Flow, In Depth

Have you ever participated in something awesome? Awesome in the root sense of the word—full of awe—in which you gave of yourself as a participant or as a witness (or both), and in doing so, you allowed the boundaries of your conscious mind to dissolve as you connected with something greater: humanity, history, nature, or the divine?

In sport, this sort of experience is often discussed as flow, but the kind of flow I’m talking about transcends the field of play and/or the performance space, be it athletic, artistic, or otherwise.

Carl Jung called such experiences numinous, from the Latin numen, divine will. In a numinous experience, which might be delightful, terrifying, or both simultaneously, we surrender any efforts at control to something larger than ourselves. We let the divine, however you choose to conceive it, flow in.

Flow in sport performance literature (Csizkszentmihalyi, 1975/1990) has to do with performance and engagement. Flow is conceived of, in the literature, as a psychological state with measurable structural conditions: the balance between challenge and skill (sometimes depicted as an inverted U), clarity of goals and purpose, and action and awareness. Things are maximally ordered, and all is aligned: task, skill, focus, feedback, and so on.

The literature presents flow as something secular and comprehensible. And there’s good reason for this: those of us who support athletes—whether as researchers and scientists, as coaches, counselors, or service-providers—want to help athletes control what they can control, and we want to help athletes highlight what they do have control over so that they can put their focus there. This is what makes flow possible in the first place.

But when you witness an athlete truly in the current of a flow state—when you are an athlete allowing yourself to ride the current of a flow state—you’re a part of something sacred. There is soul. That soul is immeasurable. And it may not always be pretty or pleasant: it might be vast and fearsome.

In his later work, Csikszentmihalyi explored this vastness, writing about autotelic experiences—things done for their own reward rather than for money or status—and autotelic traits—qualities of people who worry less about what others think, allowing themselves instead to be driven by curiosity and awe.

Where flow is a well-operationalized performance concept with indices that seek to describe its contours and complexities, the numinous is more about meaning than performance, and about dissolution that may be unsightly.

There’s a lot of talk in sport and in the sport performance literature about resilience and grit. There’s less talk, at least in the sport performance literature, about terror, dread, and dissolution. And let’s be clear: terror, dread, and dissolution are not an efficient path to a podium (or an efficient path to any place).

But we do athletes a disservice when we point them, relentlessly, toward efficiency and alignment. (We do ourselves, as humans, a disservice when we point relentlessly toward efficiency and alignment!) Social media, mass media, and funding entities overwhelm athletes with massive demands for “narratives” that are readily digestible for a large audience.

Even if such narratives are linked to intrinsic values (“I love my sport, I love my teammates, I want to share this love”), when the demands are externally driven (e.g., express a need for “content” or a “statement”), there is a neurobiological cost that is distinct from that of an action a person chooses for themselves. The demand for narrative coherence on schedule and for external consumption spikes cortisol and can contribute to burnout.

Burnout is a kind of coming apart quite different from Jung’s numinous. Burnout is about depletion, and often depletion over time, whereas Jung’s numinous experience is more like a moment of awe. When we’re burnt out, those moments of awe may be harder to access: we’re looking down at our phones, or we’re accomplishing tasks, and in so doing, we miss the shooting star (or some other unsayable thing that transcends the language of the everyday).

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So, if you’re headed back into your fall sport season with your training plan and your to-do lists, wonderful. But also—and write it into the plan, or don’t! — make space to play and space to be afraid. Find people (or other living creatures) who welcome your playfulness and who can witness your fear. You can have your goals and work to align attention and energy toward them, and you can feel the air on your skin, the breath in your body, and the vibration in the atmosphere that might be divine will.