Flow — the marvelous blend of body and mind, exemplified in an amazing video

There’s words about flow. And there’s the experience of flow. Both help us understand what flow is all about. But a video I learned about in the “Surfing the Moment” chapter of In Search of Now: The Science of the Present Moment by Jo Marchant provides an unforgettable vision of flow.

Here’s how Marchant describes the video.

In a seven-minute online film called ‘The Ridge’, Scottish trials cyclist Danny MacAskill rows across a remote loch on the Isle of Skye before hauling his mountain bike out of the boat onto the windswept beach. Once in the saddle, he wheels away from the water onto jagged rocky slopes, heading where no one has dared to cycle before — the dramatic Cuillin mountain ridge.

Soon he is hopping from boulder to boulder, crossing chasms over narrow branches and winding up steep crags most of us would struggle to scale on foot. He’s balancing, turning, leaping, propelling his wheels upwards with movements entirely natural and faultless, as if he and the bike are one entwined creature.

At the top of the ridge he flies along a narrow rocky path barely a foot wide, with mountains, sea and clear skies laid out before him and sheer drops of hundreds of metres either side. Any hesitation or slip would be fatal. But there is only harmony with the landscape, and the result is magical to watch.

Enjoy the magic.

Marchant then speaks of how flow can be experienced by those of us who aren’t daredevils like Danny MacAskill.

In this exploration of Now, we’ve been considering some different ways to connect with our immediate surroundings and feel fully ‘in the moment’. We’ve looked at how drugs, meditation, seizures, and electrical stimulation can all shrink our awareness to an immediate instant, while our wider sense of self and time break down.

These are al pretty extreme methods for influencing or distorting brain activity. But there is another, quite different route to becoming immersed in the moment. It’s an absorbed state that forms part of our daily lives, and that one we drop in and out of all the time. Rather than forcing a shift in our brains through chemical or electrical means, or extreme training regimes, this kind of Nowness seems to bubble up naturally.

It comes from our bodies: from our dynamic experience of acting, moment by moment, in the world. I’m talking about ‘flow’.

I’ve tried to find flow in my Tai Chi practice, as I wrote about in “Tai Chi has taught me that flowing is way better than forcing.” This fits with a basic principle of flow: it’s about doing.

Crucially, to experience a flow state we have to be doing something. Psychologists have concluded that it takes clear goals, a feeling of control over our actions, and detailed sensory feedback; we have to be continually perceiving, adjusting, and responding to our surroundings. But not just any activity will do: the situation must be open, creative, challenging.

If what we’re doing is too easy or repetitive, we’ll get bored and our mind is likely to wander onto other things. If it’s too hard, we’ll struggle to meet our goals and feel anxious and overwhelmed. For the utter absorption of flow, we must find the sweet spot in between: where our skills are perfectly matched to (or perhaps slightly exceeded by) the demands of the situation. Only then can we lose ourselves in the dynamic stream of action and response.

Marchant says that in a flow state we lose our sense of time, along with a loss of self. The activity is an end in itself, as I wrote about in my post about flow in Tai Chi.

Probably the most important thing I’ve learned from my Tai Chi practice is this:

My primary goal throughout my daily life shouldn’t be to achieve this or that, because often that isn’t under my control. Rather, I need to focus on feeling a sense of flow and softness in whatever I’m doing, rather than a sense of tightness and tension.

Of course, being relaxed often leads to a better outcome. But this is more of a side benefit.

I’ve learned that if I view flowing and softness as a means to an end, this produces rigidity in me, because now I’ve attached myself to that goal in much the same way someone grabs hold of a person with a strong grip.

It’s tough to flow when you’re attached to something.

So what works better for me is to view flow as a good in and of itself. If I feel myself getting tight, anxious, upset, or tense, I try (but not too hard!) to relax, let go, flow — trusting that whatever comes from this will be fine, and without worrying very much about what that whatever might be.

Marchant concludes her chapter about flow with a discussion of how eastern philosophy views letting go of the self in flow states, up to and including death, a focus of the samurai. Then she says:

There’s a fundamental difference, though, between the eastern view and the scientific paradigm we’ve been learning about. Is the blissful connection that we feel during flow states really just a reflection of efficient error correction? The conventional view would be that our experiences, no matter how Now-focused or ecstatic, are still part of the brain’s ‘controlled hallucination’.

All of perceptions are inferences: models or hypotheses as to the true state of reality. Our feelings of presence and flow are just another kind of representation, like pictures playing inside our heads, separate from what’s really going on ‘out there’ in the world.

But many eastern philosophers would disagree. Buddhists argue, for example, that these moments of flow and connection mean something more: that when we let the self go, we get closer to the true nature of how things are. Katagiri described as ‘oneness’ the flow we feel during activities such as skiing or playing piano.

‘There’s something deep there,’ he said. ‘You experience no-self consciousness… nature and you melt into one.’ Then you always want to do it. ‘There’s no reason to ski; you just really want to ski”

Katagiri would have agreed with today’s active-inference theorists that the self is an illusion, remade every moment. There’s no separate, persisting entity making decisions, he argued, just previously existing ‘conditions’ which connect each moment to the next. But he thought that when we enter a flow state of mind — letting go of self and other, past and future — we don’t just switch one kind of model for another.

We’re finally perceiving the ‘real’ nature of time. That’s why it feels so joyful, he said, and that’s why we love even just watching other people’s flowing performances, such as a gymnast competing on a high bar. For a moment, we too can be caught up in the flow and forget ourselves, when our heart leaps and we see what life really is.