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“Contrary to what we usually believe, moments like these, the best moments in our lives, are not the passive, receptive, relaxing times—although such experiences can also be enjoyable, if we have worked hard to attain them. The best moments usually occur when a person’s body or mind is stretched to its limits in a voluntary effort to accomplish something difficult and worthwhile. Optimal experience is thus something that we make happen. For a child, it could be placing with trembling fingers the last block on a tower she has built, higher than any she has built so far; for a swimmer, it could be trying to beat his own record; for a violinist, mastering an intricate musical passage. For each person there are thousands of opportunities, challenges to expand ourselves.”
Csikszentmihalyi’s contemporary theory of flow, is defined as “intense experiential involvement in moment-to-moment activity” (Csikszentmihalyi, 2014b, p.15). A little different than what the modern-day community dubs as ‘mindfulness’, flow states of consciousness involve deep absorption during the passionate pursuit of an autotelic activity. An autotelic activity can be defined as an activity we do for its own sake of experience, rather than with the expectation of future benefit.
Many of us understand this state as being completely ‘in the zone’ while performing an activity that we are passionate about for the sake of experiencing it. Writers, artists, performers, and athletes are often toted to be in flow states when they produce their best work. However, if the motivations are extrinsic, meaning your motivation to succeed in said activity is controlled externally, it is short-lived. The aim is to engage in the conscious action or activity with intrinsic motivations- when you are doing something not out of future reward, but because you love doing it.
Like many psychological theories, this flow state is experiential and subjective in nature, thus it is difficult to measure without implicit bias and incorrect correlation of data. In a publication by Ria Cheruvu on The Neuroscience of Flow (Cheruvu, 2018, p.21), Cheruvu states, “Neuroimaging studies demonstrate that the neural correlates of experimentally induced flow experiences might not be similar across multiple autotelic activities. Consequently, it appears that while overall deactivation of certain regions of the frontal cortex could be characterized as a neural correlate of flow, the specific regions of the brain that are deactivated are not consistent across multiple autotelic activities and environments. For example, flow experienced through participation in tasks such as gaming might require different attentional processes, more vigilance, and rapid decision making (Yoshida et al., 2014) compared to flow in activities such as musical improvisation, which requires the use of spontaneous artistic creativity (Limb and Braun, 2008).”
To make the distinction, below, I speak of these differences in flow state that can be likened to my experience as the practitioner during a class as compared to instructing a class.
As a yoga teacher and practitioner with my beginnings in the roots of Hatha yoga asana, movement and postures served a supreme purpose whether it was rooted in therapeutic benefits or energetic benefits, there was succinct method and that method was oftentimes unchangeable, ie. a set sequence practiced repetitively over time giving you the ability to measure your own results.
After a steady, regular Hatha yoga practice for years, I stumbled into my very first experience of what I now consider to be a somatic flow state. It was dubbed as a Vinyasa yoga class. Prior to this experience, I had distinctly practiced most postures separately- in a start, stop format- keenly aware of alignment, using small physical adjustments to refine the posture that my body was experiencing and holding them for a certain amount of time. This vinyasa flow style class was a drastically different experience providing a unique kind of challenge- one that taught me how to move and use prana energetically, riding the wave of the breath physically to induce that state of effortless effort linking postures seamlessly together. It was more of a dance with some periods of holding to refine postures befitting the theme or potential peak posture of the class. The effortless effort came about when you surrendered your analytical mind to riding the wave of the breath and using that wave to move somatically throughout the class with a knowledgeable and skillful instructor. Repetitions occurred more frequently giving the body opportunities to expand, settle, and advance. Less emphasis was on alignment as the duration in a posture was shortened before shifting and moving into another.
It was this style that ignited my passion to dive deeper into the study of the full breadth and scope of Yoga. The more I practiced this style, the quicker I advanced in my postural practice. I learned so many different postures- some that I had not practiced before, and some where I had found refinement through the breath through a different lens of practice. All of which- to my peers and family at the time- appeared to be super-human strength with break-dancing like body positions. This flow state became second nature to me until a skilled teacher weaved the postures in a different manner giving me yet another lens of focus to practice the intensity of concentration needed to complete a complex sequence. Interestingly, the more proficient I became, the less I cared about the result with expectation of future benefit.
Throughout the past 9 years, this style of asana gave me the ability to enter the flow state regularly and helped to solidify a strong home practice. To this day, when I teach and instruct a group class in this style, I naturally enter a flow state while teaching and channel that creative energy when guiding students somatically through transitions and sequences. This requires the use of spontaneous artistic creativity; much like a musician being in flow during musical improvisation. The ability to improv and create simultaneously has given me innumerable benefits to help reroute the direction of a student’s practice within the confines of a group class. Much of it is intuitive, but without the use of knowledge obtained through long term practice and training- the result can be a poorly sequenced class that could hinder a student’s ability to experience the flow state and potentially cause harm to the body.
““Inducing flow is about the balance between the level of skill and the size of the challenge at hand” ”
Like anything else, too much of one thing can tip the scales to harm and just as one of my first teachers taught me, “Just because you can do something, doesn’t mean that you should.” This very point is often the push back given from other schools of yoga when critiquing the oftentimes strenuous and physically demanding styles of Ashtanga Vinyasa, Power Vinyasa, and Vinyasa yoga in general. Sometimes, not enough time is given for the body to acclimate to the posture before quickly moving on to the next. This point I agree with and with the current commercialization of the yoga industry and it’s current methods, we sometimes send out starry-eyed new instructors to teach before they may be ready to tackle all of the intricacies of instructing a group class with varying levels of practitioners that have varying levels of physical health.
I think that a good option to help with the above-mentioned criticism is to slow down the tempo when you are composing your class. The fine line is how slow is too slow, and how fast is too fast before a student is taken out of the flow state, if that is your intention. While I do see a shift in practitioners of the quicker paced styles of yoga to slower paced class forms, I find that this dance that we practice in Vinyasa is not completely reproducible in other styles of physical practice as the motivation and intention can be quite different. This is not to say that you cannot enter into a flow state in other styles of yoga asana, quite the contrary, but from my own experience, I liken Vinyasa to a direct experience in the flow state, just as I liken producing my best writing while being in the flow state.
