Flow

My teacher Shinzen Young offers a descriptive term for the qualities of undulatory energy that I talked about in my post entitled ‘Lifeforce Energy.’ He labels that kind of energy ‘Flow.’ Flow is a product of impermanence, in other words it is the process of phenonema moving and breaking up in the body-mind, and our experience of flow is the direct contacting of that constant change. This change is occurring whether or no we are paying attention to it, though our conscious awareness of flow can cause it to deepen and expand, or contract in our experience. The energy may expand and contract at the same time, or suddenly vanish. These movements in all sensory domains, when contacted with our mindful awareness are the heart of creation, the force from which life is infused with energy…Shinzen calls it the Great Unborn, taking those words from his teacher Sasaki Roshi.

Flow is an interesting experience to work with in our practice. I find that flow in the body is easiest to contact, though it can occur in our visual and auditory thought spaces (Image/Talk) and also in our emotional and physical body sensations (Feel/Touch). I’ve talked about these sensory spaces in more depth in other posts.

Flow is impermanence in action. We notice that as we pay attention to a phenomena, say thougths for instance, they do not remain stagnant, but instead change over time, maybe each minute, second, nanosecond…we start off thinking about ice cream and end up circulating through thoughts about how our ex broke up with us at an ice cream shop, and then begin to catalog our terrible memories of that person. A few minutes later we might be ruminating on the pain of being single, or the pain of being in relationship. One things leads to another and as the popular saying goes ‘the only thing we can count on is change.’

Whether it is the flowing energy in our physical body, pulsation of emotional energy in the emotional body, a flow of thoughts or a persistant physical pain all these phenomena have a certain dynamic energy that we can pay attention to and witness….Impermanence doesn’t have to be an abstract concept it is occurring every moment in our experience. If you become of aware of this flow of experience in any of the sensory domains pay deep attention to it an soak your awareness in. Even our experience as a human follows these same laws of impermanence.

One experience flows into the next until we cease to exist. Humans like all other phenomena have a beginning a middle and an end. In light of this awareness of our own impermanence and the impermanence of experience we realize how precious the present is and how unique each moment is. We can strive to experience fully the present moment as deeply and richly as possible.