Method Of Practice: The Deep Flow Score
This is ‘a step by step’ account, a score of how to reach a state of Deep Flow. Once practiced a few times the score becomes embodied, remembered and thereby shorter.
One begins by standing bare foot or wearing socks, on the edge of the yoga mat with feet open and parallel. Set up your HRM to measure HRV, if using a heart rate monitor. Start the session. Close your eyes or place the eye mask over your eyes.
Breathe deeply, filling your whole body with air. Breathe in and hold your breath for a few seconds without any tension and then breathe out again slowly. Breathe in and expand your body like a big balloon and then release the air out again slowly.
Do this a few times.
There is no rush.
Begin the body scan.
Take your mind’s eye into your body. Pay attention to your entire body just standing. Visualise the outside of your body.
Now see/feel your body from the inside. Become aware of your whole body just standing on the earth. Let your knees be soft. Let your thighs be soft. Let your stomach be soft. Let your buttocks be soft. No tension in your legs, arms, stomach and buttocks. Just allow yourself to balance on the soles of your feet.
Now, in your mind’s eye, travel down to the soles of your feet. Feel how soft the soles of your feet are against the floor. Shift your body weight slightly forward toward your toes. Then slowly shift the weight back onto your heels.
Now shift your weight to the right side and then slowly to the left.
Do this a few times.
Now make a small circle on the soles of your feet by shifting the weight slowly around in a circle, to the right and then to the left. Try and touch all the places you felt previously.
Make a few circles. To the right and then to the left.
Eventually come to a standstill and find your centre.
Now gently press all those points you have reached into the floor equally.
Breathe deeply…
Now in your mind’s eye, think of long roots shooting down from the soles of your feet into the centre of the earth, anchoring you.
Then gently push the floor away from you with the soft soles of your feet.
At the same time, think of the earth supporting you, meeting you, pushing you gently upward.
Breathe in and out a few times.
Now in your mind’s eye, travel up your calves, your knees, up through your pelvis. Allow your pelvis to soften. Now travel up your spine. Think of the bones of your spine as being soft with air between each vertebra. Your spine becomes soft like the tail of a kite. Allow the arms to hang, your elbows soft, your hands soft, doing nothing.
Keep travelling up your soft spine.
Breathe deeply into your stomach and the press the belly button and stomach as you breathe out.
Now travel up your spine. As your spine lengthens, travel upwards to your shoulders. Allow them to feel heavy and free. Keep letting your arms just hang, doing nothing.
Travel up to your heart and breathe into your heart and then allow the breath to flow in and out of your heart.
Do this a few times.
Now travel back to your shoulders and now reach your ears away from your shoulders. The back of your neck lengthens, your head upwards, filled with helium gas and your spine is like the tail of a kite, soft and loose…
Now travel to the top your head and reach up into the sky. There are branches and leaves and flowers growing out of the top of your head into the sunshine, through the clouds.
Your head keeps floating upward. Your feet are anchored in the earth. Your belly button is gently pressing into your belly and your heart is open…
Breathe deeply, into your entire body…
In, hold and out…
There is no rush…
Enjoy feeling your head your body float upward.
Enjoy feeling your feet the soles of your feet being anchored to the centre of the earth.
Enjoy feeling your belly button rise and fall as you breathe in and out.
Enjoy feeling your heart feeling open and calm.
Enjoy feeling present and free, safe and calm.
Now, think of your muscles and let them become soft and melt away.
Now think of your skeleton and the bones become soft and melt away.
Think of your fascia and see it connecting your entire body under your skin.
Let it feel soft and free.
Think of your skin and allow it melt away into the air around your body.
Think of your fascia becoming part of the air around your body.
The air, skin and fascia all melt into each other.
You feel your arms, your legs, your torso, and head connecting through your heart and belly button holding the body together.
You feel the air on your skin.
Feel your entire body expand into the room,
upwards outwards, sideways, to the back of you.
You feel your entire body reaching to the corners of the room, upper corners, and lower corners.
Your body expands outwardly, but you hold it together in your heart and your belly button.
You may feel like an astronaut, a large kite flying
but you are connected to the earth anchored
through your belly button and the centre of the earth.
Now see if you can connect your entire body with the image of your body being soft fascia, big balloon like, soft, warm, and comfortable.
Keep breathing.
Keep focusing on the centre of your body as well as your arms and legs being connected to the centre with your head balancing and reaching away from your centre.
Keep pressing the floor gently away from you and the floor push you gently upwards.
Drop the tongue in the mouth. Relax your jaw, then top of your head, your eyes, then the skin on your face.
Keep breathing in and out with your entire body. Connect this to your centre. Feel the connection to your centre. Your body is one whole.
When you feel this, your arms may feel lighter and start to drift upwards away from your body.
Allow them to float outwards and upwards. Do not force this. They should feel connected to your belly button and heart.
You may feel your body become particles, dissolving into the air around you.
Allow this to happen.
You are now in Deep Flow.
If you are able, try and step forward onto the mat.
Slowly peel the soles of your feet from the floor and transfer your weight on that foot.
If not, that is fine.
If you’re able try to continue moving without disturbing the sensation of Deep Flow.
Feel your skin disappear as you melt into the air around you.
Feel the world around you and within you.
Now listen deeply to your body. Listen and feel deeply.
Listen see and feel your body as part of the world around you.
Allow any images to float into your mind. Do not hold onto any of them.
If they wish to leave let them go.
If you want to hold onto them, then dwell in them.
Play with the images that arise.
Moving your body very slowly,
dwelling in the sensations and images in your body.
Do not question what you see or feel. Just allow yourself to play in the sensations of your body. Keep breathing deeply, evenly, slowly.
Take more steps forward and feel the mat under your feet but also feel yourself floating and dissolving into the images that arise.
Dwell in these sensations and images.
Keep breathing.
Keep listening to new sensations and imaginings.
Keep breathing.
Keep dissolving.
Be present and playful.
Enjoy the lightness of being.
Do this for a few minutes.
Start at 2 or 3 minutes, slowly increasing this to 5 to 10 minutes.
When you feel you have had enough, step back off the mat.
Breathe in and out deeply at least three times.
Open your eyes slowly on the third out breath.
Breath normally now for a few breaths. You are back in the room, and you are standing in your body.
Turn off the heart rate monitor.
Now draw a movement hieroglyph, then report to the camera or recording device what you felt, then draw or paint your experiences and finally read and interpret the HRV data in relation to your experience of Deep Flow.
You have now completed a session of Deep Flow
Deep Flow: bodily experiencing
Deep Flow is an artistic embodied meditative dance practice that affords experiencing lived bodily presence. It comprises embodied dance practice, visual-notational practices such as video, hieroglyphs, and descriptive verbal feedback. Combined and used performatively, the practice discovers what it feels like to be in a state of flow. The phenomenological nature of the practice is discovered through affective experiences sensed by the body. Deep Flow may be thought of as ever-evolving emergent practice that is a worlding of lived experience, phenomena, and artistic practices.
The practice comprises a four-part sequential structure: the Deep Flow score, video documentation, hieroglyph, and verbal description. These combine as a performative emergent practice, all part of the experience and practice of Deep Flow. This is displayed below, starting from the left side of the page and moving across to the right.
Documentary videos
Four videos document the development of Deep Flow
1) an improvisation using the Full Drop with an exercise ball, that inspired the development of Deep Flow 11 Dec 2017
2) a 2 minute dance sequence using the notion of flow 28 Dec 2017
3) Deep Flow experiment 09 June 2019
4) Deep Flow practice 20 June 2019
Movement Hieroglyphs
As part of the experience of Deep Flow a movement hieroglyph is drawn with a pen or pencil on a piece of paper. These are drawn spontaneously without lifting the pen from the page and without reflection. The pen is felt as an extension of one’s body and the act of drawing, a form of writing from the body, that describes in visual format that which one is experiencing.
Verbal description
Verbal description is directed to the documentary camera immediately after the drawing of the hieroglyph. By not reflectively writing about these experiences, it is a spontaneous way for a practitioner to express something fundamental about their bodily experience of Deep Flow. These are later transcribed. This allows the dancer-practitioner to conduct research from a first-person perspective, to explore dance as experience, enabling them to access, interpret and describe their personal pre-reflective experiences of Deep Flow.
These notes are extracts from the practice dating 2017-2019.
My bones feel like playdough
I don’t feel much gravity
The mat is a bit cold, the bubbles
I can hear trucks going past
I’m aware of my heartbeat
Now I feel like I'm in this miasma in the chiasmic
I feel like I’m in the playdough
Really soft and malleable. I can hear the click of my bones. I feel the edge of the mat
And still my fascia feels released
My bones are still dissolved I see horizons and my body flies out to those horizons
And I meet the horizon with my consciousness
And I feel like I’m floating out above the earth as an astronaut
Weightless without form
Without time I hear noisy neighbours below
And it doesn’t bother me
My body becomes like a big volume
I am Michelin Man
Formless
The venous system
Moving Vagus Nerve
Moving
Only now am I aware of the watch I know where the front is
My hands feel enormous I dive down into the bowels of the earth
And feel heavy
My back is like a river
Flowing upwards
Out through my arms
Space between my hands is warm but small
It’s like a little earth finding its own pattern around the sun
Streaming through my fingers I feel it is time.
The state of flow became circular, I felt as if I was doing figures of eight, very rounded movements and completely…the time.. my body centre is configuring aroung itself …together with the movement so you’re feeling as if you're working very harmoniously you feel very light, I felt incredibly light in my whole body...
There is no effort in my whole body and when I close my eyes, my arms lift completely without any effort and then it feels as if your body is off on its own without any muscular effort whatsoever because everything is so synergised and everything is working together and there is no effort required at all and it just feels like the most effortless thing in the world...
The state of flow leads to a state of presence that is completely and utterly in that time, in your body, in your soma, fascia, in the bones that are melting away, into the space. I fuse with the space, my room and I imagine myself like an astronaut, floating in space, with an umbilical cord connected to the world...
I had a mind holiday, I mean my whole body has just taken a holiday and I feel as if though every cell of my body has been renewed, ha ha!, it sounds ridiculous but it really feels like that...
Today I felt my arms moving by themslves and then I wanted to propel myself forward and trusted I would move forward in a flowing manner. I didn't feel that my transference of weight was going to be difficult and surprisingly enough I didn't even hear the clicking in the bones of my feet that I've heard previously...
I felt again that I was moving around in this volume of data, fields of data and then suddenly up popped this idea, I don't know how to best describe it but my body became a nonentity or a force or a flow, formless and fused with the space. My body felt light, my skin disappeared, my bones disappeared, every part of my body was moving effortlessly, in an even tempo, without one body part leading the other, body parts disappeared. I moved as a whole...
I was suddenly flowing, between big balloons and that really helped me not to think consciously about where I would move next or how I would move my arms. I become completely immersed in this field of big ballons and then little swirls started sort of happening in my arms, moved into my chest and moved into my hips and into my legs. It felt so great. I felt as if I was immersed once again in this sensation and imagery. My body felt very flowing and twirling.
Listening to the echoes of what I was feeling resonated with what I was seeing. As if seeing and listening were getting mixed up...
I visualized the horizon and I was in fact trying metaphorically to bring that inside of me and it started to stretch and bend and so this thin line, th horizon, became very very malleable and entered into me as I entered into it...
My hands and my fingers were very dexterous, they felt plant like, like they were describing the sensation of being absolutely floating and free... it reminded me of granadilla plants that have these little tendrils that reach out and then you know where they are using other plants or objects as hosts that entwine themselves with you...
Everything was entwining with the imagery, with the thinking, with the landscape with them, with the echo, with the horizon and it all felt as if that was all entwined within this field of being
The only thing I'm constantly aware of is my breathing. Even my body dissolves and feels formless. I try to keep the breathing really deep and slow and it'll be interesting to see what happens with the data and how that comes out...
A state of flow which was like being pushed and buoyed by these big waves of balloon gel-like materials...
Today I felt like a deep lake...you're constantly in a state of presence, allowing for pre-reflective resonances, echoes and affects that need to be absolutely installed and absolutely embedded within the experience...becoming more weightless, formless, immersive, all flow together...