It’s familiar to hear athletes and artists talking about “being in the zone” during moments of peak performance — that feeling of total focus and attention that allows access to one’s best and often a sense of greater awareness and capability. It’s sometimes described as a feeling of somehow reaching beyond what we thought were our limits.
What’s remarkable in being “in the flow,” as it is also known, is a natural state of enhanced awareness, connection, and capacity that is always nearby, available to anyone as a source of new intelligence, creativity, and energy for all aspects of our lives and journey. We can also learn to better recognize the mental and energetic barriers that may be preventing a more frequent experience of true flow.
In this conversation, Aviv Shahar is joined by three Portals friends — Dan Leahy, Catherine Johnson, and Leticia Nieto — who practice, facilitate, and increase awareness of the flow state in their personal and professional lives as educators, counselors, and therapists.
Although difficult to explain or define in words, our flow friends explore ways to move closer to flow by warming up to the readiness of our bodies, minds, and ecology; by playing, role play or psychodrama; by stimulating our natural spontaneity. Their experience and perception of flow includes:
- We can facilitate the release and liberation of whatever got arrested in historic or entrenched or limiting patterns through different approaches to creative work.
- There were moments where the student’s eyes lit up; it was like something showed up that wasn't in the model or the curriculum content. They were just present in some learning kind of way.
- Play is what facilitates access; being stilted just makes it take longer. But flow is available all the time; it's not something we have to seek.
- There is a novelty factor that emerges in the moment; we are experiencing an innovation, a new synaptic connection in the brain, part of the conductive release that occurs in the process.
- The work is not to get rid of the problem or unnecessarily fully dismantle supremacy, but to lean into the rounder patterns of reclamation and resistance that have always been there.
- In role playing we invite people to play a different script than the one they have in the moment in which they feel stilted, and flow is becoming more available.
This conversation is part of the continuing Portals discovery into what is emerging on the frontiers of human experience in this time of profound change. Information about upcoming special events can be found on the Events page. Also visit and subscribe to our YouTube channel.
I tend to think about flow as the ultimate fundamental truth. The poles, the movement, the unified field of oneness are always there whether we are aware of them or not. When we surrender into it or tap into it or rest in it, then we have the possibility of being filled with that or having that move through us in a way that is more tasty.
Catherine Johnson
For as long as I can remember I have been walking beside others. Sometimes serving as a guide, teacher, facilitator, or coach. Sometimes, simply as a willing companion. Every professional role I have filled, every title held was just that: a role, a title, but not the name that was me.
In 2015, for my 60th birthday, my wife and I walked the Camino de Santiago: 500 long and beautiful miles across the Northwest of Spain. Walking through that myriad of landscapes, miles in silence, miles in the raucous company of others from around this wide world, I realized that I am, and always have been, a Pilgrim.
What’s needed most in this moment, situation, relationship is the question that guides me, the one I carry in my pilgrim pack. So far it has been enough.
Leticia Nieto
I feel most myself in song circles. The chance to blend into the One voice reminds me that all are only ever a few notes away from a harmonious we. Perhaps we are here to co-create opportunities for spontaneity jams, and this is one way to think about liberation and justice.
How I’m often introduced is: Leticia Nieto, PsyD, LMFT, TEP is internationally recognized for her work as a psychodramatist, psychotherapist, educator, and leadership coach for systemic change. Her 2010 book, Beyond Inclusion, Beyond Empowerment: A Developmental Strategy to Liberate Everyone, gives readers skills to promote social justice by using an ecological perspective to deconstruct oppression and supremacy. Dr. Nieto is a radical change artist, who weaves a new world from a tapestry of joy, song, poetry, relational repair and restorative justice.
Dan Leahy
I’m a lifelong learner. Initially that meant looking for folks who seemed to have the “answers”. Along the way I was introduced to the idea of “animating questions,” and began to learn that it’s not about the answers but rather living into the questions that evoke learning and often require courageous curiosity.
As I’ve attempted to bring this spirit to the work I’ve done in graduate education and leadership development, I’ve discovered that the most life-giving, transformative learning tends to happen more in the generative, sometimes playful conversations than in the classrooms or assignments.
In these very stormy times we live in, I find myself looking for rainbows and, as a “friend” once sang, searching for the “Rainbow Connections” within.
Aviv Shahar
Aviv is the Founder of Aviv Consulting, helping leaders unleash strategic innovation, and is the author of Create New Futures: How Leaders Produce Breakthroughs and Transform the World Through Conversation.
Visit: Aviv Consulting
