I enjoy playtime as a form of healthy self-expression. These days, I like to spend my personal time surfing, and being in nature and in recent years, I’ve grown to love the game of golf. Both give me an experience in nature, exercise, a feeling of playfulness and a challenging pursuit that can tell you a lot about yourself. Suppose anything you do is simply a vehicle for understanding who you are (which is the first truth bomb). In that case, these leisurely activities are layered with landmines for anyone open to learning.
Golf is an excellent example of how the body follows the mind. Where tension in the mind produces tension in the body, blocking the quality of movement and enjoyment in the mind/body connection.
In any evolutionary process, there is what’s missing (knowledge, skill, focus etc) and what’s interfering with a free-flowing performance. What’s interfering is the greatest opportunity for gains and is seldom addressed, quite simply because people don’t want to face what they don’t like about themselves, which is usually a fear of looking stupid or failure. Fear and its offspring (anxiety, pressure, anger etc) is an instinctual response to threat that blocks intellectual and athletic finesse to force fight or flight. Since the only real fear is when you’re actually in present physical danger, this block is unconsciously self-created and self-inflicted. In many cases, it’s our ego’s need to prove itself. Now, the game has become about how it looks to others, not how it feels to you, and we have lost ourselves in the pursuit, not found.
Everybody seems to understand we are at our best when we are calm… Yet the theory rarely evolves into experience, causing endless loops of frustration and despair because we can’t make what we know is intellectually possible, actual. To do this, we actually need to detach from both the ego’s influence as well as the thinking part of the brain and consciously connect to our mind, the deeper part of our being associated with feeling. Here, we find “flow,” free from intellectual (brain-chatter) and egotistical (fear) interference. In mind function, we access mental freedom that promotes finesse in our movement and fun in our expression.
Here are three tips to free your mind and enjoy a more free-flowing performance in any realm.
- Practice Kelee® Meditation daily to access the mind and detach from fear (https://thekelee.com.au/online-classes/)
- Prioritise how you want to feel first as much as how you want to play. I.e., the experience is more important than the result
- Give up control of the future (expectations). We don’t live via what “should have happened”, but we can learn and grow from what is happening