Meditation and Flow
Have you ever experienced moments when for a little while you forgot all your daily troubles as a result of a unique experience? A moment when for a little while you were completely absorbed by a certain event and forgot everything around you? Imagine you are on the top of a mountain and you are surprised by a fantastic view. Imagine that you go to a concert and the music of the band gets you into ecstasy. Imagine you go down during a bungy jump. Imagine you and your best friends are convulsed with laughter for half an hour. Imagine you are really in love with someone and the two of you are kissing for the first time. All the examples mentioned above are peak experiences during which you are completely absorbed in the moment. This fantastic state of experience is called "flow" in relevant literature. In the world of sports they use the term "the zone" for this phenomenon. In this section we will give you more information on what this term "flow" really means.
Psychic Entropy
At any moment in our lives our brain gets a gigantic amount of information that it has to digest and if we want to order and to absorb this information correctly we must be able to focus, to concentrate and to organise. These are exactly the skills that we can train through Meditating. If we do not succeed in focussing, concentrating and organising, we will get into a condition of psychic entropy, according to Csikszentmihalyi. This condition is characterised by inner disorder, negative emotions and the incapacity to act purposefully.
What is flow and how do you reach a State of Flow?
 Flow is that condition of your consciousness in which order, positive emotions and the ability to act purposefully rule. The term flow, optimal state of experience, was first used by Csikszentmihalyi. He called the peak experience "flow" because the respondents in his investigations indicated that such a state is characterised by feeling completely at ease, feeling no inhibitions, feeling invincible and a "go with the flow" feeling. The zone, the variation of flow that can be experienced while practising sports, differs from the flow by the fact that if, while playing a sport, you go into the zone you also achieve better than in ordinary circumstances, whereas during the flow this does not always happen. In his book Creativity he mentions the characteristics by which people usually recognise a flow experience. These characteristics can help us along to create situations of flow more often in our daily lives. Let us look at these characteristics through a flow experience of a golf pro that does his best round of the green ever.
- People pursue a constant aim. In a state of flow we know what has to be done and we know exactly what we want. Our golf pro knows that within a minimum number of hits he must get the ball into the pit. Every time he knows what club to use and how to use it.
- Every action is immediately followed by feedback. Our golf player knows right away if he has hit the ball correctly and what went wrong or right.
- There is a proper balance between challenge and skill. In a state of flow we are sure that our ability and our capacities match the action that we undertake. If as a result of poor technique we hit the ball into the water all the time we get frustrated, and if we have hole-in-ones every time we hit the ball we soon get bored. If we really play a good game there is a balance between too much challenge and too much boredom.
- 4. Action and consciousness are one. The golf player is completely absorbed by his game and he is not distracted or hindered by superfluous thoughts. This means that he lives in the NOW and does not think of his supper, the quarrel with his mother in law or the presentation he will have to give for his firm the following day. The subtle balance between skill and challenge requires us to concentrate on only one thing. This is only possible if we get clear feedback and have the proper goals.
- Distractions, fears and self-consciousness are banned from our awareness. This is a result of the characteristics 1, 2, 3, 4. Because we are completely absorbed by what we are doing there is no place for anxiety, doubts, worries and self-consciousness. The golf-player is 100% concentrated , knows what to do, is good at what he is doing and consequently there is no fear of failing or worrying whether his friends will appreciate his performance.
- People lose the awareness of time. The golf player forgets the time and may feel that he does his round much faster or slower than he actually does.
- The activity becomes a goal in itself. When the circumstances mentioned above happen we will usually enjoy the experience. The reason why the golf player enjoys playing golf is the feeling that he experiences while playing. Playing becomes for him an end in itself and he is no longer concerned with the pleasant atmosphere at the club house, his status or making new friends, he concentrates on just one thing: playing golf.
The things mentioned above all have to do with aspects of life that we often miss in our daily routines. At work the pressure may be too low or too high, maybe we do not really know what kind of work we like to do, we often doubt whether our relationship is good enough, if we have the right kind of job, and we are afraid of possible rejections or disappointments. Just think about the question whether you yourself experience the seven states of mind mentioned above when you are busy doing your favourite pastimes or whether you never experience them, for instance because you do not really function so well. Perhaps you lack clear goals in your life or you work too hard.
What you should do is try to integrate your activities, your goals and your feedback and try to find the right balance between your abilities and your challenges. If you succeed in this you will start to experience the feeling of flow. Then your activities will become an end in themselves and you have found a new passion. There are two ways in which you can enlarge the chance of experiencing flow: you can decide to take on only challenges that match your skills or you can try to improve your skills so that they meet the challenges you are willing to face. In this second pursuit Meditation can help you to be able to control your own power of observation in such a way that you limit the number of sensations you admit into your brain to such an extent that action and observation become one. In such cases our attention is focussed and there are no more diverting sensations. Besides: as you read on other pages of this site Meditation helps you in all sorts of ways to improve your performance. Within this context it is clear that Meditation makes it easier for people to experience flow..
According to Csikszentmihalyi experiencing flow often coincides with experiencing a feeling of bliss. According to him it is not strange that many people that seem successful in their careers and their social position often feel less satisfied and happy than people that lead -relatively simple lives. These ambitious lawyers, bankers, managers, captains of industry and Hollywood stars often live for the prestige, the salary or the power that their jobs offer them. The work itself is not what they are interested in, they are only interested in the consequences of the work they are doing. These people are not really Zen. Perhaps we exaggerate a little. Of course there are numerous people that work in the jobs mentioned above that like their work because it is meaningful. The funny thing is that such people are often not really interested in the results or the consequences of their work. When the painting is finished, the lawsuit is won, the deal is closed such people lose interest because with their work finished they lose the possibility to get into a state of flow. They like the result, but they like the work better and consequently they at once take on a new challenge.
Csikszentmihalyi concludes that the art of living happily lies in doing as much as possible those things that get us into a state of flow. That get us into the NOW. If you succeed in experiencing your work and your family as ends in themselves, then everything you do becomes worthwhile.. To us, this sounds very Zen.
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