The Flow Awards take no position on religion or spirituality. That said, there are undeniable similarities between creative flow and spiritual flow, as experienced in meditation, prayer or just heightened perception.

A friend recently pointed us to an article by Nirmala, author of “Nothing Personal: Seeing Beyond the Illusion of a Separate Self”. Nirmala describes the strange phenomenon, familiar to creative people, of everything suddenly becoming easy - when one is able to stop trying to make things happen and instead just accept what happens “by itself”. He says that gratitude is the frame of mind that invites this phenomenon to occur. An excerpt:

In desiring what is, you step into where it is going; you step into the flow, into this mysteriously unfolding, ever-new moment. This powerful force called desire can either cause all the suffering in the world or—when turned to right here, right now—become this incredible power for flow, for beingness.

When that starts to happen, it is easy to get overly intrigued with that. It becomes this really fun thing—to apparently be manifesting something. It’s actually a complete mystery how those two things are connected: your wanting something to happen and it happening. It would be just as accurate to say that it is a form of premonition. So, when that flow is happening, the temptation can be to get so intrigued with that, that you start to play with that. The second you get intrigued with how things are getting easier, it’s like saying I’m grateful for the Truth as long as this flow-thing is happening. It’s easy to be grateful when you’re in the flow, and there’s nothing wrong with it, but if you get too interested in it and turn away from this mysterious meeting of the moment with gratitude, then your gratitude is no longer unconditional.

You have to be willing to throw your heart open with gratitude even before there’s any sense of the flow and even when flow is a distant memory. That’s where the life is, where the juice is coming from—even where this apparent flow is coming from. And the other thing about flow is that sometimes the shortest path between two points is through Hell, and that’s the way flow is going to go sometimes. So, if you have the idea that flow looks like a flat tire being fixed really fast, you might discover that flow has a very different idea about how long you will be on the side of the highway and how late you will be to your next appointmenet.

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