Nature’s Ecstasy - Flow
You feel the weight of the guitar in your hand as you brush the strings with your fingers. As you look up, you notice the crowd anxiously awaiting your next move as the cheers begin to grow. The jitters creep in as you wonder if your hand will freeze up during the show. The lights drop and you’re on.
After a few smooth chords, you start to feel the rhythm. You begin to settle in and let go, as your sense of attention shifts from the crowd and your jitters, simply into the music. Your normal sense of self slowly disappears and a new energy takes over, that seems to merge you with sound. You are free of the normal confines of space and time, as you become the music.
15 minutes later, your 2-hour set is over. Again, you hear the roar of the crowd and see the look of genuine release on the faces around you.
What did you just experience? In psychology this is referred to as a “Flow State.” AKA - Being In Flow, In The Zone, Feeling It, or F*cking Amazing.
A musician named Tash Sultana, who can play 20+ instruments, knows this feeling well. So well that she named one of her albums, flow state. An experience she has come to know and love, “A state of mind that you become, when your fully immersed in something that you’re passionate about. You lose all sense of time, space, anything around you, and you just become that one thing. Like a painter becomes the paintbrush, the painting all in one. I just become the music.” - Tash Sultana
So how does this so-called “optimum human experience” occur, and where do I get some?
Psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihaly (don’t get me started with that name) developed the term when speaking with his clients about the best experiences of their lives. In which many described a free, flowing like water type of feeling. Thus, he coined the word ‘flow’ and created industry wide attention and research. There are many factors that contribute to one’s ability to achieve this timeless, space less and heightened experience of reality. The key elements of flow are incorporated into the Grow Zone. When you reach a heightened Grow Zone in an area of life, get ready to enter into your own flow state! We could call this one a Grow State. Bring on nature’s ecstasy.
“The best moments in our lives are not the passive, receptive, relaxing times… The best moments usually occur if a person’s body or mind is stretched to its limits in a voluntary effort to accomplish something difficult and worthwhile.” – Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
An important part of flow is the relationship between challenge and skill. As we evolve in our Grow Zone, this is a key element in keeping our attention. To stay in a flow state, one must respect the natural progression of their skill level and raise their level of challenge to meet it.
This helps to describe why things we once loved, or once loved doing, have lost their appeal. When you exit the sweet spot, it either became uncomfortable as a hair in your mouth or as boring as queuing up at the post office. Keep the things that are important to you in the sweet spot!
“Unless you try to do something beyond what you have already mastered, you will never grow.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson
(Never grow, and never Flow.)
