After a disastrous few weeksthat saw Tiger Woods fall to the lowest rank of his careersince going pro in 1996, the 39-year-old world former No. 1 announced he would be taking a break from the professional circuit to shore up his skills.

Right now, I need a lot of work on my game, and to still spend time with the people that are important to me. My play, and scores, are not acceptable for tournament golf, Woods wrote on his Web site Wednesday. Like Ive said, I enter a tournament to compete at the highest level, and when I think Im ready, Ill be back.

Woods briefly outlined a practice strategy before assuring his fans, I do, however, expect to be playing again very soon.

While Woods can practice and dissect the mechanics of his swing all he wants, some suspect the solution to his struggles lie elsewhere in his mind.

You have to have technique, but you also have to have a tremendous amount of peace of mind and confidence and not be thinking of your technique when you play the shot, said Joe Parent, author of Zen Golf: Mastering the Mental Game.

This is what we call paralysis from analysis. Youre thinking so much about your technique that you lose two important features: Visualization and feel are absent if your mind is filled with thoughts of technique, he added.

Parent, like Woods, is Buddhist, and he thinks the Eastern religion can help Woods regain his footing, especially when it comes to his short game, where Woods has really seemed to run into trouble. A clip showing Woods overshooting a hole about 25 yards from the edge of the green during the Farmers Insurance Open last week went viral for all the wrong reasons. Later that day, Woods withdrew from the tournament.

The closer you get to the hole, the more mental the game is, Parent said. Parent, who has not worked with Woods, but has worked with the likes of Vijay Singh and Cristie Kerr, added the Buddhist concept of mindfulness can help players get over their hangups, whether theyre to do with emotional turmoil, an aging body or a return from injury all things Woods has had to deal with.

In the Buddhist positioning, thoughts and mind are not exactly the same. Your mind is bigger than your thoughts. What mindfulness means is that your mind is full of perceptions of the present moment, Parent said. If you are thinking then youre separated from (the present) and therefore you lose the feel and the imagery, the visual and the kinesthetic perceptions.

Mindfulness can be practiced just like a swing. Michael Lardon, author of Mastering Golfs Mental Game: Your Ultimate Guide to Better On-Course Performance and Lower Scores, developed a technique he calls Left Brain, Right Brain, No Brain. The system takes into account rational, left-brain analytics, which in Woodss case would deal with something like his swing technique, as well as more creative, imagination-based imagery your right brain offers. Finally, the two sides culminate in No Brain, which is where the mindfulness truly occurs its when a player lets go during the swing, concentrating on nothing but the present moment.

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Is the cure for Tiger Woodss game less technique and more Buddhism?