Enter the Flow
By Dr Jill Ammon-Wexler
Pioneer Brain/Mind Researcher
© 2006 All Rights Reserved

(The following is an excerpt from Dr. Jill’s new book to be released this Spring)

He walks quietly onto the stage totally unaware of the audience. The auditorium is suddenly extraordinarily quiet as thousands of people seem to hold their breath.

The slender, calmly intense man moves the chair in the center of the stage about one inch, removes the gleaming cello from its stand, then gracefully sits and cradles the instrument with the finesse and familiarity most of us reserve for our loved ones. 

There is a brief elongated moment of silence as he closes his eyes, then the audience explodes into applause as Yo Yo Ma’s bow coaxes the cello into song. The greatest cellist of our time has opened a concert in Vienna’s historic Hofburg Imperial Palace. 

Simultaneously thousands of miles away in Berkeley, California, an intense 11-year-old girl leans against the barrier encircling the Iceland Skating Rink and closes her eyes. An almost ageless look of peaceful wisdom comes over her face. When her clear blue eyes snap open, they seem to look into another time and place. She leaps forward on the ice, builds superhuman momentum, and gracefully catapults her body into the air in a perfect triple axel.

You've heard about how a musician loses himself in his music, an athlete goes into a trance to mentally rehearse their moves, a brilliant inventor or business person “stumbles upon” a brilliant idea, or a writer or painter describes how they “become one” with their creation. 

Just what are they doing? Why do they get that calm look on their face as though they are in another dimension? And why do so many say that time stops, and only their current activity or goal remains?

The secret is this: They have entered into the “flow” – one of the most enjoyable and valuable “super-conscious” experiences you can have. Learning how to enter into the “flow” has the potential to immediately improve the quality of your entire life ... and lay your goals right in your lap!

The father of the “flow”
In the late ‘30s in Europe, one unusual young man looked out through the chaos of war and began to ask his elders some interesting questions. His goal?  To understand why, despite all the conveniences and opportunities of our modern times, so many people are so very unhappy? Why do they end up feeling their lives have been wasted? And instead of being filled with happiness, why are their years spent in anxiety or boredom?”

Hungarian-born Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi (pronounced “chicks-sent-me-high”) resolved to find an answer. He earned a PhD from the University of Chicago, then spent twenty-five years interviewing people around the world from all walks of life ... from artists and chess masters ... to janitors and the homeless. He asked each of them to recall the happiest moments of their life, and to describe what created those moments.

He discovered an amazing sameness in their answers. “The best moments,” he writes in his book Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience, “usually occur when a person’s body or mind is stretched to its limits in a voluntary highly focused effort to accomplish something difficult and worthwhile.”

"Such experiences are not necessarily pleasant at the time they occur,” he explains. “The swimmer's muscles might have ached during his most memorable race, his lungs might have felt like exploding, and he might have been dizzy with fatigue ... yet these could have been the best moments of his life.”

Characteristics of the flow
Csikszentmihalyi describes the experience of being in the Flow as being completely involved in an activity for its own sake. Your sense of ego falls away. Time stops … or seems to fly by. Every action, movement, and thought follows inevitably from the previous one, just like playing jazz. Your whole being is focused and involved, and you're using your skills and talents to the utmost.

He determined that a state of flow occurs when we are totally absorbed in an activity that is neither too easy nor too difficult for us. If the activity is too easy, we fall into boredom. If it's too difficult, we become anxious or stressed. But it the activity is just right, we can find ourselves in the state of Flow, just like children at play.

And what Csikszentmihalyi stresses is this: The doorway into the Flow is through absolutely crystal-clear mental focus. Learn to Focus!

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