Trust in the Flow
If you set a basketball on the floor and balance a pea on top of it, you would have a good representation of your conscious mind and your unconscious. (The pea being your conscious mind, and the basketball being your unconscious.)
The easiest way to explain the difference between the two minds is... Your conscious mind is anything you’re thinking about right now, and your unconscious is everything else you’re not thinking about.
What most humans fail to realize is that your unconscious handles 97% of all of your mental functions, and your conscious mind only 3%. Even these statistics are debatable, because recent studies have shown that the 3% once thought to handle your conscious processes isn’t controlled by your conscious mind. Your unconscious controls everything, and your conscious mind is a mere observer.
We deceive ourselves by rehearsing what we’re going to say to that attractive human when we see them next, believing who we fall in love with is our choice, hearing that song that reminds us of a special time, or verbalizing why we believe a piece of art moves us to tears.
Your unconscious begins storing all of your experiences from the moment you pop into existence, and it continues to do this until you die. It makes connections between all of your memories, links up moments in your life, and attaches emotion to this massive universe of thought.
You didn’t decide to be attracted to another human, falling in love was not a strategic process, the song that allows you to travel into the past to a specific moment was a happenstance, and that piece of art moves you because of the connections in your unconscious.
So, if your unconscious is the real mastermind of these experiences, why don’t we let it take over and do it’s thing?
We do. Some humans call this flow, the zone, getting lost in the moment, in the groove, on fire, or on your game.
I play the piano. When I first began lessons in the late 70s, I really had to practice. I spent a couple of hours every day practicing for the next week’s lesson. I remember getting irritated a lot because my fingers didn’t want to do what I wanted them to, and the notes on the page looked like an overwhelming foreign language. I kept practicing. After two years of this, things began to get easier for me. My fingers moved to the proper keys without me thinking about them. I didn’t read the notes any longer... it was like there was a direct highway from the notes on the page to the movement of my fingers. I remember the moment when I realized that I wasn’t just playing notes on a page any longer... I was feeling the notes and creating music.
That’s flow... The moment you tap directly into your unconscious without your conscious mind getting in the way. It’s like that moment when you realize you’re riding a bike without thinking which way to steer... you just ride.
All you have to do is trust that your unconscious knows what it’s doing and allow it to do what it does. You can only practice a skill so long before putting it into action, review your material so many times before taking the test, or rehearse the keynote that you’re nervous about before you speak to a room full of people. Surrender to your unconscious and allow yourself to feel that flow.
By surrendering, you allow yourself to experience life the way it should be lived... falling helplessly in love, seeing your reflection in the eyes of someone special and realizing they feel the same way about you, losing your sense of self in the beauty of a sunset, and knowing that this is what life is all about.
Allow yourself to relax into the moment in everything you do. Your play, your work, your relationships, and every interaction you have with another human being. Trust yourself. Trust your unconscious to get you to where you want to be. Losing yourself in flow will bring out the best you, your best performance, and your best understanding of yourself and others.
