The Difference Between Obsession and Flow
La diferencia entre la obsesión y el fluir
A question about how to distinguish between creative effort driven by fear and effort that arises from presence, and whether the felt quality of each can serve as a reliable measure.
The Difference Between Obsession and Flow
A question about how to distinguish between creative effort driven by fear and effort that arises from presence, and whether the felt quality of each can serve as a reliable measure.
I notice it's very subtle, as you say. One thing I've been looking at is this: when the effort comes out of fear, it's more like an obsession. I feel it as an obsession, and at the end of the day I'm left with less energy, more tension, less enjoyment. On the other hand, when it's a flow, I enjoy it. Even if it requires a lot of effort, dedication, and strain, it's enjoyable. Could that be a way of judging what's driving me?
Yes, a way of noticing what's driving you. And it could be the same activity. One day you could be working on the guitar and end up exhausted and contracted. The next day you work on the guitar and end up expanded. That doesn't mean one was the right day and the other was wrong. The learning is how to come from that place of presence more and more.
Don't judge the difficult days
So don't interpret a contracted day as a wrong day, or a bad day, or a day where you did it from the wrong place, because you might be working through resistances. But yes, what you described is great. Over time you will notice that difference more clearly.
I fall into that trap. If I've been in that contracted state, I judge it, as though I'm doing something wrong.
What you will eventually discover is that even when you feel contracted and tired at the end of the day, that experience will have some form of a belief structure underneath it. You can even see through that. It has to do with a belief that you know how it should be.
Yes.
The belief in how it should be. That's why it's really paradoxical to the mind. Because I also have to say: yes, the day you're more contracted and tired, you are moving more from fear, from a sense of lack. But it might be exactly what you need to be doing in order to move through it.
Working through what arises
Most likely it is. So if you're feeling like one day you are coming from that place, or experiencing it in that way, don't decide, "Maybe this is the wrong day and I won't do guitar practice today. I'll do it tomorrow." That is precisely where you can go deeper into working through it. What's moving? What's the identification? What's the sense of lack? Feel it more closely. Feel the fear. Feel the tension. Through that, you can discover that the sense of flow is happening at a deeper place, because consciousness is always in balance. I'm trying to weave in and out between the two sides of it, because it is subtle.