The core discipline
མིག་བཟང་ “good eye”
A contemplative training in perceiving before conceiving. It came out of photography, in the lineage of Chögyam Trungpa's dharma art teaching, and it works unreasonably well on a sports field.
Steps one to three are yours to choose. From four onward, it arrives or it doesn't.
Miksang is Tibetan for good eye. The discipline trains one thing: seeing what's actually in front of you, before your mind has told you what it is.
A camera makes that trainable, because a photograph either contains what you saw or it doesn't, and there's no arguing with the print. But the camera is scaffolding. What's being trained is the gap between perception and concept, and that gap exists whether or not there's a lens in your hands.
On a field it's the same gap. Something happens, and within about a second you've named it. From then on you're working with the name.
The human line is the only free will present. You use it to practise wu wei, not forcing. But wu wei that isn't ziran, arising of itself, isn't wu wei at all. It's doing something and calling it wu wei.
So no amount of choosing produces the flash. Choosing can put you where the flash is possible, and then it has to stop interfering. That's why the steps split where they do. The container, the alignment and the intention are yours. Everything after that is given, or it isn't.
The ultimate exercise of free will is to go with what is presented. That's the core of Miksang.
It also means effortless is the last thing a coach earns, never the first instruction. Anyone who hears "don't force it" as "don't prepare" will stand on a field waiting, get nothing, and conclude the practice doesn't work.
"Wait for the flash" sounds harmless and does real damage. It puts the flash in front of you, so you start scanning for one. Scanning is reaching, and anyone who reaches will always find something.
Being stopped has already happened by the time you could notice it. The work is registering that it did. That can be checked in a way waiting can't, because being stopped has a physical signature: sharp, vivid, then gladness. When the sharpness and the gladness aren't there, what you have is a thought.
Chögyam Trungpa's term, and the hardest part of this for anyone who coaches. Everything in a coach's training says close the gap fast. Read it, decide, call it. Staying in the gap feels like incompetence, and it's the opposite. The discomfort is the sign it's working.
The distinction that matters is between knowing and having worked it out. The knowing is the gap resolving on its own. Force it and what comes out is the concept that was already waiting, and you won't notice the substitution, because it feels exactly like knowing.
Sometimes it takes a breath. Sometimes it doesn't resolve and there's nothing to give, and that's permitted. We say so out loud on the first day, because a coach who's allowed to say nothing came stops inventing.
Baseball hands you the gap for free. Fifteen seconds of stillness before every pitch, whether you use them or not.
The flash decays fast, and not by fading. It gets colonised. Within about a second the thinking mind arrives with a name for it, and what you're then holding is the name.
The obvious way to hold on to something is to name it, and the naming is the loss. What holds it is the emotion that came with it, steadied rather than grabbed. Steady it and clarity settles on what you saw, and the emotion opens out instead of closing in.
Coaches grab, because the flash feels like it's escaping. Grabbing is the held breath, and it kills what it's trying to save.
The perception arrives on all three at once, which is why it can't be a story. A story is sequential and this isn't.
The last step is a check, not a delivery. You look again at what you made and ask one question: does it still hold what stopped you?
Most of the time the answer is no, and we tell coaches that early. Otherwise they start manufacturing. A full set of keepers means somebody was making photographs.
It presents the thing that stopped you. Nothing added, nothing smoothed over.
On a field, it's a sentence a player can use: a first step after the crack instead of on it.
It no longer holds what stopped you. Or it does, but you've made it prettier on the way.
On a field, it has turned into a verdict: she was late.
Most coaches genuinely cannot do this on the first attempt. They'll say "she was late" and believe they've described something.
Late is a judgment. What they saw was a first step after the crack instead of on it. One of those a player can work with. The other one only tells her she was wrong.
Getting a coach to notice that gap in their own speech is more than half the training, and it transfers to how they talk to players almost immediately.
Nothing here requires you to believe anything. It requires you to stand still on a field with no task, which most coaches find harder.
Miksang is the backbone of the training. Nunchi widens the frame from the single play to the inning, the bench, and the room.
Read about nunchi