S3 Ep08 - The Inner State of Flow

Welcome to the Zen Habits podcast, where we dive into how to work with uncertainty, resistance, and fear around our meaningful work. This is for anyone who wants to create an impact in the world and cares deeply enough to do the work. I'm your host, Leo Babauta, creator of the Zen Habits blog.

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Okay, so in this episode, we are hitting the heart of this season. We're talking about the Zen of productivity in this season, and what we're trying to do is get away from the traditional approach to productivity, which is: be disciplined, crank out a bunch of things, optimize your systems and routines, and really get good at just producing a whole bunch of stuff.

Now, I don't think there's anything necessarily wrong with that, but that's not the approach we're taking here. In this season, we're looking at the Zen of productivity, which is an inner state. Zen is not a productivity system, and I want to make sure that's really clear.

Every time I talk about the Zen of productivity, what I'm really talking about is: how do we find balance in our inner state? How do we find peace? How do we find compassion so that we can do the thing we are here to do—our purpose in life, which might be helping others? In the work that I do, I’m here to try and help as many people as possible.

Given that, how do I actually apply what I've been learning through my meditating, Zen study, and Zen practice, so that I can actually deliver my purpose? The key to that is your inner state. This is something that is often ignored. When we talk about how to get more productive, how to get more on task, how to get more focused, and all of that, we ignore the most important thing in that discussion, which is our inner state.

Imagine that you had an inner state that, to simplify, is either open or closed. Open is like, "Oh, I feel in love with life. I’m feeling wonder and gratitude. I’m feeling love for the work I’m doing and devotion to my purpose." These are examples of openness. It’s not an exhaustive list. I’m just giving you a sense of what openness can feel like. For example, if I’m out in nature and feeling in love with this moment—that’s openness.

Now, closed is when you've closed your heart, tightened your body, and are putting on the brakes. For example, if someone is aggravating you, typically what we do is shut down in some way to protect ourselves. So, there's an inner state of closedness. If the world is overwhelming us—the number of tasks, emails, messages, and all of these things—that overwhelms us and shuts us down.

If we’re frustrated, if we feel hurt by something someone else has done, or if we feel a sense of burden—"I have to do all of this stuff, and I feel like I can’t, but I have to force myself"—that is a state of closedness. I’m contrasting two different states. I’m grouping a bunch of experiences together, but in general, we’re either open or we’re closed.

Of course, we can be somewhere in between. This is not a black-and-white, binary situation, but let’s just pretend that it’s binary so we can have the distinction between open and closed. I think it’s a useful distinction, even if it’s not 100% accurate in how it describes reality.

So, open or closed. Now, give me a task to do. Change the inner state. If I’m open, that same task can be something I take on with a sense of enthusiasm, optimism, and a feeling of, "I can’t wait to do this because it’s serving something I really care about." I might have a sense of possibility and opportunity.

That’s how we might approach a task from the open state. Now, let’s imagine that we’re closed for whatever reason. Maybe we’re really stressed, not getting enough sleep, or feeling battered by life. Now we’re closed, and you put the same task in front of me. Now the same task is going to be a struggle.

I might not feel up to it. I’m going to avoid it, procrastinate, and distract myself. I’ll go to things that are easier, or to my favorite comforts. Or I might take it on but feel like I’m forcing myself. It’s like trying to force something through a closed tube. Imagine you have a hose, and it’s twisted, and you try to push water through it. Think about how much pressure that takes, how much force it takes to get the water through that closed opening. But now imagine the opening is open, the hose is unkinked. Now the water flows much easier.

The same amount of pressure can make the water flow with ease. That’s what we’re talking about—the inner state of flow. "Flow" can be defined the way it’s defined in popular psychology, as a state where you’re immersed in a task, feeling challenged at the right level, fully devoted to that task, focused, and in it.

It’s what happens when you do something and lose track of time, where hours can go by. That’s the state of flow, as it’s often described. But it can also be, as we talk about here, the state of an unkinked hose. Things can just flow much more easily.

When we can unkink the hose, when we can be in an open state, productivity is a byproduct. It’s not the end goal. It’s a byproduct of being open. If we’re open, we can have the hardest conversations with someone. If we’re open, we can exercise with a sense of delight. If we’re open, we can take on the biggest challenges with a sense of opportunity—"This is hard, but I’ve got this."

When we’re closed, it becomes an uphill battle. It’s swimming upstream. It’s exhausting. We can do it; we might be able to do the same amount, but it’s going to be so much more exhausting.

This is the secret: If you can get yourself to an open state, everything becomes easier. Now, I’m not saying you have to be in an open state all the time. That’s impossible. We’re human. We get closed sometimes in response to stress, hurt, frustration, all of that. So, we get into a closed state. But if you can get into an open state, everything becomes easier.

The same task, the same set of tasks—if you had five, ten, fifteen tasks, it becomes a lot easier. It doesn’t mean you crank them out faster—not necessarily, although you might. It’s not about the speed; it’s about how much energy it takes. Do you have to force yourself, coerce yourself to do something, or do you do it with a sense of gratitude, like, "I get to do this"?

That’s the difference. This is the hidden secret that most people don’t even realize. They don’t acknowledge that they are in a closed state. They just see the pile of things they have to do, and they force themselves to do it. That ignores the fact that you are in a closed state, and it’s going to take a lot more energy to do it. In fact, you might just resist it for a long time and then judge yourself for not being strong enough, disciplined enough, or whatever it is enough.

That’s what happens—we’re in a closed state, trying to force ourselves, and it’s exhausting. We have a sense of burden and overwhelm. This is actually the state most people are in, most of the time, and it makes everything harder.

So, what can we do about this? How can we get ourselves into an open state more often, maybe even on command? That’s not so easy, so I’m not trying to say that’s a guarantee here, but it is a possibility that you could get yourself into an open state.

The first thing is, you have to recognize: What is my state right now?

One of the things you could do is put an important task in front of you and say, "I am going to work on this important task." Then ask yourself, "How open am I to actually doing that? Do I feel the opportunity in it? Do I see how this is going to move something I care about forward in a meaningful way, even if it’s a small way? Do I see that this is serving the greater purpose, vision, or mission that I’m on? Do I see how this is helping myself and others? Do I feel alive in relation to doing this?"

If the answer is no, and I’m feeling a sense of burden or resistance, or "I don’t want to," that’s okay. We’re just noticing that my state is not open.

So we just notice. What I invite you to do is be in the practice of feeling. What does open feel like versus closed? Are you feeling open right now as you listen to this? Or are you feeling closed? Do you feel like taking on challenges? Do you feel the opportunity and wonder in life? If so, you’re in an open state.

Just notice how that feels. Start to tune into what openness feels like in the body.

Then, when you’re in a closed state, when things feel like a burden, or you feel frustrated, resentful, or too exhausted to take things on, notice how that feels. It’s not that one is better than the other. It’s not good versus bad, right versus wrong. We have enough of that in our lives. We’re just noticing what is.

So right now, if my state is closed, what does that feel like in the body? Start to tune into that state. It’s not just one kind of sensation in the body that defines open or closed. We’re not so binary as that. But there might be a group of experiences that you can group together as "open," and a group that you can group together as "closed."

I’ve mentioned some of the experiences, and we have labels for those experiences. I’ll mention those labels again. So, in the group of experiences we might call open, we have opportunity. We have possibility, like, "Oh, I see the possibility in this." We have hope, optimism, a sense of aliveness, excitement, adventure, and curiosity. We have a sense of opportunity—though I think I already said that. Excitement, purpose, love, compassion—these are things we might group into the open category.

Then we have things we can group into the closed category. Anything where it’s frustrated, burdensome, overwhelmed, or sad. Sad is not necessarily always closed, but often when we get sad, we start to close. You can be sad and open. You can be hurt and open. You can be angry and open. But we tend to tighten the body and mind in response to these things. Fear is another one that can actually be very open, but we tend to tighten as a response to fear.

Just notice: What does it feel like when I’m feeling afraid? We tighten in the body—in the torso, the jaw, the fists. We tighten against these things. Our nervous system also responds to these things, so we can say when I’m in the kind of fight-or-flight nervous system, that would be a closed state. When I’m in the calm, open kind of nervous system, that would be an open state. So the parasympathetic nervous system would be calm. I’m not feeling activated in terms of fight-or-flight—that’s the parasympathetic state, which corresponds with open states.

Okay, so we want to recognize it, and then we want to learn more about how it feels. That could actually be a practice you take on for a few days, or even a week. Just noticing: What does open feel like, and what does closed feel like for me in my body?

If you’re in a closed state, you might think, "Ah, I need to fix this." But actually, before you shift the state, I want to encourage you to befriend the state. That’s step two. The first step is recognizing what state you’re in and starting to learn more about it. The second is to befriend it.

This could be something you do for those few days or a week, where you’re noticing and learning what open and closed feel like. Could you befriend the closed state? If you’re feeling a sense of burden, we might think, "Oh, I shouldn’t feel this." If you’re feeling a sense of victimhood—"Why does life have to be so hard?"—slumped over, discouraged, these kinds of feelings are closed.

Instead of judging them and thinking we need to fix them, we can befriend them. That means, "Oh, it’s okay that you feel this way. This is a part of being human." Could I bring some curiosity, some compassion, some love to this?

As you listen to those words, the things I encourage you to bring to the closed state—curiosity, compassion, love, a sense of gentleness—are actually open states. We’re bringing openness to our closedness, not to fix the closedness, but because it deserves some openness, just like anyone does when they’re feeling closed. If we had a loved one who was feeling closed, wouldn’t we want to bring friendliness to them as well? Compassion, love, just a sense of accepting presence, with warmth, like, "You’re okay as you are, and I’m just here with you, not needing you to change."

Just like we might do for a loved one, we’re going to do the same with our closed state. It’s not something that needs to be fixed or changed. What if we could just be in that state?

In Buddhist traditions, this would actually be a tantric practice. We’re opening to a state we normally think of as negative, befriending it, and not needing it to change. Don’t equate "tantric" with sexual—although tantric practices can be brought to sexual activities, they can be brought to anything: anger, sadness, grief, pain, fear, and all of these might be closed states. Could you bring a sense of acceptance, friendliness, welcoming, love, compassion, curiosity, even gratitude to your closed state?

That’s something I would encourage you to practice for at least a week. You’re noticing and starting to understand how your closed state feels and bringing this open, welcoming practice to it for at least a week. If you can do that, you’ll be building a foundation for creating openness in your inner state for years to come.

But as long as you think that the negative states—closed states—are things to get away from, to push out, to force, to not like, or to say, "I shouldn’t be like this," as long as you're doing that, you’ll have a much weaker foundation to build openness on.

That’s what most people do. They want to get themselves to a state of openness—they might call it peace, compassion, love, or whatever—but they’re trying to do that by getting around their closedness, pushing it away, saying, "I don’t want this. I need to go to that. I don’t want chaos. I need peace." That’s what people try to do—get to peace by extinguishing chaos, pushing it away, almost with violence against it. That’s not how we create peace.

So, my encouragement to you is to spend some time, at least a week, maybe two weeks, maybe a month, just befriending the closed states. If you can do this, you’ll be transforming your relationship to the closed states and to a big part of yourself because closedness is us.

It’s not a thing we don’t want to be. I mean, we might not want it, but it’s not like, "Ah, I don’t want to be closed. I don’t ever want to have that state." It’s a part of who we are. It’s like saying, "Oh, I want a tree, but without the leaves falling off." No, that’s part of the tree. Of course, there are some trees where that doesn’t happen, but we’re talking about trees where the leaves fall off. It’s like, "I want the tree. It’s beautiful. I want it to change colors even, but I don’t want the leaves to fall off and look dead."

Okay, that’s not how the tree works. We’re accepting a part of ourselves when we befriend this.

If you do that work, what I will promise you is that the closed states will last for a shorter time. Now, we don’t want to do it for that reason because that’s trying to get rid of the closed state. But what you’ll find is that as a result of befriending the closedness, it doesn’t stick around as long. That’s because we’re allowing ourselves to feel it without needing to get rid of it. It’s okay to feel closed, burdensome, victimhood, frustrated, full of complaint, negativity—all the things we don’t want. We don’t like those things in others, but we can start to befriend them in ourselves. We allow them to happen, and they don’t stick around as long.

If you can do that, you’ll find yourself able to move into an open state much faster, and the closed state relaxes. That’s what happens—this closed opening, this tightened opening, relaxes, and all of a sudden, it becomes open. It relaxes because it feels safe to do that. It doesn’t feel judged. It feels befriended. It feels a sense of love and acceptance, and then it starts to relax.

Then what happens is, you might close again. You bring some friendliness to that, and it relaxes. It closes, and then it relaxes. It becomes almost like breathing—not necessarily the same pace as breathing, but closing and opening, closing and opening. It becomes something that’s much easier. When we don’t want to exhale, we only want to inhale, like we only want openness, not closeness. We don’t want to exhale, well guess what? We have a hard time breathing because the exhale has to happen for the inhale to happen. But we don’t want to, so we try not to, and we’re making it much harder to breathe.

So, what if we could just relax and allow ourselves to open and close at a much more relaxed pace?

If you can practice with this, what you’ll find is you’re able to get to an open state much easier. Then, all of the things you want to be more productive with—things you want to focus on and move forward with a sense of focus and purpose—that becomes a lot easier.

Practice with this, my friends. Share with me how this goes for you. If you have questions, I’d love to hear them. If you have struggles, I’d love to hear them. But if you have progress, if you have learnings from this, I would love to hear them. Email [email protected] if you want to reach me—that goes to my inbox directly. Otherwise, comment on the YouTube version of this below.

I would love, love, love to hear from you—how this goes for you, what you're learning, what questions you have, what struggles you have. I wish you the best of practice with your closeness and your openness.

Thanks, my friends.

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