The 7 Sensations of Flow: In Honor of a Legend
October 26, 2021 | Cornelia Cannon Holden, MDiv
A legend in the field of flow science passed away last week. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, born in 1934, was a renown Hungarian American psychologist who coined the term flow — defined as a blissfully optimized cognitive state where individual “attention becomes ordered and fully invested” because “goals are clear, feedback is relevant, and challenges and skills are in balance.” In short, it’s the zone between boredom (too little challenge and too many skills) and anxiety (too much challenge and not enough skills). We keep his legacy alive with how we show up to our lives. In honor of his work and the significant contributions he made to the fields of psychology and optimal performance, I wanted to take a pause to reflect on the seven sensations commonly associated with flow. So, here’s to Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and staying in the flow zone!
When you experience flow, you feel some or all of the following seven sensations. The first is an experience of total absorption where you feel completely connected to the present moment and you no longer have a sense of self-consciousness. Your sense of self falls away and you experience what Rūmī describes as “being nothing.” You feel “utterly lost in the present,” to borrow from New Zealand poet Sylvia Ashton-Warner. And hierarchies of importance fall away such that as Abraham Maslow writes, “the experience is not structured into relatively important or unimportant aspects, central or peripheral, essential or expendable.” You are so fully absorbed that you no longer need to categorize and divide. What matters seems to flow harmoniously and effectively without needing to be ranked or judged.
A feeling of unity is the second sensation. The absorption you experience unifies your field of awareness and you feel as though you’re no longer actually doing the thing you’re doing. As a result, you feel more like what you are doing is merged or “melting together,” as Maslow says, with who you are. There is no meaningful sense of self and other or subject and object. You have dropped into the field of awareness and become embedded into it. This experience is best represented by a child sitting fully absorbed in a sandbox at play. She has no sense of separation between herself and what she is doing.
The third sensation is heightened clarity where everything becomes crystal clear, even lucid. Your field of perception becomes open and clear: Like dialing into the right aperture and focus of a camera lens, your attention becomes crisp. Timothy Gallwey, author of The Inner Game of Tennis, writes, “So it is with the greatest efforts in sports: they come when the mind is as still as a glass lake.” In flow, our minds become momentarily still like an undisturbed body of water. Without learning how to stabilize in the heart-centered awareness of true flow, this mirror-like quality of the mind is short-lived.
The fourth feeling is a sensation of timelessness. You feel like time warps either by slowing down or speeding up. Rather than experiencing time as a chronological, sequential and linear phenomenon—what the Greeks call kronos—you experience it as an all-encompassing, still, open, vast, circular space-time continuum without beginning or end. This temporal vastness—what the Greeks call kairos—refers to the numinous, or sublime, quality of time. All the micro-instants that make up linear time, but are of a “wholly different order,” are the doorways through which creation and therefore, creativity, is born.
When you’re in flow, you’re riding the wave of countless sublime micro-opportunities which French moral philosopher Vladimir Jankélévitch describes as “instants.” You do this in such a way that you no longer experience time chronologically. Instead, you experience a quality of timelessness “where being ceases to be something and where nothing ceases to be nothing.” If this sounds trippy, it is. But it’s also something we all experienced when we were lost in play as children.
The fifth is a sense of effortlessness where you feel like what you’re doing is happening without you even having to try. “Striving, willing, straining tend to disappear,” says Maslow, and “experience happens without being made to happen.” It is from this unified field of awareness that experience seems to flow forth from within you.
The sixth sensation during experiences of true flow is inner and outer peace. You feel a sense of deep inner coherence, harmony, and ease. The judging, critiquing, doubting, editing, and triple-checking of your cognitive mind is temporarily off-line and you feel like you’ve dropped into a state of liquid grace where, as twelfth century mystic and saint Hildegard of Bingen says, “there is a music of Heaven in all things.” Stroke survivor and neuroscientist Jill Bolte Taylor says she discovered that “peace is only a thought away“ when she was able to "silence the voice of [her] dominating left mind.”
The seventh sensation is a feeling of heightened continuous awareness where your clear attention, focus, and concentration are stabilized inside your whole being, especially in your heart. Author and theologian Cynthia Bourgeault writes, “It is only when we do the work of guiding our minds into our hearts and sustaining our attention in present moment awareness that a flow state operating system can run.” From this more stable operating system we perceive differently. We see with a contemplative mind, eye, and heart: we come to recognize that everything—including us, others, and the universe—is an integrated whole composed of parts and possibilities in an ongoing liquid dance of being and becoming.