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“…When you throw a ball to me, without thought, my hands go up and catch it, When a child or animal runs in front of your car, you automatically apply the brakes. When you throw a punch at me, I intercept and hit you back, but without thought. ‘It’ just happens. ‘It’ is the state of mind the Japanese refer to as “mushin”, which literally means ‘no-mind’. According to Zen masters, mushin is operating when the actor is separate from the act and no thoughts interfere with the action because the unconscious act is the most free and uninhibited. When mushin functions, the mind moves from one activity to another, flowing like a stream of water and filling every space.”
“And how does one attain this state of no-mindedness?”, I asked.
“Only through practice and more practice, until you can do something without conscious effort. Then your reaction becomes automatic.”
Bruce Lee, speaking to his friend and student Joe Hyams in Hyams book, Zen in the Martial Arts.
Teaching in the winter in Baltimore means indoor lessons, which means hitting balls into a net. When ball flight is eliminated as a focus of attention what is left is technique and the sensations aroused by technique, which is feel. Using the video, the student and I can analyze the student’s swing, and, because there is no “shot” to distract us, I can get the student to tune into just how his body is accomplishing or failing to accomplish the movements necessary to swing the golf club and strike the golf ball effectively.
What then becomes readily apparent is that the golf swing is COMPLICATED. I realize that uttering this is heresy, but there it is, I said it. And I defy anyone to prove to me otherwise. Before the use of video cameras an instructor could get away with using a fluid, relatively advanced and correct swing as an example of the simplicity of the swinging motion. And yes, when it is done correctly, the swing does appear to be graceful, economical, simple.
“Back and through, that’s right, shift that weight, nice and easy, back and through. Oops, you picked up your head a little bit. Now, turn that left hand over a little bit…there you go, now you’ve got it. Just don’t think too much and you’ll be all right.” But did anyone ever really get to be “all right” with this kind of instruction? For too long the average player has been cheated out of a chance to improve their games by instructors too lazy to study the golf swing and too contemptuous of the students intellectual abilities to try to explain how the thing works. The golf swing motion is complicated in that there are a large number of items to remember in order to perform the movement properly. But, and this is a very large but, in spite of the sheer number of things to remember, none of these items need to be confusing, nor does the movement as a whole need to be confusing, because it all fits together and makes wonderful sense.
Now, don’t get me wrong. I’m not blaming the overall poor level of understanding and performance of the game of golf on the teachers of the game. There are good teachers, and there are not so good teachers. Much of the fault lies with lazy students who demand that the teacher keep their instruction simple, and when the teacher tries to add an element or tie a couple of elements together he gets an immediate cry of “ooh, that’s too complicated”. You can add the whining voice to that statement. I am convinced that the vast majority of people who try to play the game, and maybe I’m hopelessly optimistic, are intelligent and can handle more than one concept at a time. If you come to me for a lesson, I’m going to make you think. I’m not going to tell you everything about the game, I’m going to ask you questions about how you are already thinking about it, and I’m going to drag your answers out of you and make you use your brain a bit. If you think that you can learn the game without thinking, you may as well just quit. The game is a thinking man’s game. When you fully understand how you swing now, how your swing differs from a fairly flexible model, how you should practice to approach that improved version of your swing, and how you can make that swing happen under whatever pressure you are facing, then , going back to Bruce Lee’s quote regarding “mushin”, with lots of practice, you can try to eliminate most conscious thought form your game.
So do you have to think about all of this stuff while you are standing over a ball, too petrified to swing? Of course not. In a previous article I laid out how I prefer to condense my swing work into two simple swing keys which run through my mind like a song just before I swing to remind my body what it is trying to accomplish.
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