Private Practice Podcast

Flow, Episode 4 – A Doing Word

11.24.2019 - By Dan Brown & James HallPlay

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The Conditions of Flow, Chapter 4 in the book, looks at society and environment to see which external circumstances clear the Flow runway for take-off, and which ice it over to leave your flight, complete with all that emotional baggage, grounded at the airport. But it also looks at the individual, their personality, and what they need to do or understand in any conditions to achieve Flow (and pack nothing but pants and fudge in their case). This makes it an action, and not a mystical happenstance as Venus is aligned with Uranus and your chia seeds are in harmony with your feng shui.A lot is packed into this episode, including some singing and an audio graph, but when James gets the small allowance of fun out of his system the conversation moves onto the role of religion, tradition and cultural rituals which provide Flow experiences through order and complexity. We discuss how in many modern societies these have been well-intentionally blown up and created better living conditions for women and gays to find their Flow, but in the process throwing the baby out with the bathwater can cause some anxiety when society has no replacement rules or structure, and everyone has to create their own and compete to have them implemented.In looking at mushrooms and other hallucinogenic 'Vertigo' mind-games, we are unsure if the author does not believe they add complexity like other "mind-expanding" games, or if he is saying that there is a finite amount of information a person can process at any time, and so mushrooms merely shuffle this and 'expansion' is impossible on a linguistic level.Instead of finding Flow in Nazi concentration camps as a prisoner of war, this time the subject is the Nazi himself, demonstrating the need for Flow and yet the lack of its inherent virtue and quality. And from external to internal conditions; selfishness and self-consciousness can override flow, causing, for example, selfish people to only talk so they can go on about themselves, says James…Find all episodes of Private Practice Podcast and send us your thoughts at www.privatepracticepodcast.net – I'm sure we will enjoy the Flow experience of reading your concise, considered and extraordinarily witty contributions.'Flow' by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi claims to be 'The classic work on how to achieve happiness', although we think it's more like 'how to create states of purposeful complexity', which make for enjoyment, which can be interpreted as happiness. But obviously no one is going to write that on the cover of a book. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi spent over two decades looking scientifically at situations in which people from a variety of social and biological backgrounds report feelings of deep enjoyment. His studies revealed that what makes experience genuinely satisfying is a state of ordered concentration and complexity, which eliminates the psychic entropy that causes anxiety, and he called this 'Flow'. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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