The word “yoga” in its original sense has little to do with exercise, but in fact comes from the Sanskrit verb yuj, to yoke or unite. Of course, we understand that the original intent is to unite with God, but just for fun, let’s use the principle of yoga to help us unite our body and mind as one.

As I mentioned in my first lesson, we have to make our mind our best friend so that it works for us and not against us. We do this by first understanding that we always have a choice. Our intelligence is above the mind and so the power of discrimination that defines our intelligence always has the ability to overrule any silly suggestion our mind comes up with. The key now is to unite our trained and experienced intelligence with the actions of our body.

We achieve this in two ways: 1) By training and repetition of a good thing; and 2) By writing down our realizations and contemplation.

There is no doubt that practice makes perfect. The game of billiards like any skill requiring great precision requires serious practice and concentration. It is simply not good enough to knock some balls around every so often and consider that training. You have to work on drills and when something works, you have to try to repeat and firmly establish that skill in your mind and muscle memory.

Since the mind can be so frivolous, it is best to establish a set time for such training and some sort of routine. In the same way that you would discipline a mischievous child, you have to take the same regulated disciplinary action with the mind. Set up a time, place and a routine that works best for you and do it. Outside of that set time, have as much frivolous fun as you want, but during this time, you have to be serious.

Monitoring your progress and writing down your realization is a wonderful way to train the mind and sharpen the intelligence. In the same way that you would monitor your achievements at the gym, note down how you are progressing in your training drills. You see, when you write something down, you are ten times more effective in remembering and retaining the knowledge. And that is what we want because you have to learn from your mistakes and remember what worked.

Writing down realizations simply means, to capture on paper those “Eureka” moments when something makes sense for the first time. For example, the time that you realized and experienced first hand, that playing your cue ball with one tip of inside English deflected the cue ball. Whatever little instance of illumination you experience, write it down. Even it is just a few words.

Finally, our lesson today would not be complete if I did not address the importance of flexibility and of course another comparison to yoga.

Although it is possible to play well without being able to turn your body into a pretzel, it is well documented in sports literature that having a flexible and toned body is a great advantage in any sport.

The fact is that the posture needed to play pool is not at all natural to the human body. There is nothing in this world that would require you to assume such a bodily position as you do when playing pool. The same could be said of golf. So what does the world number one golf player say about flexibility:

“Although I have a lot of natural flexibility, I still work hard to maintain it. As we get older, our muscles tend to lose some of their elasticity….Every golfer should be concerned with maintaining suppleness in the shoulders, neck, back, chest, thighs and hips--all valuable power sources.” – Tiger Woods

(c) 2007 The Billiards Training Company