Jane Pollack Jane Pollack

Can Mindfulness Meditation help you in your Golf game?

The nature of a competitive sport like golf is a culmination of years of training, radical training aids, tons of books about techniques, and thousands of hours of training in the field. But, what if we told you that a particular technique would surely improve your golf game without you even getting out of your house? Two words ‘mindfulness meditation.

When they hear this word, most people will picture a monk in a robe with closed eyes in a temple. Although in some places they are precisely the right thing to partner with meditation, the western world has recently seen a boom in mindfulness meditation as a way to improve one’s skill and craft. These meditation techniques are more commonly known as mindfulness meditation or vipassana meditation.

Golf And Meditation: What’s The Connection?

To understand the relationship that exists between the two, first we need to define what meditation is and what makes it helpful in a physical sport like golf.

To put it in layman’s terms, mindfulness meditation is the practice we use to train our mind to be able to engage in mindfulness throughout our day. It is where an individual uses a technique - such as focusing attention on the breath or exploring the feelings in our bodies - to train concentration and awareness and to achieve mental clarity and reach an emotionally calm and stable state. It can help you control your emotions and thoughts to refocus the power of your brain towards the more essential things. In sports terms, it’s the next level of concentration.

At its essence, mindfulness meditation is becoming more in touch with your inner self and your environment. It helps you separate all the negative thoughts in your head that might distract you or hinder you in day-to-day activity. As a result, mindfulness meditations allow for increased happiness, as well as focus. Instead of thoughts being a hindrance, you learn to be at peace with your mind and emotions. It allows you to fully utilize your brain or your focus towards an activity, like...golf.

If you’ve played golf for quite some time, you understand that it’s not just about physical prowess like football or basketball. Golf, at its core, is a mental sport. It puts more emphasis on concentration and technique rather than raw power. You know that in an 18 hole game, you only spend maybe 20 to 30 minutes actually swinging your club and the other three and half hours thinking and focusing in your head.

In reality, golf leaves little to no room for respite to the players. Every course is different and field with its own unique obstacles. Every person who has played golf knows that every stroke counts. Although each shot you make is unique and will be approached each time differently, it’s rare for a golfer to have done the exact same shot twice. That’s why it’s crucial that your mind is prepared, ready to think and rationalize at a moment’s notice and be adept at making fast but accurate decisions. This is where a solid mental fortitude that mindfulness meditation comes in handy.

For a lot of people, the time spent concentrating can be brutal and can make or break a game. For example, a golf player runs a thousand scenarios in his mind before and after a swing, picturing everything that could go wrong. This ends up breaking their concentration and confidence, potentially messing up their game. They say that the key to playing golf is playing the game moment by moment, but what is that really about?

This is where Mindfulness Meditation comes in. Mindfulness allows you to actually live “in the moment.” But just like a perfect swing technique takes hundreds or thousands of hours, so does mindfulness meditation. Did you know that Tiger Woods grew up with a Buddhist mother who probably taught him meditation techniques growing up? This may have contributed to the extreme success he has reached in the world of golf.

The Importance Of Mindfulness Meditation To Golfers

Many published US studies have shown that about 30 minutes of meditation per day can significantly improve cognitive function and brain activity. Meditation, at its core, is all about self and mind control. Studies also showed that after an eight-week-long session of mindfulness meditation, participants had seen changes in brain regions responsible for controlling memory, empathy, and stress.

The key to playing golf is to have a mentally strong mind. A player needs to envision the impact strategy of their clubs and the technique as to how to execute the swing while making sure that you avoid any mental distractions and other external stimuli not related to the game. Golfers need to be able to maintain their focus, be determined, and prevent any loss of confidence. Emotions running out of control are a common sight in golf, especially the novice players. The nervousness on the first tee, a burst of anger in a missed short putt, and even professional players suddenly doubting their choice of clubs. All these things are emotions overrunning your mind resulting in a loss of concentration. A problem that mindfulness meditation can help with.

The Benefits Of Mindfulness Meditation In Playing Golf

You might want to try out mindfulness meditation as a technique to level up your golf game. Whether you’re a rookie or a seasoned veteran, there’s always a way meditation can help you In the game and in your life.

Reduces stress and nervousness

A lot of new golf players struggle to practice due to the amount of pressure and strategy involved in just one shot. Adding the fact that Golf is a solo sport, it could quickly get on your nerves as a new player. Golf is a game that requires extreme calmness and focuses on the player’s end; agitation or nervousness could be a huge hindrance in your progress towards that perfect hole. Performing mindfulness meditation is a great help to clear your mind, acknowledge, and remove any doubt or nervousness you have about yourself.

Improves your Patience

In a game of golf, perfect shots are often ruined because of impatience and affected by internal factors such as your mood, overthinking, and external factors such as problems with your career or your personal life. There are just times when you feel everything, including your rhythm and groove, is just off. This is where patience plays an important role. Our tendency as humans to deal with these problems is to push through, which can translate to a “forced shot” in golf. Meditation techniques include refocusing exercises to help calm you down and give you patience to re-concentrate your shots. This can help you in regaining your momentum and rhythm for that hole in one shot.

Mindfulness boosts your patience by helping you practice to maintain emotional balance in your mind. Through mindfulness meditation, you improve your ability to keep your composure and think clearly. This enables you to play at your best form without anything provoking you to lose your patience.

Helps Clear Your Mind

As an outdoor sport, Golf requires players to walk several distances between shots, time that has a lot of room for distractions, and other mentally challenging thoughts that could ruin your game.

A clear and sound mind is one of the key components in winning a golf game. It is a valuable tool to have that enables you to focus better and can help you make better decisions and excellent strategies.

Meditation helps an individual tone down cognitive processes from running wild. These thoughts are often attention-grabbing and a distraction that results in your thoughts wandering and even creating storylines that drift back and forth from the game in front of you. A focused mind helps you sustain a solid attention span and withholds any distraction from your surroundings. A clear mind also enables you to zone in on making those shots as accurate as possible.

Helps You Prevent Double Bogeys

A double-bogey is a golfer’s worst nightmare. It’s easily avoidable most of the time but often happens because of the lack of focus. As golfer Keith Cunningham says, “ A double bogey is a bad shot, followed by a stupid shot.”

How does meditation help you prevent double bogeys, you say? Well, Maintaining composure and being resilient are the two key factors that can help you avoid this blunder. Through its effect of clearing up your mind, mindfulness meditation helps cultivate these virtues in an individual. When you’re composed, your head is in the game, and you can make quick and accurate decisions. These effects help you lower your chance of making a high-risk shot, because your mind can quickly adapt and weigh the pros and cons of a shot you’re about to make.

Enhances Your Self Discipline

Let’s all be honest, every type of sport requires a great deal of consistency, dedication, and self-discipline for you to play with the best of the best. More so in a sport like golf where you can only depend on yourself. As with any sport, specific results are implied in a game, and everyone is expected to play along with these set regulations. Lacking self-discipline can quickly lose your focus, or worse, gets you thrown out of a game.

Self-discipline is one of the virtues of every meditation technique, from the Buddhist monks up to the modern variations like yoga. If there is one thing that is commonly associated with meditating, that is self-disciThe nature of a competitive sport like golf is a culmination of years of training, radical training aids, tons of books about techniques, and thousands of hours of training in the field. But, what if we told you that a particular technique would surely improve your golf game without you even getting out of your house? Two words ‘mindfulness meditation.”

When they hear this word, most people will picture a monk in a robe with closed eyes in a temple. Although in some places they are precisely the right thing to partner with meditation, the western world has recently seen a boom in mindfulness meditation as a way to improve one’s skill and craft. These meditation techniques are more commonly known as mindfulness meditation or vipassana meditation.

Golf And Meditation: What’s The Connection?

To understand the relationship that exists between the two, first we need to define what meditation is and what makes it helpful in a physical sport like golf.

To put it in layman’s terms, mindfulness meditation is the practice we use to train our mind to be able to engage in mindfulness throughout our day. It is where an individual uses a technique - such as focusing attention on the breath or exploring the feelings in our bodies - to train concentration and awareness and to achieve mental clarity and reach an emotionally calm and stable state. It can help you control your emotions and thoughts to refocus the power of your brain towards the more essential things. In sports terms, it’s the next level of concentration.

At its essence, mindfulness meditation is becoming more in touch with your inner self and your environment. It helps you separate all the negative thoughts in your head that might distract you or hinder you in day-to-day activity. As a result, mindfulness meditations allow for increased happiness, as well as focus. Instead of thoughts being a hindrance, you learn to be at peace with your mind and emotions. It allows you to fully utilize your brain or your focus towards an activity, like...golf.

If you’ve played golf for quite some time, you understand that it’s not just about physical prowess like football or basketball. Golf, at its core, is a mental sport. It puts more emphasis on concentration and technique rather than raw power. You know that in an 18 hole game, you only spend maybe 20 to 30 minutes actually swinging your club and the other three and half hours thinking and focusing in your head.

In reality, golf leaves little to no room for respite to the players. Every course is different and field with its own unique obstacles. Every person who has played golf knows that every stroke counts. Although each shot you make is unique and will be approached each time differently, it’s rare for a golfer to have done the exact same shot twice. That’s why it’s crucial that your mind is prepared, ready to think and rationalize at a moment’s notice and be adept at making fast but accurate decisions. This is where a solid mental fortitude that mindfulness meditation comes in handy.

For a lot of people, the time spent concentrating can be brutal and can make or break a game. For example, a golf player runs a thousand scenarios in his mind before and after a swing, picturing everything that could go wrong. This ends up breaking their concentration and confidence, potentially messing up their game. They say that the key to playing golf is playing the game moment by moment, but what is that really about?

This is where Mindfulness Meditation comes in. Mindfulness allows you to actually live “in the moment.” But just like a perfect swing technique takes hundreds or thousands of hours, so does mindfulness meditation. Did you know that Tiger Woods grew up with a Buddhist mother who probably taught him meditation techniques growing up? This may have contributed to the extreme success he has reached in the world of golf.

The Importance Of Mindfulness Meditation To Golfers

Many published US studies have shown that about 30 minutes of meditation per day can significantly improve cognitive function and brain activity. Meditation, at its core, is all about self and mind control. Studies also showed that after an eight-week-long session of mindfulness meditation, participants had seen changes in brain regions responsible for controlling memory, empathy, and stress.

The key to playing golf is to have a mentally strong mind. A player needs to envision the impact strategy of their clubs and the technique as to how to execute the swing while making sure that you avoid any mental distractions and other external stimuli not related to the game. Golfers need to be able to maintain their focus, be determined, and prevent any loss of confidence. Emotions running out of control are a common sight in golf, especially the novice players. The nervousness on the first tee, a burst of anger in a missed short putt, and even professional players suddenly doubting their choice of clubs. All these things are emotions overrunning your mind resulting in a loss of concentration. A problem that mindfulness meditation can help with.

The Benefits Of Mindfulness Meditation In Playing Golf

You might want to try out mindfulness meditation as a technique to level up your golf game. Whether you’re a rookie or a seasoned veteran, there’s always a way meditation can help you In the game and in your life.

Reduces stress and nervousness

A lot of new golf players struggle to practice due to the amount of pressure and strategy involved in just one shot. Adding the fact that Golf is a solo sport, it could quickly get on your nerves as a new player. Golf is a game that requires extreme calmness and focuses on the player’s end; agitation or nervousness could be a huge hindrance in your progress towards that perfect hole. Performing mindfulness meditation is a great help to clear your mind, acknowledge, and remove any doubt or nervousness you have about yourself.

Improves your Patience

In a game of golf, perfect shots are often ruined because of impatience and affected by internal factors such as your mood, overthinking, and external factors such as problems with your career or your personal life. There are just times when you feel everything, including your rhythm and groove, is just off. This is where patience plays an important role. Our tendency as humans to deal with these problems is to push through, which can translate to a “forced shot” in golf. Meditation techniques include refocusing exercises to help calm you down and give you patience to re-concentrate your shots. This can help you in regaining your momentum and rhythm for that hole in one shot.

Mindfulness boosts your patience by helping you practice to maintain emotional balance in your mind. Through mindfulness meditation, you improve your ability to keep your composure and think clearly. This enables you to play at your best form without anything provoking you to lose your patience.

Helps Clear Your Mind

As an outdoor sport, Golf requires players to walk several distances between shots, time that has a lot of room for distractions, and other mentally challenging thoughts that could ruin your game.

A clear and sound mind is one of the key components in winning a golf game. It is a valuable tool to have that enables you to focus better and can help you make better decisions and excellent strategies.

Meditation helps an individual tone down cognitive processes from running wild. These thoughts are often attention-grabbing and a distraction that results in your thoughts wandering and even creating storylines that drift back and forth from the game in front of you. A focused mind helps you sustain a solid attention span and withholds any distraction from your surroundings. A clear mind also enables you to zone in on making those shots as accurate as possible.

Helps You Prevent Double Bogeys

A double-bogey is a golfer’s worst nightmare. It’s easily avoidable most of the time but often happens because of the lack of focus. As golfer Keith Cunningham says, “ A double bogey is a bad shot, followed by a stupid shot.”

How does meditation help you prevent double bogeys, you say? Well, Maintaining composure and being resilient are the two key factors that can help you avoid this blunder. Through its effect of clearing up your mind, mindfulness meditation helps cultivate these virtues in an individual. When you’re composed, your head is in the game, and you can make quick and accurate decisions. These effects help you lower your chance of making a high-risk shot, because your mind can quickly adapt and weigh the pros and cons of a shot you’re about to make.

Enhances Your Self Discipline

Let’s all be honest, every type of sport requires a great deal of consistency, dedication, and self-discipline for you to play with the best of the best. More so in a sport like golf where you can only depend on yourself. As with any sport, specific results are implied in a game, and everyone is expected to play along with these set regulations. Lacking self-discipline can quickly lose your focus, or worse, gets you thrown out of a game.

Self-discipline is one of the virtues of every meditation technique, from the Buddhist monks up to the modern variations like yoga. If there is one thing that is commonly associated with meditating, that is self-discipline. It’s a virtue that will automatically get enhanced when you train in the art of mindfulness meditation.

So, ready to tee up some mindfulness?

pline. It’s a virtue that will automatically get enhanced when you train in the art of mindfulness meditation.

So, ready to tee up some mindfulness?

The nature of a competitive sport like golf is a culmination of years of training, radical training aids, tons of books about techniques, and thousands of hours of training in the field. But, what if we told you that a particular technique would surely improve your golf game without you even getting out of your house? Two words ‘mindfulness meditation.”


When they hear this word, most people will picture a monk in a robe with closed eyes in a temple. Although in some places they are precisely the right thing to partner with meditation, the western world has recently seen a boom in mindfulness meditation as a way to improve one’s skill and craft. These meditation techniques are more commonly known as mindfulness meditation or vipassana meditation.


Golf And Meditation: What’s The Connection?


To understand the relationship that exists between the two, first we need to define what meditation is and what makes it helpful in a physical sport like golf.


To put it in layman’s terms, mindfulness meditation is the practice we use to train our mind to be able to engage in mindfulness throughout our day. It is where an individual uses a technique - such as focusing attention on the breath or exploring the feelings in our bodies - to train concentration and awareness and to achieve mental clarity and reach an emotionally calm and stable state. It can help you control your emotions and thoughts to refocus the power of your brain towards the more essential things. In sports terms, it’s the next level of concentration. 


At its essence, mindfulness meditation is becoming more in touch with your inner self and your environment. It helps you separate all the negative thoughts in your head that might distract you or hinder you in day-to-day activity. As a result, mindfulness meditations allow for increased happiness, as well as focus. Instead of thoughts being a hindrance, you learn to be at peace with your mind and emotions. It allows you to fully utilize your brain or your focus towards an activity, like...golf.


If you’ve played golf for quite some time, you understand that it’s not just about physical prowess like football or basketball. Golf, at its core, is a mental sport. It puts more emphasis on concentration and technique rather than raw power. You know that in an 18 hole game, you only spend maybe 20 to 30 minutes actually swinging your club and the other three and half hours thinking and focusing in your head.


In reality, golf leaves little to no room for respite to the players. Every course is different and field with its own unique obstacles. Every person who has played golf knows that every stroke counts. Although each shot you make is unique and will be approached each time differently, it’s rare for a golfer to have done the exact same shot twice. That’s why it’s crucial that your mind is prepared, ready to think and rationalize at a moment’s notice and be adept at making fast but accurate decisions. This is where a solid mental fortitude that mindfulness meditation comes in handy.


For a lot of people, the time spent concentrating can be brutal and can make or break a game. For example, a golf player runs a thousand scenarios in his mind before and after a swing, picturing everything that could go wrong. This ends up breaking their concentration and confidence, potentially messing up their game. They say that the key to playing golf is playing the game moment by moment, but what is that really about?


This is where Mindfulness Meditation comes in. Mindfulness allows you to actually live “in the moment.” But just like a perfect swing technique takes hundreds or thousands of hours, so does mindfulness meditation. Did you know that Tiger Woods grew up with a Buddhist mother who probably taught him meditation techniques growing up? This may have contributed to the extreme success he has reached in the world of golf.


The Importance Of Mindfulness Meditation To Golfers


Many published US studies have shown that about 30 minutes of meditation per day can significantly improve cognitive function and brain activity. Meditation, at its core, is all about self and mind control. Studies also showed that after an eight-week-long session of mindfulness meditation, participants had seen changes in brain regions responsible for controlling memory, empathy, and stress. 


The key to playing golf is to have a mentally strong mind. A player needs to envision the impact strategy of their clubs and the technique as to how to execute the swing while making sure that you avoid any mental distractions and other external stimuli not related to the game. Golfers need to be able to maintain their focus, be determined, and prevent any loss of confidence. Emotions running out of control are a common sight in golf, especially the novice players. The nervousness on the first tee, a burst of anger in a missed short putt, and even professional players suddenly doubting their choice of clubs. All these things are emotions overrunning your mind resulting in a loss of concentration. A problem that mindfulness meditation can help with.


The Benefits Of Mindfulness Meditation In Playing Golf


You might want to try out mindfulness meditation as a technique to level up your golf game. Whether you’re a rookie or a seasoned veteran, there’s always a way meditation can help you In the game and in your life.


Reduces stress and nervousness


A lot of new golf players struggle to practice due to the amount of pressure and strategy involved in just one shot. Adding the fact that Golf is a solo sport, it could quickly get on your nerves as a new player. Golf is a game that requires extreme calmness and focuses on the player’s end; agitation or nervousness could be a huge hindrance in your progress towards that perfect hole. Performing mindfulness meditation is a great help to clear your mind, acknowledge, and remove any doubt or nervousness you have about yourself.


Improves your Patience


In a game of golf, perfect shots are often ruined because of impatience and affected by internal factors such as your mood, overthinking, and external factors such as problems with your career or your personal life. There are just times when you feel everything, including your rhythm and groove, is just off. This is where patience plays an important role. Our tendency as humans to deal with these problems is to push through, which can translate to a “forced shot” in golf. Meditation techniques include refocusing exercises to help calm you down and give you patience to re-concentrate your shots. This can help you in regaining your momentum and rhythm for that hole in one shot. 


Mindfulness boosts your patience by helping you practice to maintain emotional balance in your mind. Through mindfulness meditation, you improve your ability to keep your composure and think clearly. This enables you to play at your best form without anything provoking you to lose your patience.


Helps Clear Your Mind


As an outdoor sport, Golf requires players to walk several distances between shots, time that has a lot of room for distractions, and other mentally challenging thoughts that could ruin your game.


A clear and sound mind is one of the key components in winning a golf game. It is a valuable tool to have that enables you to focus better and can help you make better decisions and excellent strategies.


Meditation helps an individual tone down cognitive processes from running wild. These thoughts are often attention-grabbing and a distraction that results in your thoughts wandering and even creating storylines that drift back and forth from the game in front of you. A focused mind helps you sustain a solid attention span and withholds any distraction from your surroundings. A clear mind also enables you to zone in on making those shots as accurate as possible.


Helps You Prevent Double Bogeys


A double-bogey is a golfer’s worst nightmare. It’s easily avoidable most of the time but often happens because of the lack of focus. As golfer Keith Cunningham says, “ A double bogey is a bad shot, followed by a stupid shot.”


How does meditation help you prevent double bogeys, you say? Well, Maintaining composure and being resilient are the two key factors that can help you avoid this blunder. Through its effect of clearing up your mind, mindfulness meditation helps cultivate these virtues in an individual. When you’re composed, your head is in the game, and you can make quick and accurate decisions. These effects help you lower your chance of making a high-risk shot, because your mind can quickly adapt and weigh the pros and cons of a shot you’re about to make.


Enhances Your Self Discipline


Let’s all be honest, every type of sport requires a great deal of consistency, dedication, and self-discipline for you to play with the best of the best. More so in a sport like golf where you can only depend on yourself. As with any sport, specific results are implied in a game, and everyone is expected to play along with these set regulations. Lacking self-discipline can quickly lose your focus, or worse, gets you thrown out of a game.


Self-discipline is one of the virtues of every meditation technique, from the Buddhist monks up to the modern variations like yoga. If there is one thing that is commonly associated with meditating, that is self-discipline. It’s a virtue that will automatically get enhanced when you train in the art of mindfulness meditation.


So, ready to tee up some mindfulness? 


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Jane Pollack Jane Pollack

Blog Post Title Two

It all begins with an idea.

It all begins with an idea. Maybe you want to launch a business. Maybe you want to turn a hobby into something more. Or maybe you have a creative project to share with the world. Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference.

Don’t worry about sounding professional. Sound like you. There are over 1.5 billion websites out there, but your story is what’s going to separate this one from the rest. If you read the words back and don’t hear your own voice in your head, that’s a good sign you still have more work to do.

Be clear, be confident and don’t overthink it. The beauty of your story is that it’s going to continue to evolve and your site can evolve with it. Your goal should be to make it feel right for right now. Later will take care of itself. It always does.

Read More
Jane Pollack Jane Pollack

Blog Post Title Three

It all begins with an idea.

It all begins with an idea. Maybe you want to launch a business. Maybe you want to turn a hobby into something more. Or maybe you have a creative project to share with the world. Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference.

Don’t worry about sounding professional. Sound like you. There are over 1.5 billion websites out there, but your story is what’s going to separate this one from the rest. If you read the words back and don’t hear your own voice in your head, that’s a good sign you still have more work to do.

Be clear, be confident and don’t overthink it. The beauty of your story is that it’s going to continue to evolve and your site can evolve with it. Your goal should be to make it feel right for right now. Later will take care of itself. It always does.

Read More
Jane Pollack Jane Pollack

Blog Post Title Four

It all begins with an idea.

It all begins with an idea. Maybe you want to launch a business. Maybe you want to turn a hobby into something more. Or maybe you have a creative project to share with the world. Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference.

Don’t worry about sounding professional. Sound like you. There are over 1.5 billion websites out there, but your story is what’s going to separate this one from the rest. If you read the words back and don’t hear your own voice in your head, that’s a good sign you still have more work to do.

Be clear, be confident and don’t overthink it. The beauty of your story is that it’s going to continue to evolve and your site can evolve with it. Your goal should be to make it feel right for right now. Later will take care of itself. It always does.

Read More