What Do You Feel In Flow?
“What emotions do you experience in flow state?”
There is nothing but the moment itself. No past, no future, just absolute calm and total focus within the moment.
When I’m in it I’m just in it. Time goes away, fear goes away.
When I’m in a flow state, what’s remarkable are the emotions I do NOT experience: doubt, judgment, conflict. I simply feel…MYSELF. The fullest and least complicated version of myself. I feel flooded with certainty and wonder and curiosity and gratitude
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These are the typical responses. Flow state is the last stop of “ordinary mind”. Sometimes you are still aware of “yourself” but more often the world disappears and you fall into the movie, the action, the book, the sexual connection.
It is a doorway to mastery. And if you listen to what people say, a TREMENDOUS source of Gratitude.
Combine this with the fact that our emotions are created by the language we use, what we focus on, and how we use our bodies, you can glimpse one of the reasons that fear is dissolved, used up, consumed by ACTION. There are physiological as well as psychological reasons for this, but let’s just look at the mental here.
“Flow State” is experienced in any number of contexts: driving on the freeway when you are relaxed and listening to the radio, in a deep reading or writing state when you fall into the page, when a dancer enters “the danger zone, where the dancer becomes the dance.” In Tai Chi, once the basic movements are automatic and you are simply flowing from one tension or compression to the next release, to the next compression.
We might as well consider there to be flow in each of the Three Centers: physical, emotional, and mental. You can recognize it by a few symptoms:
- Time disappears.
- YOU disappear. You lose a sense of “self” and simply enter the activity or experience.
- It is the “eye of the storm.” There is still tension or various problems, but they are “out there” just a bit. In meditation, you simply ride the breath. Slow down if external thoughts intrude. Balance on the edge between comfort and discomfort, just enough to hold your focus.
In this sense MASTERY is merely the capacity to spontaneously generate, in flow, high-level problem solving.
So…you could make 1% improvement in stress relief, excellence, and resilience by seeking the ability to “turn on” this state at will. Larry Niven could turn it on INSTANTLY when he sat at the typewriter. Harlan Ellison could hold flow in a bookstore window, or the lobby of a hotel surrounded by gawkers. At that point in his life he could turn it on and off like throwing a switch.
This is the doorway to higher performance, and impacts EVERY aspect of life. All you have to do is ask yourself how you can create 1% more flow in your life today, this week. And you can do that with the Breathing.
If I had no notion of flow, I think I’d start there. Here are some activities in which flow manifests:
- Slow hot baths
- Distance running
- The “hypnogogic state” just before you fall asleep.
- Listening to 60 beat per minute largo rhythm string music.
There are many others. THIS is the doorway to whipping “writer’s block”, dealing with stress, vanquishing fear. And it is CRITICAL for writers, artists, and anyone living a creative life.
BREATHE!
Namaste
Steve
(Put Saturday August 24 on your calendar, 3pm Pacific. Tananarive and I are teaching our Summer workshop, WRITING UNFORGETTABLE CHARACTERS. You’ll be able to attend either live in Upland, or via Zoom. Get on my mailing list at www.stevenbarneslist.com and we’ll tell you how to reserve your space this Friday.!)