Drop the Facade

Maybe there's light coming in from the street outside or under the door from the hallway outside. Is it possible to see moonlight? Breathe slowly and deeply to your lower abdomen and simply take note of the subtle hues of light in your dark room. It was very subtle, said Kerr, but before I started working with [Chip], the ball rolled more off my middle finger than my index finger. He taught me to spread my hands out a little wider on the ball and use my index fingers more. He understands that a big part of shooting is the shooter's mind. The three-point shot was the missing skill from Leonard's game when he joined the Spurs as a rookie out of San Diego State. Enter Engelland and his eye for technique tweaks. I had a good shooting form, but he brought my release a little lower and helped my follow-through, said Leonard. But they were just little adjustments Chip had seen. I just believed in it and worked on it from there. Engelland's formula is a repeating cycle of observation, adjustment, and repeated practice for a specific skill of a single player. Beyond the angst of how many hours of practice, Ericsson would like to move the discussion from the athlete to the coach, hoping to duplicate Engelland's attention to detail and specific, repeatable learning sessions. The most common type of massage is Swedish, a soothing technique that relies mainly on long, flowing strokes. Not only does it relax, but can reduce pain and relieve joint stiffness. Another common type of massage is Shiatsu, also known as acupressure. In Shiatsu massage, therapists use their fingers to manipulate the body's pressure points. The same points that are pierced with ultrathin needles in acupuncture. If you cannot afford to go to a spa or health center to work with a therapist, there are many simple techniques of self massage or ones that can be done with a close friend or partner. Not only does the latter relax you and release stress but it also deepens your bonds with the massage giver/getter.

Let me describe a few self-massage methods. Scalp Soother--Place your thumbs behind your ears while spreading your fingers on top of your head. Move your scalp back and forth slightly by making circles with your fingertips for 15 to 20 seconds. This was because I remembered what I had done on TV. I made a raccoon relax. However, we were outside and there were other people watching. I'd never done something quite like this, and I thought this might just be impossible. Two of the gorillas playing in the enclosure were rather far from me, so I began to transmit Ki to the gorilla which was a bit closer: the distance was about ten meters. Four to five minutes passed, and suddenly the gorilla began scratching itself all over its body. The feedback sensation in the palm of the hand I was using to transmit Ki strengthened: I felt like I'd begun exchanging Ki with the gorilla. After three to four minutes, the gorilla went and hid behind a large rock in its enclosure. Luckily, from where I was standing, its chest and head were still visible. After about a minute or two, the gorilla yawned several times and fell asleep. Then I told the congregation, `I can't lead right now. I'm trying to grieve myself. The whole process took two years. Right before I took the job, I was scared shitless, so I took a two-month sabbatical. I needed time to transition my own thinking, and I needed the congregation to transition how they thought of me. For others, the messy middle is filled with perilous emotional lurches. Kirsty Spraggon grew up in the outback of Western Australia, where she was bullied for being skinny.

Ambitious and eager to escape, she became a real estate agent, moved to Sydney, and rose to become one of RE/MAX's top one hundred agents worldwide. But all the time she was hiding a shameful secret: She got a sexually transmitted disease when she was nineteen, which decimated her confidence, prevented her from getting close to men, and drove her into a series of unhealthy relationships. So she quit and moved to Los Angeles to pursue a career in corporate speaking and finally confront her past. Elizabeth slid off her sunglasses, snapped them safely in their case and tucked them in the side pocket of her leather tote. We had gotten into the habit of not even sitting down before the conversation began. The excitement of it all was what prompted me to bypass all manners despite my conscious effort to assimilate to the behaviors of the upper/professional-class. For Elizabeth, I sensed it was a source of pride to see my life change before her eyes. My reading for the month also proved quite insightful. After ordering the two best-selling etiquette articles off of Amazon. Instead of sitting on my articleshelf gathering dust, the articles found a home on my nightstand and I studied them nightly as I settled down for a night's rest. I would then wake up with the morning news courtesy of my iPad. I found the Wall Street Journal, my newspaper of choice, to offer a rich perspective to many world events. The local newspapers and prime-time news channels paled in comparison. The universe had never experienced Kali's wrath before. But he had to do something, or the world was going to implode with Kali's rage. Upon seeing Kali approach him, Shiva laid himself down in her way. Kali stepped on Shiva and let out such a huge roar that the continents quivered. Afterwards, when Kali looked down on Shiva's body, she was shaken and ashamed. Anger had consumed her, and she had lost all sense of self. Feeling ashamed at trampling on her beloved, Kali removed her foot and as she did, she returned back to her less terrifying form.

Kali's other origin stories vary from madness to even more madness. It makes you wonder if these myths carry deep hidden messages as the sages proclaimed or whether it was just escapist fictional writing - the science fiction of its time. It could be that there is no meaning, and one writer wanted his origin story to be superior to the other. Lazily and contentedly floating about for two or three hours on both occasions, he was brought back to his childhood. As a young boy, he would spend hours and hours many days of each summer playing in the ocean, much of it floating on a canvas raft. So, the particular self Jordan re-experienced coming present on vacation in the Chesapeake Bay was very familiar and certainly the result of happy times. Similarly, after a bike accident, Jordan stopped riding for nearly three years. The moment he got back on, he was flooded with feelings, memories, and a felt presence of how much he has loved bike riding since his father and sister taught him at age five. Getting back onto the bike instantly transported Jordan back into a part of himself that felt freedom, joy, and a deep-seated satisfaction at being able to quickly and powerfully propel himself through the physical world. If negative interactions with other people--sexual and physical abuse, physical and emotional torture, and so on--can spur the formation of selves, and if positive ones can do this as well, then what about mixed negative/positive interactions with other people? It seems likely that nearly any unique, intense, or prolonged experience with others could also give rise to selves; If so, it may also be that unique, intense, or prolonged experiences where one is not with other people--a solitary vision quest, hiding in a city under bombardment, or being a shut-in--could also give rise to selves. Interactions with others can also lead to selves in two other previously mentioned ways. I've thought of you many times since we last saw one another, struggling against the tides of your life. I thought about calling. I thought about taking your temperature with my tongue - I couldn't help it. The French have a phrase for it: Medecins Sans Frontieres: Doctors Without Boundaries. If only we'd never met like this, if only you'd not stood up when I called out your name, if only you'd not crossed the threshold of the clinic, we might have found each other another way. I checked online: my regulatory body says that two years must elapse without professional contact before romantic relations are permitted. But we don't have two years.

You don't anyway. From a distance your face looks calm enough, but up close I can see minuscule spasming in the palatal muscles, hear a new nasal timbre in your voice caused by lower motor lesions in the medulla oblongata, I imagine. This is the beginning of your future. Does it freak you out or make you uncomfortable? You're in your own house, and it was safe a minute ago. Why is the absence of artificial light making the same room scary? Breathe into this. Relax into your body. So many of us are petrified of the dark for no logical reason. You're not running around, so you needn't worry about injury. You can use your phone's light to get up and walk to the light switch when we're finished. It's okay--just sit and hang. Relax into the darkness of the room. I would argue that it starts out with questions about how can you actually measure how good a coach is. We would argue that the way you measure it is the way you measure other kinds of teachers, doctors, or even psychotherapists, he said. You're basically looking at their ability to improve somebody's performance. The next step, which is something that we're just starting to look into, is what is it we can learn by examining what these expert teachers with better teaching outcomes do that is different and potentially something that other teachers might be taught to do that would actually improve their students' improvement during the year, he added. One of Engelland's many fans is his old boss, Jeff Bzdelik, former head coach of the Denver Nuggets. He'll work with an 8- or 9-year-old at an Air Force Academy camp with the same intensity he would with a guy like Tim Duncan or Carmelo Anthony or Andre Miller, said Bzdelik. There's integrity there.