[From Saniel: I sent this to a friend who sent an audio of a traditional chant to the Guru on “Guru Purnima,” July 7, the traditional “full moon of the Guru” celebration day in India. The friend, also a client/student, had written that he wanted to honor Linda and me on that day, and had also, since he is “his own guru,” spent the day playing the chant over and over to himself. I’ve edited it a bit for publication on the blog.]
Only now listened all the way thru…that was Krishnadas, yes? Beautiful.
Thank you so much for sending it.
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[Note: At some point we’ll resurrect my golf site, honestswinggolf.com, and move this particular blog over there entirely. For now, I’ll leave it here at sanielandlinda.com.]
I’ve had a couple of mornings on the course recently that I’d mostly rather forget, if I look at them with an eye to either performance or enjoyment. But the learning … good stuff.
(That’s the Tim Gallwey “Inner Game” triad: Performance, Enjoyment, Learning. I think any of us who steps onto a course without a balanced desire to enhance our game in each of the three arenas is missing a whole lot of what The Game offers.)
What I had a chance to experience—more than I wish I had!—is what I’m coming to call “Golf Shock.” It relates to things I’ve been ruminating about in the aftermath of this summer’s U.S. Open at Winged Foot in New York, where Tiger Woods for the first time ever as a pro missed the cut at a major, and Phil Mickelson treated the entire cosmos to one of the most appalling, deeply disappointing chokes in Earthly golf history.
In our spiritual and psycho-emotional work with clients, my wife Linda and I and the teachers I’ve trained address what we call the “broken zones” of everybody’s psyche. A serious discussion of broken zones could go on and on. I’ll spare us. The essence of what we mean is this: they’re “broken” in the sense that when a person tumbles into one of them, his basic feeling of identity suffers a sharp, severe discontinuity from his ordinary, everyday sense of who he is. Suddenly he’s in another, very weird and extremely uncomfortable world. People describe how it feels to be in these psychic zones with intense terms: “shattered,” “drowning,” “knocked back,” “miles away,” “spinning,” “no ground underneath me,” “burning alive,” “freezing up,” “being strangled,” “can’t feel anything,” and so on.
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