Finding Flow

Climbing gyms are places where all of your senses are thrown together in a kaleidoscope. There are smells – chalk, feet, sweat; sounds – music, grunts, chatter, whirring fans; sights – pockmarked walls, multi-shaped holds, rainbow colored tape, people of all ages, some with sinewy back muscles on display; touch- the gritty texture of a hold, it’s shape taking form beneath your fingers; and even tastes – your own saliva as you swallow hard, breathe deeply, and go for something.

Going for something is another thing. Sometimes, I’ll “go” for something by just half-heartedly leaping towards it and laughing (clearly I’m safe when I do this). This is usually when I don’t really believe I can do it, I’m tired, just not mentally there anymore. Then there’s that single minded focus on a move, the ability to see it happen, and the eviction of doubt from one’s mind.

I’m not a great climber, I’m a middle aged lady that wakes up with puffy fingers and occasionally sore shoulders to remind me, as well. But when I discovered climbing all those years ago, what I love about it was that it had the potential to quiet the mind, to produce a single minded focus on solving the problem at hand, to contemplate nothing deeper than how do I get from here to there and to devote oneself to it. The senses fade into the background, heightened yet obscured, and there is a sense of being purely in the moment. Present.I would leave the gym, or sometimes the crag, with a greater sense of peace than I’d ever experienced.

Of course, it has the potential to create the opposite as well. Or let me correct that – the climber has the potential to create the opposite effect. To feel frustration, to climb to the point or past the point of injury, to become addicted and then to find need and attachment rather than peace.

Luckily, I clearly didn’t become addicted to ACTUALLY posting a sutra a day. 🙂 No seriously, sorry for the delay. I’m also working and completing and MFA in creative writing and I think for the next eight weeks, sutra or two a week might be more accurate.

17. Vitarka vicaranandasmitanugamat samprajnatah. Samprajnata samadhi is accompanied by reasoning, reflecting, rejoicing, and pure-I-am-ness.

Sri Satchidananda has a lot to say about this sutra. Mostly, he explains what it is – it is a setup for the sutras to come, all of which will deal with samadhi. Samadhi is the goal of yoga and translates to contemplation. He will go on to explain that there are two kinds of Samadhi – distinguished (samadhi saprajnata) and undistinguished (asamprajnata) and four kinds of distinguished.

The four kinds occur in sort of an order that starts with that which is concrete and observable and progresses to “I-ness” – or a state of a lack of awareness of individuality. More explanations of these come later, but important to them is our interaction with nature.

Essentially these four are described above – reasoning, reflecting, rejoicing and I-am-ness. Reasoning has to do with complete focus on objects of nature that can be seen and felt and touched – the concrete.

For example, some writers, artists, and scientists go into states of complete focus on their work and produce amazing discoveries or works of art. In other books I’ve read, this complete immersion into what one is doing is called flow.

What’s interesting about flow is that it comes to you rather than you going to it. But your mind has to be in the right place – has to be prepared to experience flow. A mind disturbed is not always receptive to the single-minded oneness with an activity or object that occurs in flow. Yoga gives us the tools to clear our minds of these disturbances so that we can experience flow.

I won’t go so far as to say I experience samadhi while climbing, but I think in those early days, it was flow and I think flow is an experience we’ve all had that can give us just a hint of what samadhi must be.

For Satchi, this is the first step, the next is the contemplation of the abstract – love, or the color red, he says – this is reflection. Next you let go of reasoning and reflection and you find a state called sa-ananda samadhi – where there is only the tranquil mind, until finally in the fourth stage, even ananda is not there. sa-asmita samadhi has you in pure existence – mostly – because contemplation is still an activity of the mind and your samskaras are still there, just buried deep beneath the surface.

Until that final stage, the undistinguished final kind of samadhi, when I-ness ceases, too. For this, Satchi says, a person must be prepared. He gives the example of Jesus as an enlightened being who used his power to heal others but not to save himself.

For now, I’ll have my taste of samadhi through flow. I’d like to say also through a morning meditation during which my mind wrestles with the day to come and I breathe in and out to bring it back – prana – it wriggles free – I bring it back, and so we continue. But I’m not there with meditation and who knows if I ever will be. This is practice.