Flow in Life
The Redemptive & revitalising elixir we all seek
This week, we had a wonderful Resonant Man Christmas session, with a surprise visit from Matthew in full costume as The Spirit of Winter. Dialling in to our theme of the week, we used playful exercises involving nonsense, gibberish, and music to break out of our serious selves and into a more musical approach to dialogue. These were the perfect conditions for our dive into the art of flow, something we believe is immensely valuable for our readers to know more about and experience.
Flow is the very sauce of life. It is the thing that artists, athletes, mathematicians, rockers, rappers, lovers, and fighters all seek after. It my lifeblood and the place where I feel most fully alive and myself.
The flow state is the vital force of The Resonant Man. It’s core to his armoury of Resonant Dialogue. Flow in dialogue proffers a number of powerful possibilities that shift it from everyday chat to a transformative experience.
For starters, and as the original flow theorist Csíkszentmihályi tells us, a flow state requires a state of deep presence and attention. This is something we build by opening a space for embodiment, emotional presence, and authentic dialogue. The powerful and simple medicine of an authentic ‘check-in’ helping us toward that integrated self in which action and awareness merge seamlessly.
The beauty of flow, found in music, lovemaking, mountain biking, and painting, is that it allows us to lose self-consciousness. We are immersed, and with that, we also find ourselves in an activity that is intrinsically rewarding, that feels agentic, alive, and responsive in real-time. We are in the dance.
As we approach the consummated fullness of a flow state, reality itself shifts. Our sense of time slows down and expands. The space of the dialogue can feel like it has opened out into a new quality of time. It’s in this space that the magic of flow can occur.
Flow and collective wisdom work in tandem. The collective wisdom field helps adduce flow from each person, who then, being in the state of flow, is able to deliver various unique and new synthesis to the space. New ideas, new expressions, and parts of ourselves can come together in the flow state.
However, the flow state can only arise at the edge: the ‘zone’ between our capacity and that which is beyond our capacity and within it, between our knowing and our not-knowing. What’s beautiful about this, for me as an artist, is I’m not just gaining insight into the world through flow—I’m really gaining insight into myself. That artefact, those words or rhymes that emerge at the edge of my flow state, feel like the truest expression of who I am. It’s like giving birth to yourself, giving birth to the future—discovering who we really are.
Our session caused me to more deeply recognise just how fundamental flow is to all of my life-work. I realised that flow is redemptive. We can spend days, weeks, or even years feeling out of flow, but one moment of flow, one immersive experience of kairos, can redeem all that came before. Flow heals. In that song, painting or dialogue we make sense of everything that came before us. We have made wholeness out of fragmentation, brought harmony between past and present, and in so doing, come to participate in the emergent future.
Resonant Leadership means becoming a vessel of healing and resonance that unlocks more flow in the world.
—Jacob
Wishing you a Merry Christmas,
The Resonant Man
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