This week’s article is the second in the series, Beyond Fitness: Fitness and Flow. This week I’ll talk about the Elements and Attributes of the Flow State.
Last week I defined Flow as:
1. An optimal state of consciousness where we feel our best and perform our best, and
2. An altered state of consciousness whereby an individual performing an activity is immersed in a feeling of energized hyperfocus, full involvement, and enjoyment of the activity
So what are some of the attributes that make being in a Flow State different from the everyday state of mind that we normally find ourselves in?
To begin with, when you are in a Flow State, you are normally focused on a single task — ONE THING and one thing only. In his definitive book, Flow, The Psychology of Optimal Experrience, author Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (Mihaly Cz from now on), says that you enter Flow by “changing the content of your consciousness”. He uses the term Psychic Energy to describe the ability to focus your attention on controlling that content and focusing on a single task.
Another attribute of Flow is that the experience is the end in itself. Yes, there is a goal involved, but it is the actual experience that takes you there that determines your State. Last week I mentioned that Alex Honnald, a young rock climber, ascended the 3000 foot vertical side of the El Capitan rock formation in Yosemite National Park, without any ropes, or other safety equipment. Yes, his goal was to reach the top safely, but it was the experience of the climb itself that kept him in the Flow State and allowed him to safely complete the climb.
I like the way George Leonard and Michael Murphy describe the Flow State (they didn’t call it that) in their excellent book, The Life We Are Given. They describe the experience this way:
“Like hunting animals, many artists and athletes exhibit a trancelike focus of attention, an indifference to discomfort and pain, and a remarkable forgetting of difficulty. The deep concentration, analgesia, and selective amnesia is analogous to — and may be derived from — the freezing and stalking behaviors, freedom from pain, and blindness to adversity that is evident among hunting animals.
Notice they included both artists and athletes. It’s not just athletes, and it’s not just physical. If you’ve ever watched jazz musicians who have never played together, get together for the first time and improvise off the cuff and come up with a terrific set of music, you are watching the Flow State in action. If you have ever watched a prima ballerina perform flawlessly, seemingly without any effort, you are watching someone in the Flow State. If you have ever watched a crew team rowing in perfectly coordinated form, you have watched Team Flow at its best.
Mihaly Cz summarized the attributes and elements of Flow as follows:
“The mark of a person who is in control of consciousness is the ability to focus attention at will, to be oblivious to distractions, to concentrate for as long as it takes to achieve a goal, and not longer.” — Mihaly Cz, Flow, p.31.
Next week, Part 3 will be about how and why the body and fitness combine to play such an important role in the Flow State, whether artist, athlete or day to day life. It will be followed in two weeks by how all this applies to you as seniors, how to get into Flow, and how to get the most out of your senior years and live a long and productive life filled with energy and flow — the feeling of living alive.
Watch for Part 3 in your inbox next Tuesday. Thank you for reading.