How To Get Yourself To Meditate

We know that meditation is beneficial. It’s hard nowadays to escape the ever present pictures of the smiling Buddha, and the articles praising meditations efficacy, reaching from calming the mind to lowering blood pressure.

But how do we get ourselves to fit yet another chore that’s “good for you” into our schedule?

There are no easy answers, because if you want to turn a blind eye, you will. Just like with going to the gym. Or eating your vegetables.

But those of you who are willing to take a shot at it, there are a few tricks to help push yourself.

First and foremost: Forget that your mind will be quiet. It won’t. It takes many years of consistent practice to come to a place of emptiness of thought.

In the meantime, look at it this way: Your thoughts will not be eliminated, but they will slow down, and that in itself will feel like a relief.

Allow your thoughts to be chaotic. How can we expect perfection without any or little training? We don’t expect it when it comes to our bodies. Or our professional skills. We know that it takes hard work to come to a place of mastery.

But somehow we entertain this illusion that we should be able to control our minds just like that; and when we can’t, we feel bad, and nobody wants to feel bad. So all good intentions go out the window, and there’s not going to be any meditation.

Accept that the mind is busy. When we say “the brain just functions that way” it’s easier to allow this busyness than to think, “I can’t pull it off, I am a failure”.

No one can, when they first sit down.

Be prepared for your mind to trail off, and to lose focus. Over and over and over.

But if you…..

Golf Diet and Nutrition Tips and Ideas

Food is positioned high up on our priority list.

The traditional pie & chips, washed down with a cold beer, certainly tastes great, but it leaves the fitness experts scratching their heads.

There are so many good reasons for a good diet, not least the fact that you will play much better golf.

Golf is less intensive, physically, but more intensive, mentally, than rugby, so the nutritional requirements are completely different. A golfer is expected to have muscular and mental endurance, and needs to concentrate for up to five hours at a time, making sure his muscular posture is consistent.

A good diet for better golf

Follow these tips, given by a registered dietician and enjoy better golf :

• Before a long day on the course, eat a low glycaemic meal (e.g. dairy foods, lentils, legumes, apples & other deciduous fruit, pasta, nuts, high-fibre bran, dried beans), which is easily digested. This will give you sustained energy & prevent the mental & physical ‘low’ that we often feel when we exercise on an empty stomach. If you don’t have an appetite, get hold of a meal-replacement milkshake.
• Eat something every 2 hours while on the course. Make sure you have nuts or raisins in your golf bag to carry through.
• Make sure you have enough water or sports drinks like Powerade or Energade to quench your thirst. Sports drinks are better than water, because they contain fluids, carbohydrates and electrolytes. Avoid alcohol for at least 24 hours before your round. Otherwise, have a good healthy breakfast before your tee-off.
• Before drinking alcoholic drinks after your round, make sure you’ve recovered your sugar levels by eating a sandwich and drinking a non-caffeinated soft drink. Alcohol reduces your blood sugar level and dehydrates you. It also delays the healing process, so if you’re injured, rather stay away from the 19th hole.
• At the halfway house, eat a meal containing carbohydrates and lean protein (e.g. a chicken sandwich.) 

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[VIDEO] The Spirituality in Golf...find your connection

Golf Fitness Tips For Getting You And Your Golf Game In Shape

Mike Pedersen is a golf swing biomechanic, and fitness expert, as well as the founder of his golf swing training site over at PerformBetterGolf.com.

I believe in Mike's principles and that is why I am excited to have him as a guest author on The Golf Swing Genius Website. Golf fitness is a very relavent and important component of playing great golf so Mike will share some of his insights and ideas on how you can get your body and your game more in shape for improved performance on the course.

Golf Fitness: Why You Need To Read This
By: Mike Pederson

If you haven't been under a rock for the past few years, you'll know that golf fitness is a topic mentioned during every televised tournament.

The modern golfer is fit, strong, lean and mean. Long gone are the days of the out-of-shape golfer winning tournaments. No matter what the level.

The recent winner of the Masters, Bubba Watson, like most of the PGA players has a fitness trainer who travels with him when they are on the road playing tournaments.

When you hear the term golf fitness tips, I don't want you to think about the "muscle heads" in the gym, lifting heavy weights, and sweating all over the place.

Instead, I want you to think of simple, easy-to-day, home golf exercises that can be done in a matter of minutes with just a few pieces of affordable equipment.

All you need is some exercise tubing, a pair of dumbbells, and an exercise ball and you're good-to-go!

Another very important facet of fitness for golf is stretching for golf. The senior golfer has lost so much flexibility, they must stretch to regain it if they want to hit it a decent distance as they get older.

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Career Success Tip: The Zen Way

Many young executives like to ask for career success tips. I usually start by saying career success doesn’t come in a day. Yet, day-in day-out I see young people entering the working life pushing themselves as if they will make CEO in a year. They have a tendency to compare their progress with their contemporaries. You should not and must not compare your career success to your contemporaries.

If you ask me, “What is career success?” I don’t have the answer. But, I can give you a career success tip that works for me. However, ultimately only you can answer, “What is career success?” only you can seek. No one can do it for you. It is to be defined by your own values and principles in life. You would have to define what is career success for yourself. It means different things for different people. And it is your career goals.

The first step is to ask yourself, “What is career success?” It is not a question you should mull over daily. You will have to spend time thinking about this. The answer will not come easy. Ask yourself that question, and then let it float in your mind for however long it takes – never force the answer.

Remind yourself this – if your career is a marathon, then it includes the preparation for the race – the warm ups, the stretches, the strength exercises, the stamina building, the constant practice runs. Constant effort is what will eventually get a positive response. And that response is success.

My biggest fear looking at many young first job executives is that a lot of them embark on this marathon and end up hurting themselves. They hurt themselves because instead of warming up and stretching, they sprint. Eventually they end up injured, taking months and years to recuperate.

This is an important career success tip. Your career like many things in life cannot be rushed. You succeed by not rushing nor lazing off. Your career success comes to you when you do not rush yourself through it. But this also means you do not laze off. When you rush you start to be careless.

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Golf Psychology Tips: The Secret to Your Success

So here’s the article you’ve been waiting for – I’m finally going to tell you the secret golf psychology tips you’ve been looking for all this time… Actually, no, sorry, I’m not. It’s not that I don’t want to, it’s just I’m not the expert you need. You see, I don’t know how you like to learn best or prepare for your best rounds. I don’t know how you like to play your best golf. I don’t know what makes you happy or confident or focused. I don’t know how you experience riding your “zone”, churning out great shots. I don’t know what you do to get there either. I don’t know how decide on your shots and to them through the shot. I don’t know how you picture shots, the clarity or content of those pictures. I don’t know how you speak to yourself or in what tone of voice when you’re on top of your game. I don’t know where in your body, the size, temperature, or anything else about the feelings you get when you’re “on it”. I don’t know how you best or recover from frustratingly poor shots. In fact, I don’t know much about your success at all!

I could end the article there, but fear you might simply carry on looking in the wrong places in search of other experts to tell you the real “secret”! But then, would they know how you do success any better? Be patient though – there is one expert I recommend you get in touch with.

Fortunately as a coach I can use some good generalizations about success that are common for everyone. For example,

Zen Buddhism teaches us of the importance of living in the present

Ever since I was a child, I have been acutely sensitive to the idea – in the way that other people seem to feel only after bereavement or some shocking unexpected event – that the human intellect is unable, finally, to make sense of the world: everything is contradiction and paradox, and no one really knows much for sure, however loudly they profess to the contrary.

It is an uncomfortable mindset, and as a result I have always felt the need to build a conceptual box in my mind big enough to fit the world into. Most people seem to have a talent for denying or ignoring life's contradictions, as the demands of work and life take them over. Or they fall for an ideology, perhaps religious or political, that appears to render the world a comprehensible place.

I have never been able to support either strategy. A sense of encroaching mental chaos was always skulking at the edges of my life. Which is perhaps why I fell into an acute depression at the age of 27, and didn't recover for several years.

The consequence of this was my first book, a memoir called The Scent of Dried Roses. While I was researching it, I read the work of psychologist Dorothy Rowe, a quiet, almost secret, follower of Buddhist philosophy.

Through Rowe's writing I first came across Alan Watts, and he sounded like an unlikely philosopher. His name evoked the image of a paper goods sales rep on a small regional industrial estate. But through Watts and his writing, I was exposed directly to the ideas of Zen Buddhism. I was suspicious at first, perceiving Zen Buddhism to be a religion rather than a philosophy. I wasn't interested in the Four Noble Truths, or the Eightfold Path, and I certainly didn't believe in karma or reincarnation.

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