Mindfulness doesn't really resonate with me. I thought I might put my take on it here when the thread started but didn't want to be a negative voice in the conversation but as
JillyG has mentioned me.... well I don't need much encouragement.
I've had this conversation with my mate at work. She doesn't identify with it either. She reckons it's because we are both already in a place where mindfulness happens without us needing to know about mindfulness practice. She's a runner. What she tells me about running sounds very much like my experience of photography.....only much more exhausting.
Mindfulness doesn't resonate with me but flow does.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flow_(psychology)
It's not such a different concept. Flow is also about being in the moment. For me though, its almost about being absent rather than present. When I'm on a roll with photography (or anything) my self dissipates and what im doing becomes present in me. I'm almost literally lost in the moment. My self, my sense of 'I', shuts down and the process takes over.
I have this experience mostly with photography, drawing, coding and back in the day when i was a salesman, selling, but it's not limited to those.
An interesting thing happened to me last year a couple of months before I got hit by a bus. I'd been on mobitog maybe a year or more and had increased the amount of photos i took and processed as a consequence by a very large amount. One day I was walking down a passage I'd walked down countless times before and saw it differently. And everything looked subtly different, something about the scale, size, dimensions, I'm not sure and can't really put it in words but it was a qualitative difference. The quality of my visual world had altered somehow in a small but not unimportant way.
I didn't read too much into it at the time, Ive had mind altering experiences before and just chalked this up as interesting. Then I got hit by a bus and the kind of things I thought about on a day to day basis changed for several months.
My non-concious mind didn't let it go though. More than 12 months later, just a couple of weeks ago now, walking down the same passage where my perception had changed my brain shunted the thought into my consciousness that it was probably just a patch of neurons that wouldn't normally talk to my visual system connecting up because of all the extra practice id got from mobitog.
There's no big revelation from this story. For me, I channel photography, I don't do it, it almost does me. I lose my self and become the moment, the act.
I'll leave this with a picture of the eucalyptus tree I've seen every day for 5 years but which a year ago made the unusual firing of some of my neurons made me go "woah! What's going on with that?"
No edit.
View attachment 109170
Since Flow is a word already in common usage I didn’t recognize it had a specific meaning for you. I failed to follow the link you provided which would have helped.
I think Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi did himself a disservice by recycling a word that already had an accepted meaning for his much more expansive concept.
I came across mention of Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi just today in a program I’m following about neuroscience and meditation and immediately thought back to your post. Essentially we’re talking about the same thing.
The psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi first coined the word “flow” in the 1970s when he was studying why some people were prepared to give up material goods in favour of the experience of performing enjoyable acts.
When I looked at the list (below) I felt immediate identification with Flow with activities like playing music, downhill skiing, personal photography, and a few others.
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi suggests meditation as a way to promote flow.
There’s one small point of difference that might be important in that his is talking about the feeling of the state but not the quality of the result. Ideally we want both. To exercise Flow on the path to creative results.
In his book “ Finding Flow - the psychology of finding Flow in Everyday Life” the psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi says - “The important thing, however, is the attitude towards these disciplines. If one prays in order to be holy, or exercises to develop strong pectoral muscles, or learns to be knowledgeable, then a great deal of the benefit is lost. The important thing is to enjoy the activity for its own sake, and to know that what matters is not the result, but the control one is acquiring over one’s attention.”
Here’s a list of elements that help describe the experience of flow:
1- concentration founded and focused on the present moment.
2- the merging of action and awareness.
3- a loss of reflective self-consciousness.
4- a sense that one can deal with whatever arises in a given situation because ones practice has become a body of implicit embodied knowledge.
5- one’s subjective of time is altered such that the present is continuously unfolding.
6- an experience of the experience as intrinsically rewarding.
Hmmm, does that sound familiar? They all come directly from mindfulness.
“A balance must be struck between the challenge of the task and the skill of the performer. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
Now if you look at this, and going back to item 4, the same degree of Flow could be experienced by a novice photographer as a master, but the quality of the photos would be very different. It’s based on the “body of implicit embodied knowledge”.
What happens in the studies is when someone meets a challenge beyond their experience level, for instance realizing gvthey don’t know how to do what the want to do, they drop out of Flow. So as long as a person is doing things within their skill range they can remain in Flow.
As an aside, I remember a guitar player who felt he played better after smoking pot. He felt totally at one with his guitar and felt his playing was great. Nobody else agreed however as it sounded like he was playing a jumble of wrong notes. With some trouble he was convinced to give up the pot before playing and his guitar playing immediately improved. So this can be the difference between the feeling the activity gives a person compared to the actual results.
