Speaker 1: Gotcha, Jimmy, that's the game polling effect, right.
Speaker 2: It's like we every time we want to record, it's
like forty five minutes of trying to get you online,
and we just like, forget it. We'll just do this
on the phone like we're doing today. We're just we'll
just make it easy. But you know, you're you're talking
a good game, and then you do this.
Speaker 1: Yeah yeah, No, that's a whole other, that's a whole
that's an apple. That's what's the great the monual compon
call it categorical error. Those are apples and oranges. Okay, totally.
Speaker 2: So I've now, you know, like I've been doing morning
stretch morning yoga for for decades myself, and now just
recently I've started doing this at night before I go
to sleep. I'll do twenty ten to twenty minutes of
yoga just to see if I can fall asleep faster
and stay asleep.
Speaker 1: And it's been helping me a lot. Cool.
Speaker 2: But this is we're not that's not meditation. This is
completely different then it can be.
Speaker 1: Basically, meditation has two main aspects. These are most Buddhist
scholars would agree with you, and we want to say
that and there and they're developmental and their sequential. There's
a sequence to it, which is a get back to
the analogy of the raging river that you're trying not
to drown in. Right, that's the normal state of conscious
So samata practice means narrow focus on one thing or concentration.
The positive practice means your mind's in big mode, super
wide modes. It means it basically means the positive means
big empty mind, but it also means the insights that
you can gain about the nature of consciousness and the
nature of the physical world when you're in that big
empty mind. But my view, and again most scholars would
agree with this, is that you can't learn and you're
kind of wasting your time doing the possitive practice until
you do samata practice first, which narrow focus will eventually
lead to the ability to have a bigger focus, you know,
a wider awareness, but without having chaos, whereas again a
normal consciousness where you haven't done any practice. Most people
most of the time are in medium wide or even
super wide mode, and their mind is full of all
kinds of thoughts and emotions. It's just a casual chaos.
So the analogy in Buddhism again is to the beam
of light. Right, So if you think of a flashlight being,
so consciousness is the being. But imagine that the lens
cover covering you know, where the bulb, where the actual
flashlight bulb is, has got a lot of dirt on it, right,
And so part of Buddhists practice is you're trying you're
trying to make the beam of light brighter and clearer
and stronger by removing the impediments that you know, the
dirt that's covering the lens. Yeah, that's one aspect, and
I'll give you an actual story. My son and I
traveled to northern Burma in twenty twelve. We were doing
a three month trip all throughout Southeast Asia, mainly hanging
out with monasteries with monks, and there were three hermits
living in a cave in the foothills of the Himalaya
Mountains in northern Berner were borders Tibet and one. It
was about an eight mile hike to get up there,
up the mountain trail, but my son tie and we
went up and we hiked up there. I wanted to
talk to him, and I talked to the head guy,
who spoke fluent English, and I said, well, tell me
what the life of a cave monk is like. What
do you guys do all day? And of course I
knew what they do. They read Buddhist scriptures and they
meditate all the time. And I said, well, what do
you like about it? He goes, Jim, Here's the thing,
he goes, I've been a Buddhist monk for fifteen years.
I've been a cave monk for five and the main
benefit of what I do here is I have a
very clean mind. He used the word clean to describe
his awareness, his beam of luck. I mean he's been
working on removing the dirt that's blocking the light right.
Another aspect of it is the ability to have a
measure of control, and this is the most important one
for golfers. You have to be if you want to
play your best, if you want to be good at
the mental game, you have to have the ability to
direct the beam of light where you choose to direct
it and hold it there at least for a few seconds.
That's the skill of focused attention. You have talked to
me and my buddy Carl Morris, we've talked about this
on his podcast. He's been on your podcast talking about this.
Oh yeah, the skill of focused attention. You have to
be able to hold that flash flight in your hand,
so to speak, and hold it on any object. You
put it on a you know, you put it on
target picture, for example, and you hold it there for
a few seconds. And again, with normal consciousness, that's not
a thing you're going to be able to do. With
normal consciousness, You'll start out holding it there and half
a second later, it'll instinctively the flashlight will move in
your hand and go somewhere else, and you'll lose focus.
And that's why the skill of focused attention is so
important in the met game, you know, m So, what
are the rules of the road we've been discussing. These
are some of them. There's there's there's a whole bunch.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, can we build Is it possible to bullet
point this or is it just the long conversation?
Speaker 1: I mean, we started with the two worlds theory. I
think that's probably the You need to be able to
understand that you can't be in the external world. You
can't be paying attention to the external world and your
internal world at the same time. It's either it's one
or the other. That you can't be both right on
the holding the attention one is another big one. The
three sizes, the super wide, the medium wide, the narrow
is another another one which we should talk about. Is
this might be the most important one. Uh. The essential difference,
even more essential than what I already mentioned between a
mindful state of mind and a chaotic state of mind,
is that the modern term we've used that you and
I have talked about this the podcasts called meta awareness.
Meta awareness would be imagine that your normal consciousness is
the flashlight beam. Imagine there's a smaller flashlight bolted to
the big flashlight, and the purpose of the beam of
light coming from a small flashlight is to always focus
on where the big flashlight beam of light is focusing,
so you always know where am I paying where am
I actually paying attention right now in this moment. And
if it turns out you're paying attentions in a bad place,
a place that could trigger a yip for example, or
a flinch, or just a you know, like a poorly
timed tempo or a poorly time release. If you recognize
my mind goes to a place that then triggers some
type of a breakdown in the mind body connection, or
just a bad swing is the result when my mind
wanders off. Right, knowing that that mind wandering off is
the main cause or even the only cause of the
bad swing can be a great help because now you
have the opportunity to learn from your mistakes. But when
someone lacks meta like let's say, let's keep it real simple,
let's someone's the typical golfer mid the high handicapper comes
over the top generally speaking, right, most people do so
that things their path is out to end, and if
they don't compensate by changing the face angle, they hit
the ball left right like a dead pull. If that's
their flaw and they're trying to figure out how to
fix it, but they're not actually aware in the moment
of how it is that their body creates the over
the top move. If they're not aware of it, even
if I show them on video, if I say, Joe,
here's you come on over the top, blah blah blah,
it's just it's just a waste of time. They're not
going to they're not going to learn anything. They're not
going to be able to stop coming over the top.
They have to be aware of how it is in
the moment that the flaw is happening. How is this
flaw manifesting in my body? When you can feel it,
when you can experience the flaw happened with a with
a measure of mental clarity, you know again the beam
of light idea, and you know that you know that
this is how you come over the top, then there's
a chance you can start to break through and stop
doing the flow. Can we talk about some other forms
of practice besides the candlelight? Sure, Okay, you'll like this one.
I think as you mentioned swimming, because I do the
same thing when I every day and twice a day.
When I'm in Hawaii in the winter, I swim in
the Pacific Ocean, and you talk about so I focus
on the feeling in my body of me doing the
breaststroke as my preferred stroke. So I'm I'm literally my
consciousness is feeling my muscles contract and move my arms
and my legs as I'm swimming. I'm not thinking about anything.
I'm feeling the sensations coming from my body doing doing
the swimming stroke. Right. There's some there's a similar one
that's a little bit probably easier to understand, but it's
phoned walking meditation, right, and walking meditation. I always console
my students do like a fifteen minute walk or longer,
but at least fifteen minutes daily around your neighborhood by yourself.
You won't work if you're talking of somebody else, won't
work if you if you have a dog on the leak.
So it's got to be by yourself. But what you
do is every you look at you look at an
object in the fist. So you look at a tree
and you look at it for about two to three
seconds max. And you simply notice the size, tolerant shape
of the object you're looking at. And when I say notice,
I don't mean going internal and hearing a voice in
your head say, oh, that's that's a point. That's a
black trunked pine tree with green needles. That would be
that would be going internal and having an internal reaction.
I mean simply pay attention with your eyeballs, with external
visual and notice into in two to three second time interval,
notice something about the tree, then switch and look at
the next object and look at a car parked down
the street and notice that it's a red camry, and
then look at someone walking towards you. So every two
to three seconds, you're shifting your gaze with your eyeballs
to a different physical object in the world. And the
goal is to stay external the whole time. And this
is why you don't want to look fred for more
than about three seconds, because if you look at any
object for more than three seconds, most people will automatically
go internal and start thinking about the object. Wow, right,
they get triggered by it.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Yeah. If you don't look for more than two to
three seconds, you're less likely to go internal and start
having a thought reaction to the thing you were looking at.
So that's a powerful way to get to get to
kind of get your foot in the door in terms
of mindfulness practice. Yeah. Interesting. Another one is and you
can well you can you can plan going to down
to Baja this year. Are you going down there a
couple of weeks? Oh? Perfect. So if you sit on
this east you sit on the beach, and this is
I call this wave meditation. So you listen to the
sound of the wave breaking on the shoreline, and you're
in this case, you're in one hundred percent external auditory channel,
so you're you're only paying attention to the sound of
the waves crashing with your ears. And of course there'll
be a moment where there's no sound at all, There'll
be an empty space in between the waves, right, so
you'll hear like.
Speaker 2: And then and then one of my all time favorite sounds.
Speaker 1: Yeah yeah, yeah, me too. I go to sleep at
it night because I'm where I live in Hawaii's right
on the beach. Perfect. So that's that's that's using sound
as a as an anchor for your mind. So you're
in narrow focused mode, just paying attention to the sound
of the wave and in the shore. That's another great one,
sort of beginning level of meditation practice mhm uh as always.
Speaker 2: It's balance Point golf dot Com with Jim Waldron and
your website is you've definitely done some work on it.
This is great. I can see that and it lists
all the different podcasts you've been on and will we
golf Sport gets mentioned in there too, you're yeah, but
you also have in your little pro shop area. You've
got a lot of new videos. This is all new
for you.
Speaker 1: No, it's not that new. Haven't talked about it before.
Those have been around. Well, yeah, because you have a
lot of work. The newest one is going to hopefully
be out probably junior July.
Speaker 2: Okay, that's twenty six, Yeah, next year.
Speaker 1: I'm working on short game stuff. But it's I've been
so busy teaching because I have to do some of
the basic editing myself, and then I a student of
mine from New Zealand does he does. He does the
ball of the editing, but I have to kind of
get it lined out for him. I've been so busy teaching,
I had to put it on hold. But I think
I'll have some time starting the spinner to work on it.
So when are you going to retire? You know, I
love what I do so much, Fred, I just the
whole idea of retirement doesn't make sense to me. I
love what I do, and I'm helping people anyway. For the YIPS, Yeah,
I mean I'm getting more and more people with YIPS.
In fact, I've had I've had three people so far
this week contact me with YIPS. It's getting me be
the global pandemics. So between the YIPS stuff and just
general metal game, but I also do a lot of
swing instruction. I do a ton of short game instruction,
short game mechanics, so I've been it's been very, very
busy for sure.
Speaker 2: That's great, buddy, that's great. I'm so happy to hear it. Well,
it's as always, it's great to talk to you. It's
always an education that takes us to places we don't
usually think about when we're playing golf, and I think
this is really important information.
Speaker 1: So thanks man. Yeah, great, Well, thanks for having me on, Fred, really,
and thanks again for having me on for all these years.
I think it was two thousand and five, so this
is a twenty years we've been doing it. Yeah. Pretty cool,
pretty cool journey with you.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and of you as well, my friend yeah, thanks
your friend.
Speaker 1: Mm hmm