valid instruction derived from experience can help me if it guides me to my own experiential discovery of any given stroke possibility.

understanding the swing, and remembering its feel, is like remembering a single picture. The mind is capable of that, and can recognize when one element in one picture is slightly different from another.

place and give the plant the care it needs at each stage of its development. The rose is a rose from the time it is a seed to the time it dies. Within it, at all times, it contains its whole potential. It seems to be constantly in the process of change; yet at each state, at each moment, it is perfectly all right as it is.

Always looking for approval and wanting to avoid disapproval, this subtle ego-mind sees a compliment as a potential criticism. It reasons, “If the pro is pleased with one kind of performance, he will be displeased by the opposite. If he likes me for doing well, he will dislike me for not doing well.” The standard of good and bad had been

Clearly, positive and negative evaluations are relative to each other. It is impossible to judge one event as positive without seeing other events as not positive or as negative. There is no way to stop just the negative side of the judgmental process. To see your strokes as they are, there is no need to attribute goodness or badness to them.

No matter what a person’s complaint when he has a lesson with me, I have found that the most beneficial first step is to encourage him to see and feel what he is doing—that is, to increase his awareness of what actually is. I follow the same process when my own strokes get out of their groove. But to see things as they are, we must take off our

I learned how effective the remembering of certain sounds can be as a cue for the built-in computer within our brains.

“No teacher is greater than one’s own experience.”

I used to think that whatever was present in that state would leave me, was ephemeral. Now I know that it is always there and it is only I who leave.