It’s a bummer, but we are not always aware of why we do what we do.

Many of us will find ourselves acting, then pause and wonder why that action emerged.

What appeared was automatic or spontaneous behavior.

Spontaneous actions respond to the here and now. They have an accessible intent.

Automatic actions react to the here and now. Their intent is out of awareness.

Whenever the intent disappears from awareness, we’ve received a signal that we were overwhelmed or lost awareness for some other reason.

Learning a technique helps us discover how much awareness of that technique we’ve already developed. It becomes visible through the precision of intent we’ve been able to develop.

Precision of intent is, for example, the ability to imagine a shot that one will create using one’s swing and then experience it to happen almost as imagined. It’s when the swing leads to the shot one imagined. However, there is no necessity that it leads to the result one hoped for.

Precision of intent is not imaginable without some understanding of the physics involved, and thus of at least some of the techniques one has to use. And yet, developing one’s technique cannot happen without the ability to describe an intent.

The better one becomes, the better one’s ability to connect body and mind.