Tag Archives: Flow State

A Practice for Starting Your Day

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Updated June 26th, 2020  Have you noticed it’s often difficult to overcome a bad start to the day, and that as the day begins so shall it most likely go? This makes the first moments of waking up in the morning a perfect time to remember and practice slipping into the Observer state. Particularly in these troubled times, sleep may be disturbed, dreams may put you into a bad mood that can carry through the whole day, unless you have a way of cleansing your mind and resetting your emotions before you get out of bed.

Observer state is a mindset in which we are less caught up in the process of our emotions, and are able to simultaneously observe and analyze them somewhat impassively. Wearing the Observer lens makes us more effective and creative at changing the conditions that cause negative emotions. It also makes us more able to flick into the Zone, where our performance and creativity are sparked and further upshifted.

So how do we get into the Observer state? Here’s what works for me. I begin by remaining in that transition state from sleep to wakefulness, avoiding the use of language orally or mentally, and filtering out any distractions. I stay focused on the feeling of whatever dreams I’ve had, and recapture whatever images I can from those dreams. Try this yourself upon waking. Then stay with the feelings and images a moment or so longer until you can get a hunch as to the possible meaning of those dreams — what is the message from your subconscious?

It helps if you can then move your thoughts on to the day ahead while still in bed, still sleeping as far as anyone can tell, in that transitional state. Get a fix on the possible significance of your day, what you can potentially accomplish. Visualize an upside outcome that will make you happy when you go to sleep next. This is your strong intention, your Will. Picture it. Feel it.

Then imagine what could go wrong and come up with ideas as to how to deal with those challenges. This can be just brief flashes of an idea to be worked out in detail later. Making notes while they are fresh in your mind is often a huge advantage so I encourage jotting down (or keying in) a few thoughts as soon as you feel you have to actually open your eyes and get out of bed.

What keeps us out of the two higher states of consciousness, Observer and Flow, is usually the ego. This ego process is often driven by fear of failure in one form or another, and comes from excessive attachment, and perceiving past events as failures instead of embracing them as wonderful learning experiences. Practicing wearing the Observer lens helps us improve our ability to float upward out of this debris, gain perspective on it, and flow into the Zone.

Best to all.

Bill

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How can you seize the day?

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Updated June 12, 2020

Not just the “set the world on fire” days are important — you can seize the day every day – even in quarantine.

make every day count

Sometimes what will make you feel good and would serve as the day’s best strategic move actually begins with an insight. Imagine the type of insight that sparks a throbbing impulse to creatively optimize it in ways that will continually bubble up in your mind.

We have the power to make every day count and to feel like it’s one of those days by prioritizing our mental state over the to-do list.

Achieving this is mostly by remembering the intention to do so, and bringing your attention to the intention. Intention without attention goes nowhere.

Typically, when the To-Do List has supremacy over our Intentions, each day is kept from being a day of great strategic insight or other accomplishment. We’ve become slaves of the To-Do List!

How often do our To-Do Lists supersede all higher values present in our accumulated intentions sac? How often do our intentions mostly live in a figurative mindspace where they are saved like an Amazon Wish List and perhaps looked at about as often? This is what is happening on a grand scale every day that we stay stuck in the pervasive Acceleritis™ cloud.

Pragmatically, the reason for giving highest priority to one’s own mental/emotional state over the To-Do List is that without shifting into Observer state or Flow state, the quality of one’s work is not going to be world class and the day will not have been fully seized.

Optimizing each day includes keeping track of the key moment-to-moment tradeoff decision between the To-Do List and one’s mental/emotional state. By stepping back, reexamining your intentions and your attention, you will notice that you take more frequent breaks from the To-Do List and in so doing you get sudden rushes of brilliant insights and ideas.

Don’t you breathe more deeply now that you’ve merely entertained the notion of freeing yourself from mental slavery? Doesn’t that air feel good? Is a slight headache you take for granted strangely gone?

With more practice every day, we can all seize each day. Carpe diem!

Best to all,

Bill

Follow my regular media blog  “In Terms of ROI“ at MediaVillage.com under MediaBizBloggers.
Here is my latest post.

Do what you’re moved to do.

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Updated May 29th, 2020

One of the challenges of our current reality is the pervasive condition we call Acceleritis™ wherein we feel we never have enough time to do all the things we feel we ought to do.

Don't overthink it.

Even now, in self-quarantine, do you feel like you are always behind and have too much to do? Do you speed up your actions to the point of increasing errors that require fixing (which then slows you down and makes you feel even more behind with no apparent hope of ever catching up)?

You are not alone! We have a natural drive for closure, and the seeming impossibility of ever reaching closure on everything the mind desires closure on makes us uneasy at most times — but we have gotten used to that feeling.

During your work day or at play, are you often not sure what to do next? Try to not overthink it…

Do what most inspires you at that moment. Why? Because the chances are higher that you’ll be doing it in the Flow state, which never occurs when you are doing something because you should do it. I call that “doing it to get it out of the way”. Flow state only occurs when you are enjoying what you are doing, and doing it solely or mainly for its enjoyment.

If you’re in the grip of Acceleritis and therefore not in the Observer state, you may not know what inspires you more, X or Y or Z. The solution here is to just let your body go and watch what it does. The body often makes decisions before the mind is consciously aware of making the decision.

Don’t be driven by email/text/social media.

It has become all too easy to become driven by incoming email, texts, Tweets, Facebook and Instagram posts — meaning you don’t decide what to do next, you react to the ubiquitous digital input stream. This goes on all day and you become a willing slave to others’ priorities rather than your own. Instead, practice setting aside a time each day to deal with and catch up with emails and texts and whatever else is queuing up. This puts you in charge of what you do for the better part of your day.

Create a practice to step away from the to-do list.

What works best for me is meditation — where the mind observes itself, watching thoughts as they come and go. I find this is the most effective way to allow assimilation and closure of the most salient “anti-closures” bugging my mind subconsciously at any given point in time.

Like trying to remember a name, meditation does not work by “trying to do it”, it works by letting go of everything going on inside, and continuing to let go of thoughts/feelings/ images/hunches as they arise, watching them float away (or whatever imagery works best for you). From this effortless place comes clarity that often moves you closer to closure.

Next time you are overwhelmed, step back, and do what you are moved to do!

Best to all,

Bill

Follow my regular media blog “In Terms of ROI“ at MediaVillage.com under MediaBizBloggers. Here is my latest post.

Moving Beyond Fear to Happiness

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updated May 8th, 2020

The worldwide calamity has increased our tendency to live in fear. Fear is like an alarm clock, designed to alert us to make apt decisions soon. We don’t let the alarm keep ringing in the morning when it wakes us up, and the best reaction to fear is to focus objectively on what we can do. Fear is always linked to attachment, something we are afraid of losing, such as our lives, our loved ones, our livelihood, our lifestyle. But the real question is What action can we take that is the heroic and best response to the current moment? With the right self-observational techniques you can edge into a state of ultimate competency in meeting each moment, what scientists call the Flow state and athletes call the Zone – where you want to be at all times, but most especially in the present crisis. One way to achieve happiness in the present moment is to let it all go, assume that the worst will happen, but picture yourself standing strong and smiling through the worst that can happen. Distraction is always a problem but much moreso today when we are always crowded together at home (if we’re lucky to not be alone). This post delves into practical ways you can take yourself in hand and use your strengths to enjoy every second of life, otherwise what’s the point of wanting to live?

The two biggest blocks to the Zone/Flow state are distraction and attachment.

Release Attachment - Let it go. - Bill Harvey

Attachment is also the only block to happiness, joy, delight, fun, ananda (or bliss, from Hinduism and Buddhism) — the natural built-in target state for all of us.

Attachment blocks happiness because one is fearful of losing the things one associates with happiness and tacitly assumes are requirements for happiness. When we are attached, we are also angry at whatever is suspected or known to threaten or take away those precious happiness-causing things.

“I am really attached to Pippin” (one of my cats) is a true statement for me because I love her. To experience love is not necessarily to be attached, though. To avoid confusion and getting lost in wordplay about whether attachment is a good or bad thing (because the word “attachment” is associated with the word “love”), I am using the term attachment to mean the inability to separate love from attachment and the resulting anger/fear syndrome.

The difference comes from the importance we give to keeping the “things” that give us happiness. If we truly appreciate the joy that has been created by our loves, joy that has been creating other good things through spontaneous Flow state creativity (which emerges naturally from joy and from love) it is still possible to not worry about losing any of those “things”. In fact, when we are in that state of not fearing loss, we are truly free.

A Process for Releasing Attachment

A powerful contemplation technique offered in Mind Magic (download free PDF here) involves burning out one’s attachments by intensely envisioning and feeling the loss of each separate thing one is attached to. This requires setting aside alone time, without a sense of time pressure. It requires immersion, concentration, patience as you go over the same material again and again. It’s probably best to focus on one object of your attachment at a time.

Give your imagination free reign like in a daydream. Imagine and see yourself go through the experience of the moment you lose something you are deeply attached to and visualize how it might happen. See it vividly from the inside, the way you experience life. Feel the feelings. Watch yourself in the daydream, the things you say in that situation, and the way you say them, and how the other person responds if the particular attachment involves another person. Let yourself actually feel the loss as if it is really happening.

Each time you go over the same imagined loss experience, you give the situation a more intelligent response. In your later iterations of the exercise, you will start to act like the hero you are in the daydream of the loss. You will begin to feel differently about yourself from that moment on — more confident, more self-respectful, more courageous, in fact less prone to fear and anger.

Through this process, you realize you are no longer attached to a particular outcome because you now know how you will respond if what you had feared ever happens.

Release attachments. Let them go. Happiness is the off-the-scale self-evidently best state one can experience in the emotional dimension.

 

Alone Space VideosWatch short videos on cultivating Alone Space Contemplation.

 

Happiness to all,

Bill

P.S. It can take some time for you to feel the effects of this technique internally, due to the interconnections among various ego circuits in your head. Be patient and persevere. And be happy. smiley

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