Saturday, December 1, 2012

The Legend of Bagger Vance


I really loved The Legend of Bagger Vance.  I have read in more than one book that most people don’t realize that when they seek happiness, they are actually seeking that one thing that makes them forget about everything else.  That was a really confusing statement, so I’ll explain.  In the movie, Bagger Vance keeps encouraging Junuh to forget about everything else but the course and to find his natural swing.  He tells Junuh to watch Bobby Jones and the way he waits for the swing to come.  Jones doesn’t force the right swing or try to whack the ball into the hole, he’s patient and works with the course rather than against it.  When Junuh finally does this, all of the crowd disappears, including Bagger, and it’s just him and the course.  In middle school I was really bad at shooting free throws, so my coach suggested I visualize the ball going in before shooting.  I asked him how that would help, and he said he’d read somewhere that it worked.  It sounded like total weird voodoo crap to me, so I refused to do it.  Then, my senior year of high school, I read The Peaceful Warrior.  The book is based on a gymnast who breaks his leg, and has to learn how to properly train his mind and body in order heal.  He discovers that while he is doing gymnastics, he forgets about everything else.  He experiences a sort of silence that his mentor recognizes as total focus, and explains that our minds enjoy nothing more than our entire mind and body experiencing the single moment we are in.  We each have at least one thing that allows us to do this naturally, and The Peaceful Warrior argues that every individual spends his life subconsciously searching for it.  Junuh’s focus, and therefore sense of peace, comes from golf.  It was really cool for me to see how this film pulled together all of the different experiences I had with this idea and gave it a visual representation. 

The Effect of Class


This class in its entirety has been really awesome for me.  The asana practice has stuck with me even more than I thought it would, and it turns out stretching is even more beneficial than I would have ever thought.  I feel bad I put my body through not stretching when I was really active in high school.  Even cooler though is how much I have learned from the philosophies associated with the physical activity.  Never would I have guessed that this class would make me question my normal workout regime and the mentality I have going into it.  I also never would have guessed that Hinduism could have so many allusions and similarities to Christian philosophy.  In fact, I wish more Christians did not fear learning about other religions because there is so much we can learn about our own ideology by looking at it through other philosophies.  When I took my yoga mat back to my apartment, it made me happy to see how malleable it has gotten since the first day of class, and all I could think was how I really didn’t want to find it in my trunk three months from now and realize I hadn’t used it all.  I also want to keep learning about Hinduism and the philosophy behind it. I truly feel like learning about the religion has really opened my mind both academically and spiritually, and has really given me a desire to learn more about both myself and my faith through yoga.