🤑 Not everyone has $5,000 to spend on an 8-week course. That's how much it costs to attend "Zero to Dangerous", The Flow Research Collective’s primary offering, which clearly isn’t for everyone. But if you wanted a deep dive into Flow and had the means, that’s what I’d recommend. If you want to learn more about Flow right now, here’s what an AI has to say about it and here’s my story about Ninjas and addiction.
Courses like this didn’t exist back in 2014 when I wanted to change the world through Flow education but I wouldn’t have and couldn’t have created something similar. I definitely wasn’t qualified, but most of all, I wanted to create something that was accessible.
This meant searching for the essence of Flow and finding away to share it with people for free. 🌊
I came up with three things that could increase the amount of Flow people experienced in their lives no matter their circumstances. I called them the ABCs:
Acceptance
Belief
Community
Well, that was one version. I came up with a lot. The concept of the ABCs was fun but never fully distilled what I was doing. It was a combination of principles and practices. The principles were:
Accept Reality: accept yourself, accept others, and accept that we are all one.
Believe in Change: believe you can change, believe others can change, and believe we can change the world.
Continue: meaningful change comes through practice.
I had been bringing people together for a year now to navigate life together. I started framing this time together as Practice and experimented with versions of the following format:
Action - We started each Practice with a simple physical activity like jumping jacks or all yelling "oK!" in unison.
Being - This was followed by quiet meditation.
Creation - Finally we created something: a purpose statement, goals, or a written reflection.
As you can see, our ABCs have gotten confusing. 😵💫 I’ve since realized little formulas like this usually fall short. Complexity cannot easily be captured in the constraints of language. I spent a lot of my 20s trying to force things into neat boxes and made them more confusing in the process.
It wasn’t a waste of time though. I had created a free way for people to get together once a week, for an hour, to make small changes to their lives that could provide immediate results and long-term, sustainable change. After three weeks of ABC Practice, the foundation for Flow was set.
At its core, Flow is about being present and fully experiencing all the moment has to offer. By moving and breathing we heighten our awareness of our physical reality. By reflecting, we process the past and linger on it less. By setting goals that align with a larger purpose, we worry about the future less.
This was the ABC Practice. And by practicing with a community, we built relationships in the process and experienced collective Flow. 🫧
At least, that was the theory. I was making it up as I went, terrified to have people looking to me to lead such a thing when really I just wanted to be a participant. The ABCs would have died - and oK along with them - had it not been for the support of my friends gently supporting me. Especially at this time, the support of Eric, who encouraged me and became a collaborator as we sought to bring the ABCs to more people. And a presentation we did together to the Burlington community would begin a new chapter in the fall of 2014.