Flow

The emotionally and experientially richer aspects of life come with the unconditioned flow state, which is what’s going on when the volume of our mental chatter fades away and something deeply wonderful comes through us in its place. When the everyday mind stills, it leaves us alone with our inner, peaceable spaciousness, where we can meet our inner wild.

Generally speaking, flow is best summoned through something open-ended, without pre-planning, controlling, editing or in some other way having an agenda or attachment to outcome. It is an open-ended question posed to our inner wild.

Fundamentally, flow practice is just to start wherever we are, with what we’re feeling or sensing into in the moment, and then allowing whatever comes through us to arrive, following it wherever it leads us. My experience is that following flow leads to personal, intimate and connected experiences of the fecund spaciousness we all have inside of us.

The reason we need to practice flowing is that many of us are no longer familiar or comfortable with it, (though we were as children) and may experience not controlling ourselves as anxiety-inducing. So if we want to flow, we can support that intention by adopting attitudes and behaviors that help our natural selves to feel safe and welcome to come in, for example by dropping the requirement that our creations be beautiful or impressive. We encourage ourselves to get into the dreaming by relaxing and not placing pressure on ourselves to be any particular way.

In order to be able to flow like that, without a rigid agenda, and without too much anxiety, the creative frame has to be the right size for us (not too tight, not too loose). When the frame is just the right size for us, when we are safely contained, but also have enough room to experiment and move around within that safe container, then we are able to receive something from our inner wild, by following what unfolds out of us.

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Thumbnail image reverently appropriated from Margery Gill's illustrations for What Did You Dream by M. Jean Craig, cover