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New Findings on Flow: Mindfree Creativity

3:14 New Findings on Flow: Mindfree Creativity

In this episode, Orna Ross unpacks “creative presence”—the simple, moment-to-moment awareness that silences self-criticism, steadies focus, and primes the brain for the hallowed state of flow. Discover the neuroscience linking presence to peak creativity, hear small practices that can turn chores into gateways for inspiration, and ask yourself: what would change if I started measuring my days by presence (not productivity)?

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Transcript:

Orna: Welcome back to the Go Creative Podcast, and today I want to talk to you about new findings on flow. Mind free creativity is how I'm loosely thinking about it in my mind. So yeah, we have been talking about flow now in creative circles as creatives and creativists for quite some time.

And it was a concept that was always there, really right through creative studies, the early ones that go back to the end of the 19th century when creativity began to emerge in psychology. But creativity, innovation, all these kinds of words have always been loosely bandied about. And it wasn't until the Hungarian psychologist with the very difficult to pronounce Hungarian name Mihály Csíkszentmihályi. He studied painters, first of all, and noticed how absorbed they got in their work, so absorbed that they forgot to eat lunch and various other things. And he coined the term ‘flow' or perhaps not coined it, but he certainly brought it to everybody's attention, highlighted it, foregrounded it in a way that it hadn't been before, and he was really interested in that whole effortless time- warping kind of absorption.

And so things moved on then a little bit, and what we are looking at now and what I'd like to explore a little bit in this podcast, and we'll be exploring it in an applied way in the workshop next week, next Thursday. What I'd like to talk about is how things are turning around a little bit and this concept of creative presence, which is very close to flow.

, The two are really you could say side by side, interact ive, mirror images of each other. Whatever way you want to think about it, I'm going to propose how I think about it. And then these matters are by no means set in stone. And you may think of it quite differently, and if you do, I'd love to hear about that.

To talk about what I want to talk about today, which as I say, is connected to flow, but is something else, i'm going to use the term creative presence, which is something that I use throughout the Go Creative! Program. And if we think of flow as being that fully engaged, process in which we forget about time. We are caught up in what we are doing. We are full of joy. We can see when we look at the. Brains of people who are engaged in such activities, which tend to be just about four to 14% more difficult than what they are normally used to. In other words, slightly out of their comfort zone, but not too far out of the ir comfort zone.

These are the conditions that encourage flow. Creative presence. When I'm talking about that, what I'm talking about is a moment to moment heightened awareness during what I'm calling creative activity, but I don't mean by that art. I'm not talking about Dr. Mike's painters. I'm talking about you, me and everybody as we go about our day, the creative activity that generates our awareness of the moment that we are in. That's what I'm talking about when I talk about creative presence.

So yeah, the thing about flow… let's define that as what occurs during an enjoyable, engrossing activity. Whereas presence is the awareness that is available to us when we are in any moment at all.

Harvard' s helen Langer, is the person that I think of who has expanded the thinking around flow into this world of creative presence. And she comes at it from a mindfulness perspective and she also is interested in artists, this time in musicians and she did experiments around mindfulness and high functioning performers, musicians and her research showed that a performance in which the musician felt really present was measurably more engaging for the audience as well as more enjoyable for the actual performer musician themselves, much more so than a performance that's technically perfect, but done a bit more in a rote kind of a way.

So in other words, she found that the act of being present the creative presence that the musician felt made the art more alive, both for the musician and for the listeners. So what I wanted to suggest, is that creative presence comes at this the opposite way around. Both Langer and Dr. Mike accentuate the flow is not just for artists or athletes, that it is a universal human state and that's the most important thing to know about it.

It is a state that can happen to anyone in any meaningful activity, was how they think of it from, Himalayan mountaineers to. Shepherds in the Dolomites to Dominican monks. All of these different communities were worked with and experimented with, and they all reported very similar states that state of wrapped engagement that we call flow.

But creative presence, as I said, comes out the other way around. Creative presence actually brings the presence to any activity. So flow sees it as being a certain set of conditions will lead to creative flow which makes you feel more alive and more present. But the conscious act of creative presence, actually generates the awareness and the feeling, and that leads to flow.

psychological research calls this a creative disposition because it's a skill you can cultivate. It's not a gift bestowed on the unique people we call creatives. And it's not rare. It is a universal human skill that can be tapped into. And what they find is that when you tap into this state of awareness, your subconscious comes more to the surface and everything becomes more playful and letting go of your critical faculties becomes easier.

You are less hampered by judgment because at core, creative presence is a state between the thoughts or beyond the thoughts. You are for a moment, mind free. And the irony of being mind free is that you can never get there by saying, ‘I'm going to stop thinking' because your mind, your brain will make thoughts –and thank heavens it does.

But by paying detailed, concentrated, focused attention to any activity, not just painting, not just art, not just things you love to do, not just climbing mountains, not just meditating if you're a monk, but anything, cooking, cleaning making this podcast, engaging awareness in the moment completely in whatever you are doing that is creative presence. And that state of creative presence creates the conditions for flow to happen.

So the common thread between both flow and creative presence is that full engagement in the moment but the difference is that the most ordinary task can be done with creative presence and that makes what would be an ordinary moment extraordinary.

It's the creative presence widens all our perceptions and our faculties, so they come alive. We actually feel, and experience even beyond felt emotion. We have that sense of awareness and when deeply felt, and with deep awareness, it can be really sublime.

So there's a lot of fold over between presence and flow. Neuroscientists find the same cocktail of brainwaves and chemistry in both so alpha and theta waves, which are the calm but alert brainwaves, that mix of calm and alert .

When in that state, we find that the default mode network, the everyday thoughts, the repetitive thoughts, the ruminative thoughts, the ego chatter, the self-consciousness, the surface self-consciousness is dialed down.

And the third feature of both is that we get these lovely reward chemicals that make us feel really good. So dopamine, endorphin, serotonin, you just get this feel good kind of glitter comes over the moment that makes it feel super special. And as I was saying.

So your brain will reward you for being here now. And there is a school of thought that things, that was meant to be the human condition and that maybe we're not there yet, we're evolving into that. And perhaps, or perhaps something went wrong in the development of the human brain leading to. The complete weight of the ego mind in our existence, in our experience of life and in our world, and that a lot of the things we think of as human nature could perhaps become unlearned.

And that's one of my great interests in creativity generally, and in creative presence in particular. So some really simple practices always like to. Offer you a practice in the podcast. Breath awareness is the most obvious. So literally just as you breathe now, just stop everything else and bring all the attention that's half seeping everywhere else, just on the fact that you're taking that breath.

So it's just watching it. You're not changing it in any way. Just seeing, oh, there's a breath. Breathing in, I know I'm breathing in. Breathing out, I know I'm breathing out. Another thing to do is to do what you normally do, but close your eyes through some of it and pull your awareness in, as well as out.

So not. With a hard sort of going at a task. Let's take, cleaning, mopping down the counter, not going at it in a hard, mindless way while your thoughts are thinking about other things, but closing your eyes while you do it and becoming aware of those thoughts that are going through your mind as you're doing it, or becoming aware of your hand on the cloth, how it feels.

Sense awareness is another way into this and with eyes closed, can be a good way of becoming aware of the other senses. About 90% of our attention goes outta our eyes. So if we close down our eyes, we can begin to hear and smell and taste what's going on in our mouth, and in our person.

So all of these things are you are just little tricks. There are really loads of them and I will put some in the show notes and also we will be investigating some of these practices in the workshop. As I said next Thursday. If you're able to come along live, that will be marvelous.

So yeah, just realizing I think most of all, that presence can be something that you can enjoy at any time. At any time. And so you don't have to do anything except just be where you are and be aware that you are where you are and that that positive act will help you to let go of thought. Thought will automatically fall away and flow will automatically come in to take its place.

Study after study at the moment — with over 10,000 participants in one that I just was reading about recently– every single one of them show that this sort of regular presence practice raises the baseline for flow for everybody and lowers the stress, for everybody. Remarkably consistent results cross-culturally across time and place.

And so I'd like to leave you with a question. Just what would happen to your days if you started to measure your presence in the day rather than your productivity. Just ask yourself that question and see what shifts.

What is this workshop I've been talking about all the way through?

It's June 5th. Next, it's 5:00 PM UK time. First thursday of every month, I do a go create a workshop for my paid patrons. And it is followed by an open studio where people can bring their creative problems and challenges. So I would love to see you there. If you'd like to know more, go to or na ross.com/go creative if you can't be there.

Email me your challenge. What's going on for you at the moment, creatively, what are you trying to make and what's coming up for you that's worthy of talking to somebody else about: orna@ornaross.com. And maybe we'll pick it up and bring it to the hot seat in the workshop.

So thank you for listening as ever, and until next time, stay present and go creative.

Take care. Bye-bye now.

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