The Medicine of Flow Sacred Scholarship

As part of the inaugural, 2020 NeuroSomatic Flow™ Teacher Training, students were required to submit a scholarly paper & video presentations based on their learnings from the course.

One of those submittals is featured below . . . .

Creating Community with Group Flow

by Kiki Mason

Sacred Scholarship Paper & Video Presentation

Dr. Jinju Dasalla 

NeuroSomatic Flow™ Teacher Training 

September 14, 2020

One of my missions in life is to create community. To offer a healing space for myself and for others to feel safe, accepted, seen and heard. A close friend, upon dis- cussing community building offered me this phrase, “to know and be known”. We all possess the desire to know and be known, by someone, by our peer group, by our community. Whether or not we have grown up in a close-knit family or community or have experienced life more on a solo path, there is a deep longing to “know and be known”, to be seen and heard and accepted just as we are.

I have had the pleasure of being a part of many types of groups and communities within my life. In my wanderings from my early twenties up until just a few years ago, I lived-in several different parts of the country and was always able to find a sense of community and connect with likeminded people. In exploring the concept of flow and the medicine of flow within this course and throughout my life, I have been privy to the medicine “group flow” as well. With our world in a pandemic where we are told we cannot gather in groups, we cannot safely hug or touch each other and we need to social distance in order to be responsible and safe, I feel it is essential for us as NeuroSomatic™ Flow teachers to be able to consciously and safely facilitate group connections and create safe space in order to offer the medicine of flow as a healing modality for our communities.

As we foster our own connection and relationship with how to use flow as a healing modality for individuals and groups, understanding “group flow” can be a useful path to study and then put into practice as we expand our teachings and our offerings to our local communities and the greater communities within the world. I propose the following: using NeuroSomatic™ Flow techniques within group settings has the potential to create stronger communities and more collaborative group experiences that lend itself well to a sense of belonging and a sense of overall connection, and offers potent medicine to those engaged in the group process. Understanding the components that make up group flow experience is beneficial to how we can co-create and facilitated healing within our families and community groups.

The man who coined the term “flow” while researching happiness, Mihaly Csikszentmihályi (1990) determined the following definition of flow: “the state in which people are so involved in an activity that nothing else seems to matter; the experience itself is so enjoyable that people will do it even at great cost, for the sheer sake of doing it (Csikszentmihályi, 1990). Within his research findings, Csikszentmihályi (1990) came up with five conditions within activities that help flow to be more accessible. These are: 

1. clear task goals, 

2. intense concentration, 

3. a sense of control, 

4. a perceived balance of skills and challenge, and 

5. clear feedback.

Any of these conditions can rank higher in priority given the specific activity or task demands and can then be examined within a group experience. (Ghani and Deshpande, 1994). 

Taking the concepts and conditions of individual flow and how rewarding it can be to connect in with our own innate flow, when we enter into a social situation with others who are able to self-regulate and connect with their own flow state, we can experience social coherence aka group flow. According to HeartMath Institute’s research on the Science of the Heart: Exploring the Role of the Heart in Human Performance social coherence is seen as “a stable, harmonious alignment of relationships that allows for the efficient flow and utilization of energy and communication required for optimal collective cohesion and action.(Bradley 1987)

Diving into the concept of group flow and social coherence opened me up to the work of R. Keith Sawyer, Ph.D., a professor of psychology and education at Washing- ton University in St. Louis. He is considered one of the main experts researching creativity. In his book Group Genius, Sawyer discusses his ideas around group flow, the process and also the conditions that support group flow, which are in relation to the conditions outlined above in Csikszentmihályi’s original findings. Sawyer defines group flow as ““a unified flowing from one moment to the next, in which we feel in control of our actions, and in which there is little distinction between self and environment; be- tween stimulus and response; or between past, present, and future.” He stated 10 conditions that are essential for group flow. I will list them here: 

1. Common group goal or mission 

2. Close listening 

3. Keep it moving forward 

4. Complete concentration 

5. Being in control 

6. Blending Egos 

7. Equal Participation 

8. Familiarity 

9. Communication 

10. The Potential for failure

As it turns out, group flow can happen when the right balance and harmony is found within the group with the above conditions as guidelines. It is about creating the just- right amount of rules and structure to offer a safe container and providing enough space and trust for creativity and spontaneity to emerge. When we enter into a group cohesion experience with others, we open up to an entirely new awareness of who we are and what we are capable of and enter into a place of infinite possibilities. With deep listening, a common vision, clear communication and mitigating of egos, we can foster a sense of belonging within this space and feel a part of a bigger whole. This in turn opens us up to connection and collective spirit of oneness. Having others who are able to hold space, listen and offer support and encouragement is medicine for the soul. It opens us up to heart-centered connections that create deep trust and bonding among the group. Being witnessed and valued within a group experience is exponentially powerful and it taps into the desire “to know and be known”. 

In conclusion, as we, the inaugural class of NeuroSomatic™ Flow teachers, share the medicine of flow to our local community groups and thus spread the awareness of how flow can enhance lives, we will be a guiding light for collective cohesion within this new season of pandemic separation and division. The more we can come together and co-create with a common vision, we can help bring stability and harmony to our intimate circles and assist in fostering in a collective healing. With so much divisiveness in the world right now, let us entrain our hearts within our communities and be the leaders that can bring more connection and collaboration to any of the groups we belong to as well as the ones we have yet to create as leaders in the healing art of NeuroSomatic™ Flow. May our common vision be to spread the medicine of flow to the world, starting with ourselves and expanding out in infinite circles to connect the hearts and minds of all who are ready to experience fully embodied, present moment awareness living that is in flow with all of nature.

References: 

Bradley, R.T., (1987). Charisma and Social Structure: A Study of Love and Power, Wholeness and 

Transformation. New York: Paragon House. 

Csikszentmihályi M (1990). Flow: The psychology of optimal experience. New York, NY: Harper 

Perennial. Ghani JA, Deshpande SP (1994). Task characteristics and the experience of optimal flow in hu- 

man-computer interaction. J. Psychol. 128(4):381-391. 

McCraty, Rollin. (2015). Science of the Heart: Exploring the Role of the Heart in Human Perfor- 

mance, Volume 2. ISBN 978-1-5136-0636-1 

Sawyer, R. Keith (2007) Group Genius: The Creative Power of Collaboration. New York: Basic Books.