Patanjali On My Mind

Patanjali on My Mind

A while ago I decided to work with yet another routine for my golf game, one that’s built on the ideas of intention and attention. The basic concept is that the intention one has for a round, if conscious and committed to, will determine what one pays attention to on the course. It’s probably the echo of a thought planted by Fred Shoemaker years ago. But one idea that crept in has a much longer echo – in fact, more than two millennia.

Being married to a wonderfully talented yoga teacher, I’ve been exposed to Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras, the seminal work of yoga philosophy. And one Sutra in particular has been meaningful for me as a golfer – sthirasukhamasanam. It’s a Sanskrit term that means, generally, the posture is firm and soft. It suggests the idea of being present in one’s body with firmness and physical stability but also with presence, attention and mental stillness. There is the idea of softness and ease in adapting the posture to one’s physical capabilities without force or excessive will, unlike fruitless hours spent bashing balls on the range trying to find that perfect, repeating golf swing. In another interpretation, stirasukhamasam means that firmness is the opposite of physical agitation and ease is the opposite of suffering. Firmness and softness are both physical and mental, and no yoga posture is real unless the two qualities are present together.

I can’t be sure whether this was a true insight into my game or a swing tip that was just more esoteric than most. But it energized me, and I did create an intention to play “firmly and at ease”  This intention had both physical and mental qualities for me. To be firm physically was to be precise in alignment, feeling of the swing, trust in the swing – all the components of the pre-shot routine. To be at ease physically was not to try too hard, to let the swing “unfold” without hurry, to be committed to the strategy. At the same time, to be firm mentally meant adhering to my routines, while being at ease mentally meant to observe rather than judge, to be present for learning rather than insistent on fixing.

So, being “firm and at ease” became my mantra – I would literally stand over the shot and say “firm and at ease” to myself. The result was the best round of competitive golf I’d played in 18 months, and one of the most satisfying. I think I would have been just as happy even if I hadn’t won my match. Valuable? Enduring? In truth, these ideas have a whole lot more staying power than the swing tips I got recently from Golf Digest and are a whole lot more relevant to my life. Isn’t that what play and exploration in golf should be about?

Hilton Tudhope believes that, for the fascinated mind, “golfing” and “learning” are synonyms. He is a corporate communications professional based in Carmel, CA. His essay, Golf at an Undisclosed Location, will appear in Issue 4 of “The Journal of the Shivas Irons Society.”