Today's technique is Feel Flow, and just to be as clear as possible, let's define our terms a little bit. Let's define what Flow means. Flow refers to any change in sensory experience.
By its definition Flow is not unusual or mysterious. If a sensation changes in intensity, for example, if it grows weaker or stronger, that's Flow. If your thoughts speed up or slow down, that's Flow. If a mental image fades in and fades out, or changes, morphs in some way, animates, that's Flow. If you see a car driving by and you notice the movement of the car, that's Flow.
Any force that pushes out or pulls in can be considered to be a form of Flow, so even uncomfortable inward or outward pressures are considered forms of Flow, including when you get distracted. What happens? Your mind gets scattered. Right? Your attention gets scattered. Or when you get obsessive about something, what happens? Your mind is gripped by this particular thing.
At the deepest level, that is Flow. It involves a kind of a gripping movement or a kind of a scattering movement. You can learn to track that with your attention. So you don't need to think of Flow as a special type of sensory experience. It's something that you may or may not detect within any given sensory experience. It's really about your perception. If you are aware of movement or force within an experience, then that experience is flowing. And it can occur in visual, auditory, or body experience.
It can occur within an active state, but it can also occur in restful experience. For example, you may have the experience of sinking into relaxation. Right? That "sinking into" is an unfolding process that you can track and go along for the ride of.
It can also occur within a subjective or objective experience like I described earlier. If you notice a car driving by, and you are drawn to the movement of that. If you notice the breeze through the leaves, and you're drawn to the movement of that, or a siren outside your window, and you're tracking the movement of that, then it's flowing.
Now with that understanding of what Flow is broadly, let's talk about the technique that we will be doing today. We're going to be doing a technique called Feel Flow, and that means that you are focusing on the flow of body experience. You're noticing how physical sensations change. You're noticing how emotional sensations change. The movement of the breath, of course, is always available. That's always in motion. You're also noticing how your attention moves through the body space, so you're narrowing your focus just to the movement qualities in your body.
Feel Flow fits into this broader set of techniques. This gives us a great chance to open up the system of techniques that are available to you through Unified Mindfulness. Up until now,
in this course you have done techniques that fall under one particular category, and that's called Appreciate. But if you look at your handout, you'll see that there are four quadrants. There are a set of techniques within each of those quadrants. The quadrant helps you get the big picture of all of the world's contemplative approaches.
We've got these four categories: Appreciate, Transcend, Express, Nurture. In the next few weeks, you're going to try these other categories. But today, Flow. Focusing on Flow in the body, Feel Flow, is in this category of Transcend.
In See Hear Feel, you focus on any experience, and you turn towards that, and you apply Concentration, Clarity, and Equanimity to any experience that's arising in any of the three sense categories. Feel Flow is different. It's more like what you've already experienced with Feel Rest where you're narrowing your focus range. This time, it's just to the Flow experience in the body, just to the movement in your body.
Why is this in the Transcend category? If you think about transcendence as overcoming, let's just start there. Typically, when we're uncomfortable, psychologically, we can say to ourselves, "This too shall pass. This is gonna pass. I'm gonna get through this. I'll get to the other side of this.”
That's helpful. It's a helpful intellectual exercise, but it's more profoundly helpful to do the perceptual exercise of discovering that “this too is passing.” In other words, that our discomfort is actually, right in this moment, passing away. Perceptual experience is much more profound for us than simply intellectualizing, "Oh I know I'll get through this"—that kind of thing—telling ourselves, conceptualizing.
When you get really good, when your skills are high (Concentration, Clarity, Equanimity), you can go along and track the flow of your experience so completely that you get completely absorbed in it. You lose yourself in it. You don't “fixate the limited identity.” We've all had these experiences. When we've gotten immersed in an activity that we really enjoy, that's a common time for that to happen.
[The following is not in the audio. This is a suggested place to put in a personal moment.]
Make it personal: Can you think of a time when that has happened for you—maybe on a run or playing an instrument? Anyone feel like sharing an experience they had like that?
Or tell a personal anecdote about how the experience of Flow has positively affected your daily life.
[Back to the audio]
What we're saying in practicing Flow is, you can do something intentionally to cultivate that, so you get into the flow more consistently. So that you lose yourself and get absorbed deeply into your experiences more effortlessly and more fully.
As we do that, we begin to know ourselves as Flow. When we begin to track it really closely, we notice that actually all our experience is composed of Flow. You can sort of think about the fact that we can know matter in its waveform or its particle form. You could say that when we're tracking Flow, we are knowing ourselves more as a wave and less as a particle. That's a way to understand, just from a perceptual perspective, what's going on, and it's very pleasant.
What are the benefits? Well, it can be energizing and rejuvenating and deeply pleasant. That's rewarding. That motivates you to practice. And it can also help release stored tension. It can help you to not get stuck in physical or emotional pain. When you are able to track the slight shifts in the pain, then you can participate in those shifts, and you find a greater release in the process. You don't get as stuck. There's not as much resistance, so there's not as much fight going on around the discomfort.
You're also encouraging Flow to deepen and grow just by focusing on it. You're developing a palate for it. We go back to this chef analogy with Sensory Clarity. When you develop a palate for it, you're refining your appreciation for it.
Make it personal: You as the teacher, can choose a different analogy from the chef analogy that captures the concept of sensory clarity.
You're deepening it, and you're allowing it to grow, so Flow gets more tangible. You also can experience greater emotional resilience and bounce. Your emotional life is less sticky. You get less caught because you've practiced how to move through the experience and to recognize the experience of your emotional life as changing.
Of course, overall, by doing this practice, focusing on Flow, you are developing the fundamental skills of Concentration, Clarity, and Equanimity. That leads overall to a more fulfilling life. That reduces your suffering, and all the wonderful benefits that you get from this practice, generally.
What are its practical applications in daily life? Well, it's fun to detect right after exercise. I highly recommend that—it's a good spot. After exercise, we tend to get this nice buzz, after yoga or after running or whatever it may be. You can take advantage of that. You can notice the pleasant buzz of energy in your body, and by doing that, you get more fulfillment from it.
Make it personal: What times or situations might you, the teacher, recommend as an opportunity to detect Flow, based on your experience?
Flow in the body is also always available because of the breath. If you are someone who likes focusing on the breath, then you can notice the breath from the perspective of Flow, of change, and that can be very interesting. You can also notice the movement of the breeze through the leaves or the movement of water or the movement of traffic. You can
start to notice all the times in life where there is movement happening, and you can just focus in on the movement aspect of what's happening. That can get pretty interesting.
It gets more and more pleasant over time, and it can also help you prevent burnout because there's less fight going on, like we talked about earlier. And it has the potential to be a positive bio-feedback loop because the more you feel Flow and the more pleasant it gets, the more you want to practice.
The one thing to watch out for, though, as you're practicing, is to imagine that this technique is more important than others. Some people may say, "Oh well transcendence, isn't that the whole point of this? Shouldn’t I just focus on Flow all the time?" But Flow can be subtle, and it's not always available, so it's not always the right technique for the moment. You have to recognize what you're going through and make a practical decision about what's going to be best for you at any given time.
Sometimes we try to practice on Flow, and it's just too subtle. It's just not there. Sometimes Flow gets so intense, it makes us uneasy. We get overwhelmed, so if that happens, then you can choose to anchor your attention away from the Flow if you want to. You don't have to continue to focus on it.
You may also want to try to yield to it if you can, see if you can let it get intense. Think of it like a jacuzzi bath. Literally, when we sit in the jacuzzi, it's very pleasant, and we easily surrender to it because we know it's healing.
We can think of Flow as like the alka-seltzer for the body. You want to try to open up to it. Just be aware that sometimes it can get pretty intense, and if it does, you're free to back off from practice or anchor your attention onto something else. In any case, it will pass, to go back to that useful psychological paradigm.
Even the Flow, even the pleasant stuff can be scary sometimes, and you do your best to work with it or step away from it and know that it's temporary. Just remember this principle of “recycle the reaction.” To remind you, if you are having a reaction to the intensity of the Flow, that can only come up in See, Hear, or Feel. You can work with that reaction. If you find it frightening, see if you can detect where that fear is located, etc. You want to get into the habit, when challenges present themselves, of knowing how to work with them—having confidence in your ability to work through them effectively.
But it's rare that Flow is unpleasant. Usually, it's deeply pleasant. One of the most obvious ways you notice it in the body is this pleasant tingling or waviness or bubbly-ness, kind of a champagne bubble quality that you might detect in the body that gets very tangible, very pleasant.
Make it personal: Has anyone ever experienced a pleasant Flow of energy in the body as a result of practicing meditation? (If “yes”) It’s very pleasant, isn’t it?
Or tell a personal anecdote about how detecting Flow has had a positive impact on your life.
How do we practice? Well, we are finding Flow in the body by noticing any and all movement in physical or emotional sensations. The change can be subtle. Even a slight shift in intensity or a slight movement from place to place qualifies as Flow. It doesn't have to be this big thing. You can always focus on the movement of the breath or your heartbeat. That's always available. Also, as you move your attention from place to place in the body, you can notice the movement of your attention, and you can notice the change in where your attention is, and what you're detecting there.
With an emotion, you can track the way the emotion changes as it gets stronger or weaker. Does it move location? Does it grip your attention? Does it change in quality? Did you feel sad a moment ago and now you feel happy? Noticing those types of changes are part of detecting Flow in your experience. And you just apply Concentration, Clarity, and Equanimity to Feel Flow wherever you detect it—so across the whole body, in one local area of the body, or freely floating between locations in the body.
And if discomfort is strong and Flow is subtle, you just do your best to notice any subtle changes in the discomfort to strengthen your Concentration, Clarity, and Equanimity. And of course, you're always free to shift to a different technique, if you're not finding a productive way to work.
Finally, mental labels. If you choose to use mental labels as we're practicing now, the label would be Flow, if you're detecting physical or emotional Flow. But if you're really not detecting any, you can just use that label Feel.
With that, any questions before the guided practice?
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