Flow Nugget: Zen, Surfing And The Path To Flow States With Jiro Taylor

Welcome to the Flowstate Performance Podcast.

Created for those committed to mastery and success.

Coming to you from Manly Australia we break down the science and philosophy of optimal performance.

So you can unleash your potential.

Welcome to the Flowstate Performance Podcast.

I'm Jira Taylor,

The founder of Flowstate Performance.

I wanted to briefly talk in this flow nugget about Zen,

Surfing and the path to flow.

This is just about a little bit about my personal journey to learning all I could about flow states.

And yeah,

It's quite an interesting story.

So I started reading about flow research quite a few years ago.

But the actual real journey to me learning about flow states began many years before.

I started snowboarding and surfing in my late teens and they've been my passions for many years and most of my life has been designed around traveling around the world to surf and snowboard as much as I can.

Certainly most of my twenties was all about that and I've lived in some epic places in the mountains and by the surf.

So by the time I started reading about flow state research,

I'd had many episodes of heightened awareness and focus when I was surfing and snowboarding.

And at the time I didn't know what this concept of flow was.

But many of these instances stick in my memory as peak moments in my life and there were certain occasions where my focus was sharp,

My challenge was high,

My levels of involvement in activity would just go to this other realm and my immersion in what I was doing would go from the physical to the mental to something else.

It might have been snowboarding in waist deep powder through a tight tree section,

It might have been putting my surfboard on a rail and really or tucking into a barrel that had a microsecond window of opportunity.

But when I went into these zones of performance time slowed down,

My field of awareness honed in,

I became what I was doing.

All of a sudden I made rapid decisions without having to think about it and I felt in total control of the situation.

And afterwards it felt amazing.

Not like the sort of whooping and hollering,

Put your hands up in the air kind of euphoria,

More of just a calm knowing that you had just nailed it and that you were in your zone and you were doing what you were put on this earth to do.

A sort of intrinsic bliss.

So I'd read about being in the zone and as a kid I'd watched a lot of sport.

I used to watch all sorts of sport.

And I remember particularly watching Michael Jordan when I was growing up.

The Chicago Bulls were just the team in basketball and Michael Jordan and Scottie Pippen were just running rampant.

And I remember Jordan just sinking impossible three-pointers in the dying seconds of huge games.

And I remember thinking that he is just going into a different state and the commentators would be like,

He's in the zone,

Jordan's in the zone.

And I remember thinking,

What are they talking about?

And then later on in life I did a lot of experimentation as a teenager in my early 20s.

I'd go to a lot of nightclubs and I would ingest multiple substances quite freely.

And I had experienced this pulsating energy of mass human euphoria.

What I would now call a collective flow state.

And I remember one particular time,

It wasn't a rave,

It was a Dave Matthews gig.

And I remember watching a ten minute saxophone solo by that amazing saxophone player that he had.

And there must have been like 50,

000 people at this concert.

And every single person in there was vibing off the energy created by this dude on the saxophone.

So I knew the flow state existed and I knew something of what it could do,

What it could create.

But I knew nothing at this stage about how it occurred and whether it was something that could be induced or recreated.

Most surfers and snowboarders,

Mountain bikers,

Base jumpers,

Skydivers,

Skateboarders,

They all know that they love what they do.

They're hooked to these sports by some mysterious magnetic force.

But if you ask a surfer to articulate why exactly he loves sliding down waves or if you ask a base jumper to articulate why he likes jumping off high buildings and stuff,

It can be quite an awkward endeavor.

I remember trying to explain to my own father why surfing consumed so much of my life.

Because when he watched surfing,

He just saw a bunch of dudes bobbing up and down in the water just occasionally standing up,

Riding this thing and then falling over.

So when I talked to my dad about surfing,

I remember sort of rambling on about feeling the energy of the ocean and feeling at one with nature and then I was sort of cringing at how awkward it was to try and explain to a non-surfer what it was all about.

So I gave up.

So the action sports industry and everyone's got us thinking that why we do these adventure sports,

Why we go mountain biking,

All that sort of stuff is for the adrenaline rush.

That's kind of a manufactured facade and I think it's designed to sell shit.

Because for me and most of my friends,

It's not really about adrenaline rush.

Yeah,

There's escape from real world,

There's definitely escape from the stresses of modern life.

We can certainly escape from the busyness of our own minds.

Certainly when we go back into nature,

There is this calming and resetting and refreshing effect.

And yeah,

With surfing there's something about the purity and the intensity of riding pure energy in the form of waves that produces these peak experiences for me and for most surfers I imagine.

And it's the energy of the wave,

It's that feeling of speed and power,

Everything changes,

There's only riding the wave.

I think Laird Hamilton said it best,

He said,

When you go to that place,

There's no time and there's definitely no thought.

You are and it is and that's why we continually seek it out.

So what I was experiencing was flow.

I didn't know it at the time but this is what I believe has been the thing that has captured me and basically made me kind of like a surf addict.

My whole life has been designed around riding waves.

And there's so many of my friends that are the same.

And I believe that flow is the reason.

The reason why surfing and so many other similar activities are addictive is because they plunge us into the moment.

And the flow state,

As numerous studies have shown,

Is a state of optimal consciousness and it's got a very strong correlation to happiness.

So the more we flow,

The more happy we are.

So there's an interesting part of my story in which I went to Japan.

I lived in Japan for a couple of years.

I was 21.

I'd been surfing for two or three years and I had an epic time in Japan.

I mean,

Yeah,

I did a shitload of karaoke and I ate mad amounts of sushi.

But I would also go and hang out at the Zen Buddhist temple.

And that's where I learnt about meditation and mindfulness as a way of training the mind.

The Zen monk that ran the temple was a cool dude.

He didn't speak much English.

When we meditated,

He would pace around the room with this stick,

Like a 2x4.

And occasionally people would put their hand up and that would be the signal for him to come over and bash this person on the back,

Quite firmly,

Not aggressively,

Quite firmly,

With this stick.

And what I learnt was that that was this person saying,

Hey,

I'm struggling to focus.

Can you give me a focal point?

Can you come and just give me a tap on the back so I can get back in the zone?

So yeah,

That was a pretty interesting part of that experience.

But over those two years I learnt a lot about not only the practice of meditation,

But I guess the principles of mindfulness and minimalistic living and really what Zen is all about,

Which I kind of view as removing the obstacles to flow in life.

Like the Zen philosophy,

When you think about Zen minimalism or the Zen architecture,

Or when you think about everything that the word Zen stands for.

I know it's been a bit polluted these days.

But if you think about the Japanese aesthetic,

If you were to go to a temple in Kyoto,

What you notice is that it's very bare and there's not many obstacles,

There's not many things to distract your attention from the essence of what is.

So over the next ten years after that experience,

That amazing experience living in Japan,

I spent ten years,

At some stages I'd be practicing meditation quite intensely,

And at other stages I really wouldn't.

I remember a big chunk of my life where I just didn't meditate at all,

It did correlate with me feeling spiraling into a bit of depression as well at the time,

So I believe there's definitely a strong mental health connection with meditation.

But there was a stage at which all these dots joined together,

And that's this meditation experience and me having these transcendent experiences on a surfboard and on a snowboard and in nature,

And me also having these kind of collective flow experiences when I was at concerts or at night clubs.

And I started connecting the dots in about 2008,

I just left my career as a headhunter in the finance industry where I was working in London and then Hong Kong,

And it was kind of like the most intense period of my life.

Lots of work,

Not much play.

So I quit everything and I basically took myself on an eighteen month adventure around the world.

First of all,

I moved to Bali and I committed to surfing every single day and meditating every day and practicing yoga every single day and really eating healthy,

And basically just grounding myself and reconnecting myself with who I was because I just had this crazy two years,

Like,

Living in a suit,

Living in a skyscraper,

Wearing a suit every single day,

And really feeling disconnected from who I was.

So during this amazing time in Bali and traveling the rest of the world,

I picked up the books,

I was reading a lot about philosophy,

Buddhism,

Taoism,

Meditation,

Yoga,

And I was also just surfing and snowboarding heaps.

So this was a really fertile period of my life,

As you can imagine,

And I really confronted one of the lies that our culture teaches us,

That happiness depends on success,

And success means career,

And career means financial security and wealth.

Which all sounds reasonable in theory,

But when you see how miserable,

Stressed out,

And discontent quite a few bankers in London and Hong Kong are,

You kind of see that that connection between wealth and happiness is mythical,

Or bullshit.

So jaunting around the world for fourteen months with my surfboard and snowboard and all my books was just the adventure I needed to reset,

And yeah,

Really settled back into who I was and to start asking some big questions.

And really to experiment on myself,

If having money and a high-flying career and ticking all the boxes and having expensive suits and all that sort of stuff,

If that stuff didn't make me happy,

But surfing every day,

Training my mind and body,

And learning about philosophy and flow and things like that,

If that did make me happy,

Then everything that mainstream culture taught me was wrong.

And everything that those wise dudes in the East,

And I'm going to include Mr.

Miyagi in this,

And Bruce Lee and Buddha and Lao Tzu,

And many in the West as well,

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi,

The dude that some people call the godfather of flow,

All these guys are right.

The search for happiness,

Success,

The ultimate life,

It's not external.

You won't find it out there.

I tried.

I basically looked under every nook and cranny that they said you would find it,

And it was not there.

Which is why,

When you think about that Russian oligarch with his model wife,

His 10 Ferraris,

His 200-foot boat,

Do you really think he's any happier than my buddy Steve,

Who basically loves to jump off high stuff,

Or my other buddy Steve,

Who goes mountain biking every time it pisses down with rain,

And they don't care so much about wealth and all that sort of stuff,

They just have enough money to fund their epic life of surfing,

Rock climbing,

Base jumping,

Whatever it is.

Life is a journey of exploration,

Self-exploration,

And therefore the conditions for happiness are insiders.

Not out there.

So,

On my adventure around the world,

I was really exploring the connection between flow and meditative states.

What is the connection?

On one hand,

You've got these flow states,

Which I can tune into sometimes when I'm surfing or when I'm riding.

On the other hand,

I've got meditation.

So what exactly is the similarity?

So both states required a deep focus on the activity taking place,

Both states required the silencing of the thinking mind,

So that the subconscious could take over.

And with both states,

The harder you try,

The less it happens.

There's a certain amount of letting go and surrender that's required.

So,

The more of what I read about modern flow state research,

The more I saw it as an echo of ancient wisdom.

And it's taken me my entire life of playing,

Working,

Traveling,

Thinking,

Reading,

Talking to people,

But the dots are just now so clearly connected.

There's science,

There's philosophy,

There's ancient wisdom,

There's nature,

Adventure,

Extreme sports.

They're all connected by this elusive state that we call flow.

And this is the stuff that I write about,

I explore,

I experiment on my life.

That is what the Flow State Collective is all about.

So for anybody that resonates with any of that or with all of that,

Please come along and join the ride.

Check out theflowstatecollective.

Com.

We're building an epic community of people that are flow seekers in all walks of life.

People that want to tune into that state,

That innate state,

Their intuition,

That state of purity that no doubt you've tapped into during some pursuit.

So we're building this for all of you guys out there.

For anybody who's interested in reading more about the links between extreme sports and flow states,

Steven Kotler wrote an amazing book,

The Rise of Superman.

And I urge people interested in flow to Google Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi.

Just give it your best shot at typing that.

I'm not going to spell it.

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi.

And he's got an amazing TED Talks.

And that will be a good introduction for flow states.

Otherwise,

Just check out our blog posts on theflowstatecollective.

Com because we've done a lot of writing about it and we're going to be doing a lot more exploring about it.

Thanks for tuning in guys.

Until next time,

I'll see you later.

Thanks for listening to the Flow State Performance Podcast.

Check us out at www.

Flowstateperformance.

Com for more inspiration to unleash your potential.